“Chrome’s usage share for January has made it into double digits: the browser was used by 10.7 percent of Web users last month, up from 9.98 percent in December. It was a good month too for Safari, up to 6.30 percent from 5.89 percent the month before. The WebKit-powered browsers were the big winners: Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was the big loser. Internet Explorer reached a new all-time low of 56 percent, down 1.08 percentage points from last month. Though Internet Explorer 8 continues to perform well – up 1.15 points from December – defections from Internet Explorer 6 and 7 to other browsers continue to dominate, with those versions losing 1.63 and 0.47 points respectively. The beta of Internet Explorer 9 made minor gains, rising to 0.50 percent share. Firefox continues to hover between 22 and 23 points; its January share was 22.75 percent, erasing the small gains it made in December. Opera made small gains, up to 2.28 from 2.20 percent a month ago.”
Got linky for that one?
here, some links for you
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-monthly-201002-201101
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0
Oh, I believe the stats – I was just curious where Thom found his quoted article text there
Without even looking at the site, just at the stats, I would say:
http://marketshare.hitslink.com
how these facts are playing out on the web. Microsoft was quick to put it’s slant on it (We’re actually winning when we are losing). But, as usual, facts here are presented as… well, actual facts. How cheeky of you OSNews. Sorry you seem to always miss the fun in turning everything inside out, upside down, and slightly backwards. Oh, the joy of Spin.
I didn’t understand your comment.
Well they are still winning… But they are loosing their lead. 56% is nothing to scoff at. Over the past decade and a half, Microsoft dominance was due to lack of good competition. It took FireFox, Chrome and Safari to release a browser that was Faster then IE. Back in the old days Netscape and Mozilla were slow and sluggish and only really used by geeks who just hated Microsoft. So when other browsers became competitive Microsoft Lost Market share, they still may continue loosing share and I estimate they will settle at around 40% share. with 20% with WebKit based browsers and 20% firefox. Unless Microsoft makes someting really good or really screws up bad.
Be interesting to see if IE9 RTM slows or changes the trends at all. The buzz is generally positive.
Firefox 4 is also due for release in approximately the same timeframe. It too could have considerable impact on trends, given that it is a very significant improvement over Firefox 3.x and that it makes Firefox at least comparable in speed to IE9 and Chrome, if not faster.
According to Statcounter, Firefox 3.x already is the most popular browser at least in Europe.
http://gs.statcounter.com/press/firefox-overtakes-internet-explorer…
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-eu-monthly-200912-201012
Edited 2011-02-02 02:52 UTC
Faster.. depends on what you are measuring!
Faster in webpage rendering, perhaps, having a more responsive UI (which is the main reason why I dropped FF), I’ll believe it when I see it!
Mozilla did a lot to increase asynchronism in various subsystems for Firefox in 4.0 and in my experience it’s also noticeable when directly compared to 3.6’s interface responsiveness. Unfortunately it’s still not on par with Chrome so far. Mozilla already has a working browser with content/chrome separation (i.e. Fennec/Firefox Mobile) so I’m positive that it will be introduced to regular desktop Firefox as well in a version after 4.0.
In combination with Adblock Plus, 4.0 beats the living shit out of Chrome when it comes to page rendering performance.
Edited 2011-02-02 14:48 UTC
On my system, Firefox 4 beta 10 is faster than Chromium in javascript, and it is on a par with Chromium when it comes to rendering web pages and in UI responsiveness. On my system I will have to wait for Firefox 4.1 before OpenGL rendering acceleration becomes available for Firefox … but this is not available for Chrome or Chromium yet either, so it is not a difference.
On Windows systems (all Windows systems, including Windows XP), Firefox 4 can use DirectX so it will be faster than Chrome in rendering as well.
The problem with IE9 is by tying it to Vista/7 MSFT has basically “pre-crippled” it by making sure it will not run on literally hundreds of millions of PCs, laptops, tablets, etc.
As an early adopter of Win 7 (been using it since the beta) it is frankly an awesome OS, but it simply isn’t prudent to run it on older/slower hardware of which there are millions running in homes and offices across the world and frankly is more than “good enough” for average web surfing. If you look at the stats you’ll see IE8 has the largest IE share and I doubt IE9 going out of beta will change that at all.
