Earlier this month, Opera decided to use WebKit as its rendering browser engine and V8 as its JavaScript engine. Unfortunately for around 91 people, that means the browser maker no longer requires their particular skills.

In its Q4 2012 financials, Opera stated, “At the end of 4Q12, the company had 931 full-time employees and equivalents. … Excluding employees associated with the organizational restructuring, the company had 840 full-time employees and equivalents at the end of 4Q12.” Or, in simpler terms, 91 folks got the boot.

WebKit is the open-source software behind a few other modern browsers you may know — Chrome, Safari. In its attempt to keep up with those fast-moving Joneses, Opera had to let go of its own rendering engine, Presto.

“It makes more sense to have our experts working with the open source communities to further improve WebKit and Chromium rather than developing our own rendering engine further,” said Opera chief technical officer Håkon Wium Lie.

“Opera will contribute to the WebKit and Chromium projects, and we have already submitted our first set of patches to improve multi-column layout.”

While some developers were sacked in the switch, others working on Presto chose to leave of their own accord when their skill sets and job descriptions became less than useful to the company.

The company also just shipped Ice, a new mobile browser for iOS and Android — again, WebKit-based.

With around a 2-percent share of all web traffic, the small company is clearly hoping these strides forward will help it keep pace with competitors and remain in the browser game for a little while longer.

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During the latter half of 2012, Firefox has once again overtaken Chrome as the number-two browser for desktop computers, and Internet Explorer has not only stayed on top but has actually seen some small gains.

Chrome had eclipsed Firefox briefly during 2012, but Google’s desktop browser lost its position during the second half of the year.

Check out these charts, compiled with data from Netmarketshare:

For Internet Explorer, IE 9 has made all the difference. While IE 8 still accounts for more installs overall, IE 9 has been steadily picking up steam since its launch in March 2011, thanks to better features and a faster overall experience.

Just as important for IE’s legacy has been the process of killing off older versions.

“IE 6 has been the punch line of browser jokes for a while, and we’ve been as eager as anyone to see it go away,” wrote Roger Capriotti, Director of Internet Explorer Marketing, at the beginning of the year. “Less than a year later, I’m thrilled to say that the United States has joined the ranks of Austria, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Norway in dropping below 1% usage of IE 6.”

On the mobile side, Apple’s mobile version of Safari still accounts for the vast majority of usage, around 60 percent of mobile browser share. But the mobile version of Android has seen some spikes late in 2012, as well. In fact, between September 2012 and October 2012, mobile Safari lost around four percentage points, while the Android browser gained five percent.

As for BlackBerry, that OS browser’s share has dipped from three percent to 1.3 percent over the past year.

Top image courtesy of Art Prestige Studio, Shutterstock

Chrome, Google’s speedy web browser, eclipsed Microsoft’s Internet Explorer in global market share back in May and is now leading by a significant margin of nearly 2 percent.

StatCounter, a site that (you guessed it!) tallies statistics around web browsers and websites, showed Chrome sliding past IE by a very slim margin a few months ago. Between May 14 and May 20, Chrome was ahead of Internet Explorer for the first time in its brief history (the browser launched publicly September 2008).

At that time, StatCounter showed Chrome having a lead of just three tenths of a percent. Today, Chrome claims 33.81 percent to IE’s 32.04 percent. The situation has changed quite a bit since this time last year, when IE had 42.45 percent of the global browser market and Chrome claimed a mere 22.14 percent.

The stats service moreover showed Chrome passing Firefox in popularity at the end of last year, when it claimed a 25.7 percent share of the global browser market to Firefox’s 25.2 percent share.

Still, StatCounter is just one resource for browser-tracking. Another source is NetMarketShare, which showed that after months of steady losses, Internet Explorer did experience some staunching of the bleeding around the release of IE9, a more modern and competitive browser, and during Microsoft’s concerted campaign to rid people’s PCs of the oft-maligned IE6.

“IE6 has been the punch line of browser jokes for a while, and we’ve been as eager as anyone to see it go away,” wrote Roger Capriotti, Director of Internet Explorer Marketing, at the beginning of the year.

“This is an important step in helping to move the Web forward,” wrote Internet Explorer Senior Director Ryan Gavin at the end of last year. “The Web overall is better — and safer — when more people run the most up-to-date browser.”

But overall, the trends as analyzed by StatCounter don’t favor IE for the long haul. Here’s a chart showing where the major browsers stand and how we got here:

Top image courtesy of mikeledray, Shutterstock

Internet Explorer has been sliding downhill in market share for the past few years, but recently mined stats show something the critics never expected to see: A small but significant uptick in IE’s numbers since the beginning of 2012.

Data from NetMarketShare show that while IE had indeed been in a slump for quite some time, the browser picked up slightly more than one percent of market share between December 2011 and January 2012.

And that percentage point wasn’t just a fluke; IE held steady between January and February but grew nearly another whole point between February and March 2012.

We did some spreadsheet jockeying with NetMarketShare’s numbers, and here are some pretty shapes and colors we came up with to represent the trends:

Regardless of waxing and waning percentage points in recent months, Internet Explorer has been the unquestioned top dog in this race for quite some time. Chrome, one of the fastest-gaining players in the browser wars, only recently reached the number-two spot in a tight race with Firefox; and both of those browsers only claim around 25 percent of the market each.

So, what could have happened to shift the tides in IE’s favor?

For one thing, Microsoft has been working to kill off older versions, such as the much maligned IE6.

“IE6 has been the punch line of browser jokes for a while, and we’ve been as eager as anyone to see it go away,” wrote Roger Capriotti, Director of Internet Explorer Marketing, at the beginning of the year. “Less than a year later, I’m thrilled to say that the United States has joined the ranks of Austria, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway in dropping below 1% usage of IE6.”

Along with killing off “bad” versions, the company has been working on getting machines to automatically update to newer versions of Internet Explorer. “This is an important step in helping to move the Web forward,” wrote Internet Explorer Senior Director Ryan Gavin at the end of last year. “The Web overall is better — and safer — when more people run the most up-to-date browser.”

And when it comes to the most recent version of IE, it had the distinction of being named “a browser you might actually want to use” by VentureBeat’s own Sean Ludwig. High praise from a man with high standards.

So next time you critics try to put IE on death row, just remember — you can’t keep a good dog down.

Top image courtesy of mikeledray, Shutterstock

This morning, Microsoft is showing off Love Is in the Air, a browser demo intended to show off the latest, shiniest HTML5 toys available to the modern browser.

“This experience brings together hardware-accelerated HTML5 canvas, SVG, CSS transforms & transitions, WOFF, audio, and more,” wrote IE group program manager Rob Mauceri today on the company blog.

“On Windows Developer Preview with support for multi-touch in IE10, you can reach out and swipe to reveal a special message of love, or just use your mouse. If you think your browser can keep up, turn up the volume to 1000 floating hearts.”

Microsoft particularly recommends using IE9 or IE10 with built-in hardware acceleration for this demo, although we had a fine time playing with the page in Chrome, as well.

As the web rolls on and newer, cooler apps (including Facebook’s Timeline) ditch support for older Internet Explorer versions, IE is upping the ante by implementing automatic updates to the software.

And, as we stated about a year ago, Internet Explorer isn’t as bad as its reputation. In fact, our own Devindra Hardawar said IE 9 was the best browsing experience Microsoft had provided to date and a “major departure” from past versions.

Currently, Internet Explorer is the number-one browser in the world, claiming 40 percent of the global market.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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