Data gathered by Net Applications has revealed that despite the domination of press by its rivals, Microsoft Internet Explorer is still the world’s most popular browser.
Microsoft’s product accounts for almost 60 percent of the market and it does not appear to be going away anytime soon.
Chrome, which is IE’s main rival, has been expanding its reach and has grown to 21 percent up from 19 percent just a month earlier. That growth has mainly been at the expense of Firefox, which now accounts for only 14 percent, down from around 20 per cent a year earlier. Finally, Safari is holding steady at the five percent mark while other browsers are also slowly declining in usage.
Internet Explorer IE 8, which is the default browser in Windows 7, has slowly gained users and now accounts for over 22 percent of the market.
Newer versions of the browser, such as 10 and 11 have declined in numbers. IE 11, the current browser version only accounts for 17 percent.
As Internet Explorer 12 coming as part of Windows 10, formerly known as Windows 9, Microsoft may soon find itself in a situation where it’s desperately trying to get its users to upgrade.
Also it is telling that the impact of mobile browser use is negligible – both Apple and Chrome do not seem to benefit much from a “mobile effect” on the figures.