World Browser Market Share – January 2011

So with the first month of the year gone, leaving me clueless as to where it went, lets have a look at how the Internet browser market is fairing. The big news would be that Chrome has finally broken the double digit barrier at 10.7% market share, up from 9.98% in December. This is largely due to taking chunks out of IE, which has hit an all time low of 56% (makes it sound worse than it is when you put it that way).

Firefox has been holding steady between 22-23% for months now, but with the imminent release of version 4, we’re likely to see a sharp increase for a couple months as people try it out. Whether this will have any long term market gain remains to be seen, but after using the beta for some time now, it’s much improved but there are still bugs to squash and extensions to update.

Safari has gained some ground as well, up from 5.89% to 6.30%. Opera made a very modest gain to 2.28%. For the most part, all these gains from other browsers have been the result of a continued decline by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. IE 6 and 7 are steadily loosing favour with IE 8 gaining 1.08%. Much like Firefox, version 9 of IE could change things since IE has lost a good 8% share within a year and still declining.

These next generation, GPU accelerated browsers are looking mighty interesting in terms of speed and compliance with new standards. HTML5 based websites are already beginning to crop up – even though the HTML5 standard is still not finalized. I’ll be keeping a close eye on things as the new browser versions are released.

Chrome’s usage share for January has made it into double digits: the browser was used by 10.7 percent of Web users last month, up from 9.98 percent in December. It was a good month too for Safari, up to 6.30 percent from 5.89 percent the month before.