Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera Gain in July, Firefox and Chrome Lose
According to NetMarketShare, Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera all experienced a small bump in market share in July, while Firefox and Chrome were knocked down.
Microsoft’s IE finished the month with 60.74 percent of global usage in July, up from 60.32 percent in June. The browser started the year with 62.12 percent in January.
Mozilla’s Firefox browser finished July with 22.91 percent of the market, down from 23.81 percent in June. It started the year with 24.43 percent of the global market, but has seen steady decline since it reached 24.59 percent in April.
Google’s Chrome browser finished the month with 7.16 percent of the market, down from 7.24 percent in June. It began the year with 5.22 percent.
Apple’s Safari browser notched 5.09 percent of the global market in July, up from 4.85 percent in June. It started the year with 4.53 percent of the market.
Opera finished July with 2.45 percent of the market, up form 2.27 percent in June. It began 2010 with 2.38 percent of the global market.
While the social networking realm seems to have overshadowed the browser wars lately, there’s no doubt that there’s something of an arms race going on. Google is set to unveil a new stable version of its Chrome browser every six weeks, while Firefox showed off its fancy “Tab Candy” recently.
However, Harry McCracken at PCWorld is a bit uninterested in the current iteration of the browser wars. Nevertheless, he sees a change coming.
“We seem to be in a period of equilibrium, but I don’t think it’ll last forever. At some point, interfaces will get as sleek as they’re going to get, it’ll be hard to eke any more speed out of JavaScript engines, and HTML5 will be everywhere. Browser developers will need to latch onto fresh ideas — and when they do, their products might once again feel more distinctive than they do at the moment.”
A report from The Wall Street Journal shows that Microsoft executives opted to take the safer business-friendly route when building IE8, though the product team wanted to make the browser the company’s most private ever, enabling the default settings to lock out tools that track Internet users’ online activities (which is what the non-default InPrivate browsing feature does).
The company predictably responded by calling online privacy “tricky” and touting IE’s privacy features.
“In the end, advertising money trumped user privacy,” writes Nick Eaton at seattlepi.com.
Sources:
http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=1&sample=32
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/08/01/internet-explorer-gains-share-in-worldwide-browser-usage
http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/216594.asp?from=blog_last3
http://www.pcworld.com/article/202321/browser_wars_enter_a_new_round.html
