The ups and downs of web browser market shares

It is interesting to see which web browsers people are using and to look at the trends. Which browsers are gaining market share and which ones are losing? Websites gather information about their visitors, but don't worry, they can't tell who visits, just which browser they are using (amongst other information). It's just part of the functions of the web server software that's running. It's hard to say how representative this website's visitors are of the wider general public, but there is Windows, Linux and Apple Mac content here, so presumably there are a wide range of visitors using all three computing platforms. So who has the biggest market share, which browser are people flocking too and where are they coming from? There are clear winners and losers.

The data shown is for October 2010 and if you click the image you can view it full size.

Firefox is clearly the most popular web browser with a 34.76% share of the market. Interestingly, this has not changed since March 2010 and the figure is almost identical. The same is true of Safari and it's 28.41% market share is unchanged since March 2010.

When it comes to Internet Explorer and Google Chrome though, there is a clear winner and a loser. From March to October Internet Explorer's market share has fallen from 22.83% to 17.77% while Chrome has grown from 8.85% to 15.36%. That's quite a big swing, so while Firefox and Safari are unchanged, many people appear to be switching from Internet Explorer to Google Chrome. Opera is down 1% too, so some Opera users have also switched to Chrome too.

With Chrome almost doubling its market share since March, it's easy to see the trend. It's stealing Internet Explorer and Opera users.