The browser war has begun a new quarter. April saw the first full month of IE10 availability on Windows 7, the release of Firefox 20, and the first full month of Chrome 26 availability. The latest market share numbers from Net Applications show only Firefox and Safari gaining last month.
Between March and April, Internet Explorer dipped 0.02 percentage points (from 55.83 percent to 55.81 percent), Firefox gained 0.09 percentage points (from 20.21 percent to 20.30 percent), and Chrome slipped 0.10 percentage points (from 16.45 percent to 16.35 percent). Safari meanwhile gained 0.07 percentage points to 5.38 percent and Opera slipped 0.01 percentage points to 1.73 percent.
At 55.81 percent, Internet Explorer seems to have flatlined. January was the first time the browser went back above the 55 percent mark in a long time, while February, March, and April have shown it won’t be losing that crown anytime soon. Despite the release of Windows 8 and its early market share gains, however, IE10 was not progressing with the same ease.
At 6.02 percent in April, the browser more than doubled its market share with a 3.09 percentage point gain thanks to its launch on Windows 7. As a result, IE9 has lost a solid 2.45 percentage points (its biggest loss ever), falling to 18.17 percent.
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IE8 meanwhile dipped 0.15 percentage points, but it’s still the world’s most popular browser at 23.08 percent. The real tragedy here is that this won’t be changing anytime soon: IE10 is mainly stealing share from IE9 on Windows 7, since Windows XP users can’t upgrade past IE8.
IE7 was down 0.12 percentage points to 1.81 percent and IE6 somehow gained 0.01 percentage points to 6.22 percent. Everyone can’t wait for it to fall below the 5 percent mark, but that won’t happen till sometime later this year (and China is delaying things). Thankfully, we can expect IE10 to pass it next month.
At 20.30 percent, Firefox continues to hover at the one-fifth-of-the-market mark. Firefox 20 may not have been available for a full month, but it was released on April’s second day, so the latest and greatest still managed to grab 13.22 percent share. All other versions were down: Firefox 19 fell 8.66 points, Firefox 18 lost 0.43 points, Firefox 17 dipped 0.02 points, and Firefox 16 was down 0.05 points.
At 16.35 percent, Chrome can’t seem to completely recover from its losses in the last few months. Nevertheless, Chrome 26 grabbed 12.56 percentage points thanks to a full month of availability. All other versions were down: Chrome 25 lost 12.48 points, Chrome 24 was down 0.14 points, Chrome 23 lost 0.04 points, and Chrome 22 dipped 0.03 points.
At this rate, Chrome may not pass Firefox in 2013. In Microsoft’s world, IE10 will soon pass IE7 and IE6 combined.
Net Applications uses data captured from 160 million unique visitors each month. The service monitors some 40,000 Web sites for its clients. StatCounter is another popular service for watching market share moves; the company looks at 15 billion page views. To us, it makes more sense to keep track of users than page views.
Nevertheless, for April 2013, StatCounter listed Chrome as first with 39.15 percent market share, IE in second with 29.71 percent, Firefox in third with 20.06 percent, Safari with 8.00 percent, and Opera with 1.01 percent. The only part everyone agrees on is that Safari and Opera are not in the top three.
Top Image credit: Hugo Humberto Plácido da Silva
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