Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser seems to be reversing its market share losses showing microscopic gains, according to research firm, Net Applications. The research group says the overall Internet Explorer share grew 0.42% worldwide in July 2010. While some of IE rivals showed a slight dip, Apple’s Safari and Opera saw their market share increase to 5.09 percent and 2.45 percent respectively.
Internet Explorer 8 logged a 0.98% gain in July 2010 and now accounts for about 30 percent of worldwide browser usage. On the Windows Blog, Microsoft’s Senior Director, Internet Explorer Business and Marketing, Ryan Gavin blogs:
While the continued IE8 momentum is encouraging, developers and browser enthusiasts are equally as excited by the future of Internet Explorer. There is great buzz around the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Previews – with 2 million downloads of the Preview and over 16 million page views to the IE Test Drive site.
Related content from GigaOM Pro: (sub req’d): What Does the Future Hold for Browsers?
at work, we just upgraded from Windows 2000 to XP, and with that Internet Explorer 6 to 8- woohoo!
The only reason Microsoft has any market share for Internet Explorer and Bing is because IE is default on Windows and Bing is default in IE.
Nobody uses Bing or IE by choice, if given the real choice. The EU browser ballot screen is not true choice, as only IE is pre-installed on EU Windows machines and that users can just disregard the ballot screen if they are confused and stay on the default IE.
Ah, same old windows haters glad to see after all these years your arguments remain the same.
This does not come as a surprise. I have used firefox for the last 5 years and chrome for the last year and a half, IE never before, other than on a fresh install of windows to download Firefox or chrome :).
But for the past month I have been using IE 8 non stop and my experience has been it isn’t as bad as it is portrayed by google and other companies. Sure it isnt the smoothest UI going around but the browser is steadier than firefox. I have left it running with 20+ tabs open for periods of 10 days without a single browser crash and no memory spikes to speak of. Dont know if this is because the browser is integrated with the OS or what reason but I haven’t had such a steady experience with either firefox or chrome.
Dude, get real! I have Firefox running with no less than 30 tabs, usually around 70 and I have 16 extensions installed (including some beta).
And no- I am not gonna give IE another chance- too much bad taste in my mouth from it…
BTW, how come StatCounter shows another steep drop for IE and gain for Firefox?