IE is Still Beating Mozilla and Generalissimo Francisco Franco is Still Dead

February 27, 2008 at 5:22 pm | Posted in Browsers | 4 Comments

I just checked the most recent browser stats and, no surprise, IE is still keeping it’s grip on the browser “market” (can it be a market if it’s free?).  A browser study I did in 2005 of 217 organizations found that 89% had some form of IE (mostly IE6 at the time) as their desktop standard.  At the time 17% of respondents said they had considered changing their browser standard.  Corporations, governments, and non-profits also influence consumer browser habits since they create the majority of sites that consumers browse.  In my study I found that these organizations were more open about the browsers they targeted for their sites than what they forced their own internal users to use (49% did compatibility testing against Netscape and 29% had help desk troubleshooting scripts to help Netscape users; the numbers were 28% and 11% for Firefox).So how have things changed since 2005?

Not much.  OneStat shows about 83% marketshare globally for IE and 77% in the US.  According to them the most popular browsers on the web are:

 

Worldwide	February 2008	June 2007	Difference
Internet Explorer	83.27%	85.81%	-2.54%
Mozilla Firefox	13.76%	12.72%	1.04%
Apple Safari	2.18%	1.79%	0.39%
Opera	0.55%	0.61%	-0.06%
Netscape	0.14%	0.11%	0.03%

USA	February 2008	June 2007	Difference
Internet Explorer	77.35%	75.69%	1.66%
Mozilla Firefox	17.85%	19.65%	-1.80%
Apple Safari	4.03%	3.77%	0.26%
Opera	0.44%	0.61%	-0.17%
Netscape	0.21%	0.17%	0.04%

Marketshare (from Net Applications) shows about the same as the OneStat US shares give or take a few percent.

 Browser    Total Market Share   Microsoft Internet Explorer 75.47%

Firefox 16.98%

Safari 5.82%

Opera 0.62%

Netscape 0.61%

Mozilla 0.32%

Determining browser market share is a bit of an art form.  While my market share numbers were obtained by directly asking organizations, most stats are determined by looking at web server logs of visitors and by reporting sent by services installed by participating sites.  So the stats vary based on the types of users that hit these sites.  Ultimately, the only stats that matter for an enterprise determining what to use is what its target population is using and is expected to use in the future.  I’m not interested in the horse race or religious aspects of browser selection – the reason I think browser selection matters to enterprises is twofold: 1) to determine which browser offers the best experience for its employees (such as distributed management of security settings, compatibility, etc.) and 2) to determine how websites should be developed and tested based upon the browsers its audience is expected to have.