Firefox 4 Making Gains in Global Market Share, Internet Explore Still the Leader

Firefox 4 is making some gains in the global browser wars. It has eclipsed version 3.6 for the first time and now is the third most-used browser in the world, behind Internet Explorer 8 and Google Chrome 11, according to StatCounter Global.

If you put add all versions of all the browsers together, IE is still the global leader with 43.9%, of which 4.6% is IE 9. Firefox is second with 29.3%. Chrome has experienced the most growth, going from 8.6% in 2010 to 19.4% in 2011. Yet, depending on which research group you trust or prefer, the precise numbers of browser use market share remain muddled.

Firefox has added almost 10% to its global market share since 2008, when it broke the 20% barrier, according to Mozilla. We asked last year if Firefox was going to lose market share to Chrome. Based on the StatCounter Global statistics, that is not the case. Yet, if you look at NetMarketShare, Firefox only has 21.71% of the market (down from 24.59%) while Chrome has grown from 6.73% to 12.52%.

In the U.S., IE has 47% of the market while Firefox weighs in at 15% and Chrome at 15%. That would correlate with data we reported from Quantcast in February 2010 that said U.S. users are less likely to use Chrome or Firefox.

The StatCounter report says that Firefox version 4 has had considerable adoption since its release in March. That's impressive considering Firefox requires users to manually update browser versions whereas Chrome automatically updates and Microsoft prompts users to upgrade from IE 8 to IE 9 within Windows Vista and Windows 7.

StatCounter Global statistics are based on aggregate data collected on a sample of over 15 billion page views per month, 4 billion of which came from the U.S. The data is collected from the StatCounter network of more than 3 million websites.

Tags: browsers, chrome, firefox

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