IE7 continues to step up
I’ve been keeping my eye on the figures showing the breakdown in browser market share on TheCounter.com. When I wrote in December Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) had just overtaken the combined versions of Firefox with 12% of users. Another two months have gone by and now in the figures for February it’s risen to 24% with the corresponding reduction being made for IE6 (down from 70% to 59%). The other browsers have remained more or less static - Firefox on 11-12%, Safari on 3% & IE5 on 1%.
Microsoft were reporting a higher market share a month ago (25% across all websites in the US compared to TheCounter.com’s 20%) as they notched up the 100 millionth IE7 installation. Given the vagaries of web statistics then it’s pretty much in the small ballpark.
An interesting aspect of the change in figures is that the increase is established (more or less) within the first few days of the month, and no significant variation thereafter. This is likely to change now that Windows Vista has been launched to the consumer market (on 31 January) as users upgrade or buy new machines (currently not shown in the operating system breakdown). So the stepped effect should be reduced in the future.
