Competitors Gain on Internet Explorer

Love it or hate it, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has long dominated the Web browser market, recently commanding as much as three quarters of the worldwide browser market. But new preliminary data from Net Applications’ Hitslink service shows that alternative browsers have been steadily gaining ground on IE.

According to the preliminary report, versions of Internet Explorer were used by 68.15 percent of Web surfers during December 2008, which represents a decline from 69.77 percent in November and 71.27 percent in October. And the main browsers to benefit from IE’s decline are Firefox, Apple’s Safari, and Google’s Chrome browser, which racked up shares of 21.34 percent, 7.93 percent, and 1.04 percent, respectively, during December 2008. The month marks the first time Google’s Chrome—which is only available for Windows and only just came out of beta—topped a 1 percent share. December is also only the second month in which Firefox topped a 20 percent share.

Net Applications notes that the end-of-year holidays may skew December’s numbers a bit, as more Web users are likely to access the Internet from home rather than work, potentially skewing results in favor of browsers like Safari that may have a higher usage among residential users.

Net Applications bases its analysis on cumulative statistics gathered from sites that use its traffic monitoring service; according to the company, the statistics are generated based on 160 million Web users per month.