IE Loses Global Ground, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera Gain
According to the latest figures released by Net Applications, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is continuing to lose ground as its four main competitors are increasing their respective market shares.
In September, IE held 65.71 percent of the global Web browser market, down from 66.97 percent in August.
Mozilla’s Firefox browser, which has been regarded as the likeliest candidate to topple Microsoft’s browser chokehold, claimed 23.75 percent of the worldwide market in September, up from 22.98 percent in the prior month.
Firefox 3.5 (12.65 percent) replaced Firefox 3.0 (9.62 percent) as the leading version of the browser during the month of September.
Apple’s Safari browser had 4.24 percent of the market in September, an increase from its 4.07 percent share in August.
Meanwhile, Google’s Chrome browser got 3.17 percent of the worldwide market, up from 2.84 percent in the previous month.
Opera claimed 2.19 percent of the market, up from 2.04 percent in the previous month.
There w a silver lining to this undeniable cloud for Microsoft: IE 8 was used by 16.8 percent of the market, up from 15.1 percent in the previous month. Accordingly, the shares of IE 6 and IE 7 fell.
IE 6 still maintains 24.42 percent of the browser market, the most of any browser, followed by IE 7 with 19.39 percent.
Microsoft’s Windows Vista saw its market share drop 0.18 percent to 18.62 percent in September, according to Net Applications. However, Windows 7, which is being officially released on Oct. 22, 2009, saw its market share increase to 1.52 percent of the market, up 0.34 percent.
Windows XP still has the lion’s share of the total operating system market with 71.51 percent of the pie in September, followed by Vista.
Mac OS X 10.5 claimed 3.03 percent of the market, followed by Windows 7, Mac OS X 10.4 (0.96 percent) and Linux (0.95 percent).
Sources:</strong
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-10367359-264.html?tag=newsEditorsPicksArea.0
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=5700
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=2
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10
