2010 will be remembered as the year when Chrome took off despite Microsoft's attempts to hold on to its shrinking browser market share. It looks like Internet Explorer's two months of market share gains were an aberration. Other trends are continuing as before: Firefox is steady between 20 and 25 percent share, Chrome is steadily moving forward, and Safari trudges onward. Opera, meanwhile, is still hanging on to the leftover scraps. Everyone but Microsoft saw at least a modest market share gain in September.
Between August and September, Internet Explorer dropped 0.75 percent, a drop bigger than the last three months. Firefox, meanwhile, went up a mere 0.03 percent. Chrome gained 0.46 percent, making it the biggest winner this month. Safari was up 0.11 percent and Opera grabbed another 0.02 percent.
IE has managed to fall back below the 60 percent mark. At 59.65 percent, this is the lowest point for the Microsoft browser. This drop comes despite the overwhelming monthly gains of IE8 and the release of the Internet Explorer 9 beta right in the middle of September. Microsoft told Ars that the beta has been downloaded 6 million times in the last two weeks. Nevertheless, this translates to a mere 0.25 percent of the whole market for those two weeks, and when looking at the whole month of August, it's only 0.10 percent. We might see more progress in October.
Unfortunately for Web developers everywhere, IE6 (15.55 percent) continues to be more popular than IE7 (10.39 percent), though this month its share declined more than its successor. IE6's share can be attributed to businesses still using customized intranet applications, and XP's much bigger installed base compared to Vista's (especially in developing countries). We expect that IE7 will drop below the 10 percent mark next month, while IE6 may finally fall under 15 percent.
Source: ars technica
