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The past month has seen a lot of Internet browser upgrades.  Just about every major browser has been updated recently, each getting faster, supporting newer standards and adding features that might now seem standard.  Given that, each browser underwent an upgrade, it wouldn’t have been surprising to see the numbers for the market share to fluctuate a bite, but ultimately they stay roughly the same.  The good news is that hasn’t happened.

Internet Explorer, much to the dismay of web developers, has long been the reigning leader in market share, with over half of all measured users using Microsoft’s built-in browser.  With the added pressure of others such as Firefox 3.0 and 3.5, Safari 4 and Chrome 2 it looks like Microsoft could be having trouble keeping that lead.  Since March 2009 IE across all currently used version (going back to even IE6) has lost 11.4 percent of the market share to the other competitors.  What’s unclear, however, is how the numbers break down since the latest version of the other main three are all added together in one “Other Browsers” measurement.  It’s more likely that Firefox 3.5 is the leader among them.

While Internet Explorer losing market share is a big deal, there’s also the fact that Firefox 3.0 alone has 26.7 percent of the market share according to the StatCounter stats.  It’s a bit interesting that among all the talk recently of trying to get as many people as possible using WebKit browsers, that Firefox is in the lead.  Though it isn’t surprising, given that even those who aren’t the least bit tech-savvy know to use Firefox.  Either way, the more browsers that fully support the latest standards like HTML 5, the better.

Read [TechCrunch]