Internet Explorer’s browser market share shrinks — because IE6 is finally dying
Too many people in this world still use Internet Explorer 6 — the badly aging, 2001 version of Microsoft’s still-dominant browser line, that lacks basic modern features such as tabs. But this is changing, according to the latest stats from analytics service NetApplications. The global number of IE6 users has fallen to 19.21 percent this January from 30.63 percent last February. Other browsers have been growing, apparently at IE6’s expense.
Mozilla’s Firefox grew four percentage points to 21.53 percent over the last year, Apple’s Safari grew a little less than three percent to 8.29 percent and Google’s new Chrome browser grew to 1.12 after launching late last summer.
But Microsoft is far from losing the browser wars. Internet Explorer 7, the next version of IE, grew from 44.03 percent of the web’s browser market to 47.32 percent over the last year. Better yet, the yet-to-be-released Internet Explorer 8 actually looks pretty good . Altogether, IE still has 67.55 percent of the market.
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About the Author, Eric Eldon
Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.
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Eric Eldon