Internet Explorer’s Market Share Drops below 70% in 2008

For the first time since Windows 2000 was released, the number of people browsing the web, using Internet Explorer, has dropped to below 70%; if statistics released today by Net Applications are to be believed.

Leading the assault on IE is of course Mozilla Firefox, now peaking at over 20%, followed by Safari, at around 7%. The remainder is made of “bit players”, such as Chrome, Opera and Netscape. Not coincidentally, Mozilla’s Firefox browser has also surpassed 20 percent market share for the first time.

Further driving the bad news for IE, Google is officially telling users of IE6 to drop the dated product and consider Firefox or Chrome, as opposed to IE7 or 8. And Google certainly isn’t reluctant to kick Microsoft while it’s down, as it now automatically recommends that Gmail users running IE6 switch to Firefox or Google’s own Chrome browser (apparently Google is hoping that those users don’t realize that IE7 exists or that IE8 is on the way).

To be more specific, in December Internet Explorer lost a total of 1.6 percentage points and ended the month owning 68.2% of the market which is a drastic 10.4% decline in its share since December, 2007. Not surprisingly, the results demonstrated by other browsers are much more impressive: for example, Firefox crossed the 20% mark in November and continued growing to end the year at 21.3% of the market. Safari’s performance was the most impressive as the Apple’s browser increased its market share by 41.9% since the end of 2007 and now Safari owns 7.9% of the web browsing market. And even Chrome after leaving beta (probably due to large-scale advertising support by Google) now looks to be better able to compete with established players in the market as the Google’s browser completed December at above 1% market share. The only browser that remained stable was Opera as it stayed at the same 0.71% in December that it had in November.

Anyway one of the most intriguing story of 2009 must be that of Google promoting its Chrome browser. We have already seen advertising for Chrome everywhere and we will probably soon see the results of promised OEM deals for Chrome to be installed on newly-manufactured computers. Google must be very determined to distribute its own browser this year to demonstrate some significant changes in the web browsing marketplace and it will certainly be an interesting thing to watch.

Interestingly, a report released around the same time, comparing browser security, shows that Safari, not IE, may in fact be the least secure browser, especially when used on PC; although it does note that use of Adobe Flash represents the largest problem with cookie security regardless of the browser, as Flash stores its cache outside of the browser’s and is not automatically cleaned up.