Internet Explorer ended 2010 with the highest monthly loss of market share in 2 years. Firefox has overtaken IE now in Europe and Google’s Chrome appears to be a freight train that cannot be stopped at this time. IE may still be the king of browsers, but it is more and more apparent that our prediction that IE9 will get Microsoft more in trouble rather than bringing back the glory of IE in the near future is more than credible.
December wasn’t exactly a successful month for IE. According to Net Applications, IE dropped by 2.33% or 1.36 points to a share of 57.08%, a record low for the past decade (2001-2010). StatCounter lists IE’s share even lower, at 46.94%, with a loss of 2.53% for the month or 1.22 points. There is no accurate information how many users IE may have lost, but 1 point of market share has been translating to a bit more than 10 million users lately, so IE’s loss is significant by any measure.
For the entire year of 2010, IE dropped from 62.12%, which means that IE declined by about 5.04 points. We should note that this drop was less than in 2009, in which IE lost 6.40 points. In January of 2009, IE still held 69.72% of the browser market, according to Net Applications. StatCounter listed IE at 65.41% in January of 2009 and indicates that IE lost nearly 20 points over the past two years, which is about double of what Net Applications estimates.
The Breakdown for 2010
IE
IE is in serious trouble. It is somewhat surprising that IE9 has not been able to stop IE’s decline: It launched in September and is still in Beta, but Microsoft supported the launch with a massive marketing campaign that, however, has largely evaporated. IE9 is a very competitive browser, but consumers haven’t gotten the message yet as IE9′s market share is at just 0.46%, according to Net Applications.
IE posted gains in just two months of 2010, which was the result of a rather questionable scare campaign Microsoft ran across multiple TV channels. In every other month, IE suffered heavy losses and the losses seem to be accelerating again. December was a disaster for IE.
If we break the losses down to versions (Net Applications is nice again and published overall market shares for IE versions again, including the fragmented versions of IE6, IE7 and IE8), then we are seeing IE6 now at 13.06% and a monthly loss of 0.66 points, IE7 at 8.76% and a loss of 0.77 points as well as IE8 at 33.02% and a gain of 0.23 points. IE9 gained 0.08 points to 0.46%. Those four IE versions make up 96% of IE market share.
We notice that IE8 growth stalled in December while IE7 and IE6 continued to slide. It would be silly to state that IE8 has reached its peak, but it was clear that more than 1 point of losses by IE6 and IE7 have not been picked up by IE8 and IE9. User conversion has been the most pressing problem for Microsoft and it is far from being under control.
Firefox
Firefox ended 2010 with 22.81% market share in Net Application’s charts. That was slightly up from 22.76% in the prior month, but overall flat with the shares we have seen over the past half year. Since July 2010, Firefox has posted shares in the 22% range. That leads us to believe that Mozilla may have stabilized its share, despite the fact that Firefox 4 has been delayed and carries a marginal market share of 0.37% and Firefox 3.6 – a hopelessly outdated browser – holds 18.50% share. If 3.6 can defend Mozilla’s market share, then Mozilla could be winning back share once Firefox 4 is out. We are cautiously optimistic that this will happen.
However, Mozilla was down from the year by more than 1.5 points from 24.43% in January 2010. We know that Microsoft’s IE8 TV campaign has hurt Firefox the most and there may be the most common ground of browser users between IE and Firefox. Given Microsoft’s aggressive IE9 campaign, Mozilla’s ability to defend its share is impressive.
The best news for Firefox comes out of Europe. According to StatCounter, Firefox surpassed IE officially across the continent (we jumped the gun a few months ago due to some confusion about StatCounter’s market share numbers.) Firefox now leads with 38.11%, followed by IE with 37.52%, Chrome with 14.58%, Safari with 4.62% and Opera with 4.57%. Both Firefox and IE are losing market share to Chrome in Europe, but IE is dropping faster than Firefox and has surrendered its lead for the first time ever. This may be an event limited to Europe, but we should not underestimate the importance as there are about 475 million Internet users in Europe – which is more than the user count of North America, South America, Central America and The Caribbean combined (470 million), according to Internet World Stats.
Of course, Mozilla can’t quite celebrate, as Chrome is gaining share quickly.
Read on the next page: Chrome, Opera, Safari; Trends
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