About the same time, Chrome will grab 2nd place from Firefox, new stats show
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) will lose its place as the majority browser next summer, according to statistics published today by Web metrics company Net Applications.
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If the pace of IE’s decline over the last 12 months continues, IE will drop under the 50% mark in June 2012.
In August, IE lost about seven-tenths of a percentage point in usage share, falling to 55.3%, a new low for the once-dominant browser. In the last year, IE has dropped 6.9 points.
IE8 remained the most popular version, with a 30% share overall and 54.4% of all editions of IE.
Net Applications calculates browser usage share with data obtained from more than 160 million unique visitors who browse 40,000 Web sites that the company monitors for clients. More browser statistics can be found on the company’s site.
The California company revamped the way it determines usage share last month, splitting smartphone and tablet online activity from that on desktops and notebooks. The change, which Net Applications said was prompted by the rise in mobile browsing, resulted in a significant decline in Safari’s share of the desktop browser market, and increases in IE’s and Chrome’s.
IE is headed downward toward 50%, but Chrome is on pace to overtake Firefox by mid-2012.
