Send to KindleInternet Explorer (IE) has had a comfortable lead over other web browsers like Chrome and Firefox. However that lead has been slowly declining over the years. In fact Microsoft launched a campain of their own to ask consumers to stop using IE 6. The currrent verson of IE is version 9 unless your using the Windows 8 Preview which comes with version 10.
With that being said IE posted another major gain in share last month, the second in the first quarter of the year, perhaps signaling a turnaround.
Meanwhile, every rival, including Google’s Chrome, which is usually the one stealing users, lost share.
IE gained 1 percentage point during March to end the month with a 53.8% share, its highest level since September 2011. Last month’s growth was the second this year of 1 point or more.
Chrome lost a third of a percentage point to close March with 18.6%, while Mozilla’s Firefox slipped by about the same to 20.6%, the open-source browser’s lowest number in more than three years.
Apple’s Safari and Opera Software’s desktop browsers also dipped, falling by two-tenths and one-tenth of a point, respectively, to 5.1% and 1.6%.
Chrome’s decline is especially notable, as March’s slide was the third consecutive month that Google’s once-hard-charging browser lost share. In the first quarter of 2012, Chrome has dropped more than half a percentage point, representing a 3% decline from the browser’s December 2011 number.
