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IE 8 Is Top Browser, Google Chrome Is Rising Fast

Posted by kdawson on from the trend-is-your-friend dept.

An anonymous reader points out that the latest Net Applications numbers show that MSIE 8 has become the world's most-used browser, taking over from IE6, which has been hit by the decline in the use of Windows XP. PCMag.com emphasizes another angle on the numbers, which is that Chrome is the fastest-growing browser. Firefox's market share has stalled just below 25%. Chrome is now in third place, ahead of Safari. The Guardian's article reminds: "There's no guarantee that NetApps' numbers are accurate, and they are very unlikely to be correct to two decimal places. However, they do appear to be a good indicator of market trends."

6 of 319 comments (clear)

  1. the more prevalent it remains, the bigger the risk by jollyreaper · · Score: 5, Interesting

    With so many people still using IE, whatever holes there are in firefox and chrome just won't get the same attention from the hackers. That alone makes me not want to use it. Obscurity may not be obscurity but it's also not jumping up and down with a target painted on your chest.

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  2. Going by rendering engines... by argent · · Score: 5, Interesting

    MS HTML control 62%
    Gecko 24.5%
    Webkit 9.7%%
    Opera 3.0%
    Miscellania 0.7%

  3. At some level this is may be a good thing by JoshuaZ · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The results show that we've got pretty heavy diversity of browsers. We now have four browsers with ranges in the 12% to 24% of market share (although why they made the graph with those as the numbers easy to track isn't clear to me). This means that any single exploit that is browser specific isn't going to harm more than a fraction of all users. Just as genetic diversity helps prevent epidemics from sweeping through and wiping out a species, browser diversity does the same thing. The real upshot is not the rise of IE 8 but that we have more than 2 serious browser choices that are being chosen by people who aren't just the types who read Slashdot. That also means that a lot of people are making real choices about their browser types, possibly indicating that the general public is more aware about browswer issues than they were about a decade ago. On the other hand, another way of looking at this data is that around 40% of people are still using some form of IE. So all of those people have what is essentially their default browser. It might be interesting to compare this over longer term, but the data in the article only goes back a year.

  4. Can someone please answer this? by mystikkman · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Something that bugged me throughout the whole China-Google-IE6 fiasco... Why were Google etc. using IE6 internally and got hacked? MS released IE7 with sandboxing in Vista and Windows 7... and Google's internal IT saved lots of money by sticking with IE6, but then turn around and blame MS for IE6 when MS itself recommends upgrading. Did I miss something or did Google PR and astroturfing successfully prevented this point from being made in any of the articles or Slashdot comments?

  5. It's very different in some parts of the world by Enleth · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I remember posting about this about a year ago or so on /., and now I see the trend continue.

    I run a website about the Heroes of Might and Magic game series (very little "geek bias"), in Poland and for Polish-speaking audience. It's relatively popular, about 1500 unique visitors a day, first hit for "Heroes of Might and Magic" in a localized Google search, thrid for "heroes" only after a Wikipedia disambiguation page for the term and the page on that goddamned TV series. The statistics are so completely different that it looks almost as if it were a parallel universe or something:

    January 2008:
    53.58% - Firefox
    31.19% - IE
    13.83% - Opera

    January 2009:
    60.99% - Firefox
    23.99% - IE
    12.32% - Opera
    2.10% - Chrome

    January 2010:
    60.33% - Firefox
    16.12% - Opera
    15.29% - IE
    6.24% - Chrome

    Data gathered by Google Analytics, active on just about every non-static page on the server. It gets even more interesting in a month-by-month comparison on a graph, some of the fluctuations clearly correlate with new releases of FF, Opera, Chrome, *and* IE, but I'm afraid that I don't have the time right now to prepare something you could see and decide yourself.

    Any other admins out there with similar statistics to share?

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  6. Re:I'm using Chrome by Duct+Tape+Pro · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Why does the browser constantly chatter to 1e100.net? image If this is a Google server, why doesn't it LOOK like a Google server?

    I suspect they were going for 1x10^100, which is by definition a googol

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