IE11 doubles market share to 3.27%, Firefox slips a bit, but Chrome still at two-year low

November saw the first full month of IE11 availability with Windows 8.1, the first full month of availability for Firefox 25, and the debut of Chrome 31. The latest market share numbers from Net Applications show Firefox was the biggest loser last month, but not by much.

Between October and November, IE gained 0.14 percentage points (from 58.22 percent to 58.36 percent), Firefox slipped 0.16 percentage points (from 18.70 percent to 18.54 percent), and Chrome climbed 0.02 percentage points (from 15.42 percent to 15.44 percent). Safari meanwhile gained 0.06 percentage points to 5.90 percent and Opera slipped 0.03 percentage points to 1.39 percent.

At 58.36 percent, Internet Explorer has hit a new high for the year. January was the first time the browser went back above the 55 percent mark, and it has steadily shown it won’t be losing that crown anytime soon, edging ever closer to the 60 percent mark.

IE11 grabbed an additional 1.78 percentage points in November (moving from 1.49 percent to 3.27 percent). This was largely at the cost of IE10’s market share decline, having fallen 1.44 percentage points to 17.50 percent, and IE9 slipping 0.24 percentage points to 9.25 percent.

IE8 slipped 0.02 percentage points, but it’s still the world’s most popular browser at 21.74 percent. The real tragedy here is that IE11 is mainly stealing share from IE10 and IE9, since Windows XP users can’t upgrade past IE8.

IE7 was up 0.03 percentage points to 1.34 percent and IE6 slipped 0.01 percentage points, to 4.92 percent. Two months ago, IE6 finally fell below the 5 percent mark, and thankfully it hasn’t regained its losses.

At 18.54 percent, Firefox seems to be hovering again. The last five months aside, the last time we saw the browser at 18 percent was way back in May 2008.

Firefox 25 managed to move up 9.67 percentage points to 10.43 percent share since it was available for a full month. All the other versions lost share: Firefox 24 fell 9.11 percentage points, Firefox 23 slipped 0.85 points, Firefox 22 lost 0.08 points, and Firefox 21 dipped 0.01 points.

At 15.44 percent, Chrome is still at the level it was 28 months ago. Chrome 31 grabbed 6.77 percentage points. All other versions were down: Chrome 30 lost 4.51 points, while Chrome 29, Chrome 28, and Chrome 27 lost a combined 2.00 points.

Net Applications uses data captured from 160 million unique visitors each month by monitoring some 40,000 websites 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 (for more, see this post).

Nevertheless, for November 2013, StatCounter listed Chrome as first with 41.87 percent market share, IE in second with 27.31 percent, Firefox in third with 18.15 percent, Safari with 8.5 percent, and Opera with 1.18 percent. The only part everyone agrees on is that Safari and Opera are not in the top three.

See also – Windows 8 falls to 6.66% market share as Windows 8.1 hits 2.64%, but combined the duo barely grows to 9.3%

Top Image Credit: Hugo Humberto Plácido da Silva