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IE Fades as Chrome Surges

May 7, 2010 on 6:53 am | In IdBlog, Tools | Add a Comment

The window through which people view the web is changing. Between March and April, usage of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer slipped below 60 percent, according to ArsTechnica. That’s a huge change from just a few years ago when the various versions of Internet Explorer accounted for over 90 percent of the browsers used on the net.

Mozilla’s Firefox holds just under 25 percent of the browser share and Google’s Chrome browser claims almost 7 percent of the viewing public. Google’s open-source net-viewing tool is faster than the competition and their latest release parses web pages faster still.

Although some analysts predict that the internet will be accessed primarily from mobile devices in just a few year’s time, actual mobile web usage accounts for  less than 2 percent of US web content consumption. According to a Pew Internet study, about one-third of Americans accessed the net with a mobile device in 2009. Counting mobile access is also tricky, since many mobile devices strip or otherwise obscure their user agent strings.

Browser preferences also vary greatly by venue. Sites about web tech can usually count on a majority of users viewing with Firefox; sites about the arts may see a marked preference for Safari. On this site 45 percent of users log in with Internet Explorer while 41 percent use Firefox and 14 percent prefer Safari.