Net Marketshare’s numbers for desktop browser use in October are out, and while both Internet Explorer and Chrome gained over the last 30 days, Firefox continues to lose steam.
IE remains the top dog by a landslide, accounting for 58.49 percent of total desktop-based Web traffic. That’s slightly better than its 58.37 September result, and almost imperceptibly up from August, when Microsoft’s proprietary browser sat at a supremely dominant 58.46 percent.
Meanwhile, Google Chrome use shot up from the sub-20 range in August, to over 20 percent in September, and it isn’t looking back. Previously at 21.19 percent in September, the silver medalist earned a measly 0.06 percent in October, and is now eating up 21.25 percent of the pie.
The third spot on the podium goes, as always, to Firefox, whose share dropped from 14.18, to 13.91 percent between September and October. This is the second consecutive monthly loss for Mozilla’s browser, which dipped from 15.23 percent in August. All in all, the flame-spitting wild beast lost a whopping 1.32 percentage points in the last 60 days. That’s close to 10 percent.
Outside of the top three browsers, there’s little movement in one direction or the other, with Apple’s Safari still a distant fourth. Usage of Apple’s browser, which is pre-installed on all Mac computers, rose from 5.01 percent in September, to 5.1 in October. Safari’s August number of 5.32 percent is a distant, pleasant memory in Cupertino.
Opera is, as one would expect, a mere blip on IE’s, Chrome’s, Firefox’s, and even Safari’s radar, with its popularity shrinking to 0.83 percent. That’s down from 0.86 percent in September.
It’s important to note that Explorer got a bit of media attention recently, thanks to minor security improvements and bug fixes. That probably helped it grow, but maybe not as drastically as Microsoft had hoped. It’s worth noting that IE is installed on all Windows machines by default.
The same could be said about the release of one of Google’s more exciting Chrome extensions in a while, which failed to make a great impact. On the Firefox front, very little changed, and you can see that reflect in its increasingly disappointing scores.
As for Safari, it’s the same old story, but as we saw in our recent review of the iMac with Retina Display, it’s still the smoothest browser to use on Mac OS X systems.
