Here is the latest statistics of the browser market. The table is tweaked a bit to make it so that Firefox 4, 5, 6 are combined into one. Since Firefox is doing the rapid release its hard to separate the figures since most of the users update their browsers as new version appears.
| Browser | July | August | Change | Relative |
| IE 9 | 7.27% | 8.05% | 0.78% | 10.70% |
| IE 8.0 | 26.30% | 25.68% | -0.62% | -2.40% |
| IE 7.0 | 5.45% | 5.07% | -0.38% | -7.00% |
| IE 6.0 | 3.42% | 3.09% | -0.33% | -9.60% |
| Firefox 4.0+ | 17.66% | 18.10% | 0.44% | 2.50% |
| Firefox 3.6- | 10.30% | 9.39% | -0.91% | -8.80% |
| Chrome | 22.17% | 23.17% | 1.00% | 4.50% |
| Safari | 5.15% | 5.18% | 0.03% | 0.60% |
| Opera | 1.66% | 1.67% | 0.01% | 0.60% |
| Others | 0.62% | 0.60% | -0.02% | -3.20% |
| IE (all) | 42.44% | 41.89% | -0.55% | -1.30% |
| Firefox (all) | 27.96% | 27.49% | -0.47% | -1.70% |
This table shows the browser market share estimated for desktop browsers. The ‘change’ column shows the absolute increase or decrease in market share. The ‘relative’ column indicates the proportional change, for example another 9.6% of users have dropped the browser last month.
IE9 displayed another good month. It progress remains steady but there are a couple solutions if Microsoft want massive adoption. First they should offer Windows 7, the hardware, which runs it, installation, migration and training to everyone for free. The second solution, alternatively, release a version of IE9 which is compatible with XP. The other browsers support XP and still manage to offer fancy features, such as hardware acceleration and CSS3 text shadow.
Firefox 4, 5, 6 is seeing increase in their market share but not at the same pace Firefox 1, 2, 3 are dropping. The rapid releases users seem to like but users are becoming frustrated with add-on compatibility failures and memory usage problems on Mac OS. Mozilla is trying to address the issues that they are having but they are losing user and who knows if they will ever come back to Firefox.
Opera and Safari have little to report on since both the browsers made little gains but neither are in the front running for the top market share.
Chrome is last browser to discuss. Chrome just celebrated its third birthday, the browser launched 3 years ago on September 8th. Chrome usage continues to grow at the same pace, 1% per month, sometimes more. If Chrome continues their current trend, Chrome will overtake Firefox in December 2011 and has already occurred in the UK where Chrome has 23.41% lead over Firefox’s 21.75%.
Chrome is recommended by many, its fast simple and stable and updates without a fuss. Firefox has a range of essentials add-ons for power surfing and development. They both have specifics that might make them better than one another but I want your feedback. Which one do you think is better and why?