I have been keeping an eye on browser usage at Net Market Share for some time now and I have noticed an interesting underlying trend. It seems to me that people who use Internet Explorer fall into 2 main camps;
- They keep up to date with the latest releases – these people have adopted IE7 in the past and are now migrating en-masse to IE8. IE7 usage has dropped from 35% in March 2009 to 14% in February 2010 and I guess this trend will continue until IE7 disappears entirely.The combined usage of IE7 and IE8 has remained fairly stable at around 36-37% of the market. As IE7 has faded IE8 has taken up it’s share.
- They have used IE6 for years, possibly in a corporate environment where stability is more important than modernity, or possibly just because that is what was installed when their PC was first delivered. These people are now starting to upgrade from IE6 to more modern browsers, IE6 usage has dropped from 31% in March 2009 to 20% in February 2010.The interesting thing is that these people don’t seem to be upgrading to the newer versions of Internet Explorer, rather they are migrating to other browsers, some are moving to Firefox or to Opera but the biggest beneficiary of this move seems to be Google’s Chrome browser. Chrome usage has gone from less than 2% in March 2009 to nearly 6% in February 2010.As a footnote – Apple’s Safari Browser is also gaining users but I suspect that is due to more people buying Macs and iPhones with Safari installed rather than to people actually choosing to install Safari on their PC.
By amalgamating the version data from the Browser Trends website I have come up with the following graph. Please click on the image to see the full size graph.
Amalgamated web browser trends Mar 2009 to Feb 2010
You can see how the more modern versions of Internet Explorer are maintaining their market share but IE6 usage is dropping quite rapidly while other (non-IE) browsers take up it’s share.
As a website designer I love this trend, I can look forward to a day when IE6 usage will have shrunk sufficiently that I can ignore it’s many foibles and design for 21st Century browsers instead.
As users of Microsoft’s newer browsers seem to keep up to date with the latest versions we can hope that they will all be using IE9 or even IE10 by then. Internet Explorer is slowly becoming more standards compliant with each version so hopefully IE9 & IE10 will continue this trend and life will become much easier for me.
I dream of a day when the websites I create work properly in all browsers without me having to compromise the design to get to that state.