This story on BBC news says that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer’s market share has dropped to around 60% of all users. This would be great, but I think it’s a bit far fetched to say that.
To find out, I had a look at some of the stats of websites I’m involved in.
First of all, we have a site purely for professionals working generally in big companies and US based. This is where I would expect to see the highest use of IE. Here’s the top 5 browsers for all of April 2010:
1. Internet Explorer 73.95%
2. Firefox 17.44%
3. Safari 4.12%
4. Chrome 3.23%
5. Opera 0.90%
Let’s take a look at another site which is almost totally UK based. It’s for a fishing club, so is more of an “everyman” site, but people probably still access it a lot from their offices…
1. Internet Explorer 68.89%
2. Firefox 19.45%
3. Safari 4.49%
4. Chrome 3.71%
5. Mozilla 1.23%
The third site is one heavily targeted towards the 15-30 year old demographic and people who use services such as Skype (i.e a bit computer savvy). The results are very interesting.
1. Firefox 44.32%
2. Internet Explorer 26.08%
3. Chrome 18.11%
4. Safari 9.32%
5. Opera 1.62%
The final site is one targeted towards artists and in particular song-writers. Again, a younger demographic.
1. Internet Explorer 38.86%
2. Firefox 33.01%
3. Safari 17.41%
4. Chrome 9.19%
5. Mozilla 0.70%
So there you have it!
I.E still dominates within big organizations and with people who don’t know the difference between a computer and a toaster. Amongst the tech-savvy young hipsters of the day (or just people who know you don’t have to use the default browser that comes with the PC), I.E is still a major player, but it’s in freefall from it’s former monopoly position of just 5 years ago.
Gary,
Its interesting to see the results you’ve posted up there. Especially the results for the last 2.
I avoid IE if i can and only use it at work as I have no choice. Just out of interest which browser do you use?
Gordon
I’ve been with Firefox for several years. When Firefox first came out, it was almost like getting a new computer as the difference between IE was so big.
Firefox almost lost it’s way about 2 years ago with the later versions of Firefox 2 that were fat and bloated and ran sloooow. A lot of people I know switched over to Chrome, but for me Firefox fixed it’s issues with Firefox 3 and continues to be in total kick erse mode.
The best for me is the thousands of Firefox plugins. My favourites just now are:
Fire FTP, the best FTP I have used and it runs right in a brand new tab of your browser.
SQLite Manager, a full GUI for interacting with SQLite databases again in just a new window.
Firebug which makes fault finding in html and CSS a slightly less painful experience.
And last but not least Outwit Hub which is scary, but brilliant and deserves a blog post all of it’s own.
Interesting stuff Gary, we recently invested in a Macbook – I think I could have save some money and not bothered, really don’t see what extra I’m getting. Am using Safari – similar to IE or am I missing something?
Hiya,
Interesting. There is some things that a Macbook/iMac is really good at. For example a decent Mac and the “Logic Studio” software basically gives you a recording studio that would have cost you half a million pounds 20 years ago.
Other than that, I would always go for a PC above a Mac at the moment just because of the range of software available etc.
You can use Firefox on Mac and it’s quite good. However I have heard that Google’s Chrome browser is the best when it comes to an alternative browser on Mac.