Internet Explorer falls below 50 percent global marketshare, Chrome usage triples

By Tim Stevens  posted Oct 5th 2010 7:19AM
Oh, IE, it pains us to do this to you. You who once so mightily won in the battle against Netscape Navigator now seem to be losing your war against a battalion of upstarts, relatively fresh faces like Firefox and Chrome. According to StatCounter, IE's global usage stats have fallen to 49.87 percent, a fraction of a tick beneath half. Firefox makes up the lion share of the rest, at 31.5 percent, while Chrome usage tripled since last year, up to 11.54 percent. Two years ago IE had two thirds of the global market locked down, and even if Internet Explorer 9 is the best thing since ActiveX, well, we just don't see the tide of this battle turning without MS calling in some serious reinforcements.

Update: If you needed more proof of Chrome's increasing popularity, we got a tip on this report from Softpedia confirming that Chrome is the fastest growing browser of the moment. Firefox is more or less flat and, well, you know all about how IE is faring.

Press Release--
Microsoft's Internet Explorer Browser Falls Below 50% of Worldwide Market for First Time – StatCounter

BOSTON & DUBLIN--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) browser has fallen below 50% of the worldwide market for the first time according to StatCounter. The company's research arm, StatCounter Global Stats finds that Microsoft IE fell to 49.87% in September followed by Firefox with 31.5%. Google's Chrome continues to increase market share at an impressive rate and has more than tripled from 3.69% in September 2009 to 11.54% in September this year.

"This is certainly a milestone in the Internet browser wars"
"This is certainly a milestone in the Internet browser wars," commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. "Just two years ago IE dominated the worldwide market with 67%."

He added that Microsoft's agreement with European Commission competition authorities to offer EU users a choice and menu of browsers from March may have tipped IE below 50% globally.

In Europe, IE market share has fallen to 40.26% in September this year from 46.44% in September last year. In North America IE is still above 50% at 52.3% followed by Firefox at 27.21% and Chrome at 9.87%.

The rise of Google Chrome in North America has also been impressive and in June it overtook Safari for the first time.

StatCounter Global Stats are based on aggregate data collected by StatCounter on a sample exceeding 15 billion page views per month collected from across the StatCounter network of more than 3 million websites. StatCounter, which provides free website traffic information, publishes browser stats in its StatCounter Global Stats, a free online research tool. It also monitors Internet market share battles including Search Engines, Social Media and Operating Systems including mobile.

For individual country analysis go to:
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-monthly-200909-201009

Further information on our analysis is available at:
http://gs.statcounter.com/faq

About StatCounter
StatCounter, a free online visitor stats tool, was founded in 1999. It offers its members the chance to grow and improve their online businesses by allowing them to monitor the number of hits to their website; the geographical location of visitors; the various pages a visitor views; keywords used to find the site plus other features. For information on this real-time, user-friendly, and free visitor stats tool, please visit www.statcounter.com.