IE10 Doubles Share of Browser Market

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NetApplications has published its browser market statistics for April, and the big story is that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 10 (IE10) doubled its market share. IE remained most popular desktop browser, while Apple’s Safari continued its reign as the most popular mobile browser.

Computerworld’s Greg Keizer reported, “IE10, which Microsoft launched last October for Windows 8 and in February for the far-more-popular Windows 7, doubled its usage share within IE from 5.3% to a month-ending 10.8%, data published by Net Applications showed. The browser’s quick rise — as recently as January, it accounted for only 2.3% of all copies of Internet Explorer — was triggered by the start of an automatic update from 2011’s IE9 to this year’s IE10 on Windows 7 PCs.”

PC Pro’s Nicole Kobie observed, “While that’s positive news for the latest version of Microsoft’s browser, the 12-year-old IE6 still retains 6.22% – up very slightly from March but down from 7.1% in April last year.”

CNET’s Lance Whitney noted, “Internet Explorer 8 is the top dog with a 23 percent share, followed by IE 7 with 18 percent. Google’s Chrome version 26 holds 13 percent, while Firefox 20 is in fourth place with a 9.5 percent share. Among the rival browsers in general, IE holds the overall lead with almost 56 percent of the market. Firefox takes second place with 20 percent, leaving Chrome with a little more than 16 percent and Safari with 5.3 percent. In the mobile arena, Safari for iOS lost a bit of ground last month as its share dropped to 59.4 percent from 61.8 percent in March.”

The Next Web’s Emil Protalinski added, “Between March and April, Internet Explorer dipped 0.02 percentage points (from 55.83 percent to 55.81 percent), Firefox gained 0.09 percentage points (from 20.21 percent to 20.30 percent), and Chrome slipped 0.10 percentage points (from 16.45 percent to 16.35 percent). Safari meanwhile gained 0.07 percentage points to 5.38 percent and Opera slipped 0.01 percentage points to 1.73 percent.”