So I would say MSFT by tying IE9 to tech that only works with Vista/7 has slit their own throats. By the time WinXP is EOLed in April 2014 I seriously doubt there will be enough IE users to care, simply because by leaving the XP users on an EOLed browser they will mostly have moved away from IE by the time they replace their XP PCs.
Slit their own throats? Congrats on winning hyperbole post of the day.
MS sells Windows and Office, not IE.
Tying IE9 to Win7/Vista sends a message to enterprise that they are moving away from XP. MS is willing to gamble IE marketshare on XP to encourage OS upgrades.
True. However, by trying to encourage OS upgrades by witholding advances such as IE9, Microsoft risks a lot of XP users discovering non-Microsoft alternatives (especially freedom software) which gives them equivalent advances for zero cost (because by using freedom software either they don’t have to move at all, or they don’t have to move to new hardware, or they don’t have to move to Windows 7 and Office 2010).
I would really love to see Opera eating Firefox & Chrome market share. Just wonder why people are not using Opera browser
, for me it seems like it is as good as (sometimes even better then) other browsers.
I’ll give you one extremely powerful reason: It’s not open source.
I know that makes all the difference in my book.
Well I have never spent time playing around in the source code of a web browser, nor do I do code audits on my desktop software, but I have another explanation: Opera has been steadily declining in quality since 9.5x. The 10.x release broke on any non-Windows platform (actually, 10.5 since we had to wait another half-year for a UNIX version), and version 11 ported the newfound brokenness to Windows. MDI, Opera Link, and rendering issues popped up over the last few iterations.
The company itself has lost its focus. Instead of fixing its web browser, the company half-heartedly adds useless features each time out. Remember how Opera Widgets were going to revolutionize everything, then it was Opera Unite, and now after years of saying we didn’t need it, an extensions framework. But I still can’t get the forums at Scout.com, or features of my online bank to render properly.
Maybe Opera should end up as a rebranded Chromium-based browser, with all these features that integrate with Opera’s online services (including Fastmail.fm) as extensions. Kind of like what Netscape became to Mozilla, or Eudora to Thunderbird. Its just a thought, but I know of no other way I return to that browser at this point.
These are not the main reasons why having the source code open is desirable. The main reason is that, if the source code is made available, then at least one person (not yourself, and probably many more than just one person), somehwere, will download the code and “play around” with it, and/or audit that code. If anyone does spot something malicious in the code, they will raise the alarm for everyone.
It only takes one whistleblower to spot that a given piece of code is a trojan horse containing malware. It isn’t like everyone has to spot it for themselves.
Edited 2011-02-02 09:56 UTC
Spot on!
For the quality, I would say since 9.27 which was the most polished release since I’ve started using Opera in the version 6 or 7 days… and I’ve used all of them.
I also have another reason: broken things that never get fixed. One example, the tooltips that wander all around the screen even when Opera is in the background.
Edited 2011-02-02 10:09 UTC
I think the main reason is that the market is already well served by Firefox, Chrome and IE.
Firefox has the extensions, Chrome is fast and minimalist while IE is good for casual users and enterprise. OSX users tend to use Safari and version 5 is pretty decent.
Opera could also use a better name. The connotation doesn’t fit the software. The default skin always sucks as well.
But Opera 11 is definitely faster than FF 3.6 and has a good selection of extensions. I’m surprised by how unpopular it is in US:
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-na-monthly-201001-201101
call me a noob, but how do they come up with these numbers? i mean i know that they are monitoring a certain number of webpages, but if a person opens 60 different pages in a day then that is counted as 60, if someone else opens only 10 then it is conunted as 10. Read something about China, where all internet cafe’s are using win xp + IE, and they are 24 hours full, continuous browsing. Isn’t that affecting the “official” marketshare numbers? Oh, and remember those viruses that opened for you a lot of webpages whenever you clicked on something? Good old days of IE6 (massively used in China)
That’s right, these “web use” numbers have a very low accuracy.
For more information we can see http://www.analog.cx/docs/webworks.html