IE10 falls below IE9 in market share

Pretty misleading title, since IE10 isn&#x27;t the latest version. IE11 is the latest and went from 11.51% to 12.80% (big jump compared to Chrome, 16.28% to 16.84%). Interesting (and slightly sad) that Firefox isn&#x27;t gaining - in light of these stats, I&#x27;d say things don&#x27;t look too shabby for IE.<p>I&#x27;m not too familiar with IE (heh), but is the upgrade mechanism better in IE10? That might explain the higher drop.

Net Applications apparently have a sample of 40,000 websites, whereas StatCounter have a sample of 3,000,000 [1]. StatCounter shows radically different numbers (e.g. Chrome by far the most used, whereas NA shows IE majority). IMO, StatCounter&#x27;s numbers are more likely to be accurate.<p>[1] <a href="http://gs.statcounter.com/press/open-letter-ms" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gs.statcounter.com&#x2F;press&#x2F;open-letter-ms</a>

These figures make no sense to me. The fact that we do not have meaningful browser statistics makes no sense either. Why is it so hard to get meaningful figures and why do the figures from the &#x27;experts&#x27; vary so much?<p>In some ways &#x27;what browser do people use&#x27; is a bit like &#x27;what language do people speak&#x27;, except it should be easier to measure the statistics. Yet, unlike the situation with languages, we have a really hazy idea of what browsers are used. As a developer it is easy to get things working in developer preferred browsers to then be clueless about what percentage of your audience use IE and what versions. Does IE7 matter any more, or IE9? Do people with those browsers almost expect sites to look wrong?

Can someone explain why the Net Applications numbers are so different from the StatCounter numbers? I would expect some variation in counting &quot;users&quot; versus &quot;page views&quot; but the difference here is stark

I&#x27;m a little surprised that their stats show IE having &gt;50% market share. Most stats show IE having between 18% and 25% market share. My own sites show between 10% (for a tech site) and 15% (for a health site). I guess Net Applications is only sampling corporate users, who still tend to use old IE. My own stats show that IE11 has a higher number of visitors than any other version of IE.

How reliable are these numbers anyway?<p>Other commenters have mentioned differences between NetApplications and StatCounter, but I suspect there are other factors that can heavily skew the apparent market share of different browsers.<p>For example, it is already well known that programming-related websites get a higher than average share of non-IE visitors. I don&#x27;t think this would affect the likes of NetApplications and StatCounter, because they&#x27;re used by all sorts of websites. But ...<p>... it is also much easier to find and install an ad blocker in Chrome and Firefox than it is to do so in IE. Many of those ad blockers and similar extensions will also block the tracking beacons used by NetApplications and StatCounter.<p>This probably has a negative effect on the apparent market shares of Chrome and Firefox. Especially the latter, I suspect, because lots of people who consciously choose Firefox nowdays do so for privacy reasons. (Can&#x27;t trust Google anymore, etc.)

FWIW, several DHS department level IT shops are moving to IE11 in a few months. I&#x27;m at one where after they&#x27;ve been at IE8 for so many years, they jumped to IE10 last fall and IE11 is around the corner. Love it. It&#x27;s been so nice not having to support IE &lt; 10 the last several months.<p>And IE11&#x27;s dev tools, while still a little clunky to get around, are very comparable to Firefox&#x2F;Chrome for most of the features.<p>We also still have some users that haven&#x27;t upgraded (also smaller resolution monitors) but all less than 10%.

To me this just means that on more modern version of Windows more people than not have enabled auto-updates. I&#x27;d guess corporations make up a good chunk of the staid browsers.

IE9 is probably going to stick around for quite a while, it&#x27;s the last version that Vista users have access to. IE8 should start dropping off at a faster rate after April, but will still be with us due to home owners who don&#x27;t wish to upgrade past XP. What will be interesting to see is whether home users gravitate towards new PCs or tablets.

The Android browser is the new IE:<p><a href="http://www.mobilexweb.com/blog/android-browser-eternal-dying" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mobilexweb.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;android-browser-eternal-dying</a>

Not a shock, corporate users are still catching up. Most that I&#x27;ve seen are thankfully off IE6 but only up to 8 or 9.

I don&#x27;t understand IE7 : if you have it, it means you are able to upgrade from IE6, so why not IE8 ?

I know of a bank which had just recently upgraded to IE9. :-(<p>It&#x27;s a pain in the ass to support this.

What&#x27;s wrong with line (or area) charts to chart values that change over time?

I think IE is covered, but: &quot;Android is the new IE&quot;.<p>Think of % of 2.x.