Internet Explorer 8 Becomes the World’s Most-Used Browser

We posted yesterday about Microsoft’s recent reason for celebration, being the proud owners of the world’s fastest-selling OS, but thanks to Web analytics firm Net Applications, it has another reason to toss onto the pile. That company has just updated its browser market share charts for the month of January, and Internet Explorer’s share is looking good… real good.

During the month, IE 8.0 became the most-used browser around the Web, which to me, is quite interesting. I’ve always had the mindset that alternative browsers were steadily stealing market-share from IE, but this report seems to prove the opposite. Not only does IE 8.0 own 22.37% of the market, but IE 6 comes in second with 20.00%. With all versions combined, the total market share skyrockets to 62.12%.

With the second place belonging to Firefox, with its mere 24.43% ownership, it appears that Internet Explorer is going to remain safe for a while longer. The alternative browsers do continue to grow in usage, but it doesn’t seem like IE is dropping in the charts as fast as it once was. I still can’t help but wonder whether that massive share is due to users preferring that browser, or not being aware of the alternatives.

In taking a look at our Web analytics software, I can’t say I was too surprised to see that our results completely differ from Net Applications’ report. It’s to be expected, since we’re just a single website, and target the tech crowd. Net Applications on the other hand gathers information from a wide-array of large websites, which tend to attract Web-surfers of all stripes.

For interest’s sake, Firefox held 49.94% of our visitor’s usage during the previous month, while Internet Explorer sat at 30.00%. From 3rd – 5th place, Chrome had 10.41%, Opera had 4.68% and Safari had 3.60%. For specific versions, 54.29% of our Firefox visitors browsed using 3.5.7, while for IE, 64.00% were using 8.0. Fortunately, only 11.47% were using 6.0, and that number is getting even smaller as the month’s pass.

This week, Net Applications released their January browser market share report. Their report shows that Internet Explorer 8 is not only the most popular browser on Windows with 27.9% usage share, but that it now has 25.6% of market share across all OS’s on a worldwide-weighted usage share basis (data provided by Net Applications). We launched just less than a year ago, so it’s both humbling and thrilling to see so many people choose our product so quickly – making it the most popular browser of choice worldwide.