It's no secret that Internet Explorer has been dominant among browsers, but that Firefox has been gaining steadily, as has Chrome. Now, new statistics from website analytics firm StatCounter indicated that, at least in Europe, IE has been dethroned.In December of 2010, Firefox had 38.11 percent of European market share, compared to IE's 37.52 percent. The big winner is not Firefox, however, but Chrome. A look at the graph of market share shows that while IE has been steadily declining, Safari, Opera, and indeed Firefox have been pretty static. Chrome, on the other hand, has been rising.
In fact, Chrome has nearly tripled its European market share, year over year. In December of 2009, Chrome had 5.06 percent of the market, compared to 14.58 percent in December of 2010.
Aodhan Cullen, CEO of StatCounter said:
"This is the first time that IE has been dethroned from the number one spot in a major territory. This appears to be happening because Google's Chrome is stealing share from Internet Explorer while Firefox is mainly maintaining its existing share.In the U.S., IE remains dominant, although also losing ground steadily. StatCounter data shows IE at 48.92 percent, followed by Firefox at 26.7 percent, Chrome at 12.82 percent and Safari at 10.16 percent.
We are probably seeing the impact of the agreement between European Commission competition authorities and Microsoft, to offer EU users a choice and menu of browsers from March last."
StatCounter is a free service that allows website owners to embed traffic tracking widgets into their sites. It provides free website traffic information and publishes browser statistics via StatCounter Global Stats. This does, of course, limit the "range of sites" that it tracks to determine its statistics, but it claims a network of more than 3 million websites.
