Most of the regular readers know that I am a fanatic for statistics and numbers. We are at the fag end of this year and I am planning to do series of posts that featuring some very interesting numbers and statistics -I am sure readers would find quite interesting & informative.
So here it goes – Statcounter, one of the leading Web statistics tracker in world has come out with global statistics on Web and Mobile browsing. Infact, they have launched a section that gives you most updated insights on user behavior on web and mobile.
Here are some of the popular once that you may find quite Interesting:
Top 5 Browsers of 2009
Yes, I know you are seeing this particular graph with a hint of frown on your face (especially if you are a IE hater) – Internet Explorer still close to 56% market share as of December 2009. The good part is – the share is rapidly falling down. Just a year back IE has close to 70% market share. There is hope.
Firefox comes up at 2nd place with close to 32% market share, as rise of about 5% over last year.
The biggest gainer though has been chrome and I am sure it will be rising even faster in coming days. Chrome is not even a year old and it has already captured more than 5% market share. One of the main drawbacks about chrome was that it did not have plugins / extensions to extend its functionality, which is very popular with with Firefox users and also one of the main reasons why many people have not yet moved from FF to Chrome.
Having said that, Chrome already has extensions on its beta release and from the looks of it, it is absolutely awesome (yes, I use them). From personal point of view I gave up sluggish FF 6 months back and have never returned to it. I am a die-hard Chrome fan !
Top Browsers Versions used
This graphs looks to be more evenly distributed, but as you may have guessed, Top 3 of 4 browsers are IE versions. I am really surprised that worldwide there are close to 15% people still using I.E 6
Now here is a shocker – Do you know how many Indian web users still use IE6?
A whooping 31% (double compared to global average)
Top Mobile Browsers in the world / India
Worldwide
India
The reason I am featuring World-wide Mobile browser usage as well as India is because of the amount of difference in usage patterns shown India Mobile users compared to their global peers.
Globaly, the mobile browser market share is quite evenly distributed with Opera accounting for close to 27%, followed by Iphone (23%) and Nokia (19%). One of the main reasons is off course the popularity of Iphone in Western countries, while it nearly bombed in countries like India and China.
If you look at the graph of Indian mobile users it is completely different – Only 2 of them nearly cover the entire landscape. Opera is extremely popular with more than 62% of Indian mobile users using it followed by Nokia in-built browser (27%). Interesting, the third position is taken by netfront browser (6%) – I have never heard about it (I have skyfire on my windows mobile phone).
Is any of the trak.in readers using Netfront?
I will be following up this post tomorrow which will cover Operating System / Search Engine statistics etc so keep tuned :)
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Author: Arun Prabhudesai
Arun Prabhudesai is founder / chief editor at trak.in. He jumped the Entrepreneurship bandwagon in early 2008 after a long 13 year stint in I.T Industry. You can follow him on twitter @trakin or get in touch with him at admin-at-trak-dot-in or 91.9822575676.Related posts:
- PC and Mobile Operating System Statistics for 2009
- Mobile Internet Users grow 245% [India] – Facebook becomes most popular mobile social network [global] – Report
- iPhone is the most popular phone in US: Nokia doesn’t even figure in top 10
- Email is still the most popular way of sharing articles from a blog / website.
- 43.7 million Indian users use Mobile Banking
- Top Facebook & Twitter Trends for 2009
- Mobile Internet Usage in India
- How & What Mobile Phone Services does India use – Report
- Another bumper month – 10.4 Million mobile users added in October
- Indian Mobile user’s Internet Usage
{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
Really cool Arun, i think IE will loose out its share within 2011, most probably firefox and chrome will become market leaders. Microsoft better do something fast or they are gonna loose out. I think the past 2 years has been a bad year for Microsoft, profits falling, loosing market share, increasing competition and failure of many products.
Well, I both agree and disagree.
Agree that Firefox and Chrome are probably better and faster browsers and are keeping with the times.
Disagree that IE will be loose market very soon – I think it be at least 5 to 10 years before it can be unseated from the top position. My reasoning is that as long as a browser is packaged with the OS, not many home users or non-tech savvy users would think about downloading a different browser like FF or Chrome. I think same reasoning might hold for mobile browser dominance – what comes pre-packaged with the device might be the most used, like Opera for Indian mobiles. Arun do you further info on this?
Hi Madhav,
Yes, one of the main reasons why IE demands that kind of market share is because it comes preloaded with Operating System. My Dad still uses IE6 even after I installed FF on his machine – guess it is just the comfort level as well.
But with mobile browsers I beg to differ. I dont think opera comes pre-packaged. It many be true for Nokia’s browser market share but not for Opera…
Hi Arun,
That’s an excellent and a very informative post. The progress of Chrome in its first year of launch is commendable. Surely as pointed out by Madhav, IE has its market share due to it being bundled up with Windows. But I am sure that all those minds sitting at Google will find a way out for this too :)
Yeah…Extensions and now with new Chrome O.S completely based on Browser itself…its going to be interesting times ahead :)
@Pooja, yeah… like crash IE every time it tries to access Google.com, so users will need to install Chrome to do it :-)
hehehehe…Madhav that a good one…They should really try doing it :D
Just want to share this piece of news – European regulators dropped their antitrust case against Microsoft on Wednesday after the software maker agreed to offer consumers a choice of rival Web browsers. (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/17/business/global/17msft.html)
This could be a game changer for browser wars in Europe. Any bets on similar other major regions?
PS: One thing that I have still not understood about browsers is, how does this benefit the manufacturer like MS or Google if their browser is used?
It does help indirectly. The browser collects lot of information and passes it on to the vendor (offcourse the vendor has choice to switch it off) – which in turn gives vendor the intelligence which could be used in many profitable ways.
More than that if browser is closed source like IE, it helps them in increasing their branding / pageviews to their portals (by default page point) etc.
SO yes, there are not direct benefits, but indirect benefits are lot..
I am not sure if everyone will agree to this…but thats my take..
Arun,
Thanks for the info, and sorry for digressing a bit from this post’s topic. Didn’t realize that browser tracking was a business model, and would we all be willingly agreeing to such activities by our browser providers? (Wonder how FF benefits, as it is open source, and no individual or company owns it.)
Hey that’s an interesting piece of information. I would love to compare the market shares after its implementation. Also, it would be interesting to know how many people actually make a switch when given a choice of different browsers.
@Madhav Regarding your question, probably Arun can provide some information here. Never thought about the revenue model behind internet browsers.
I like both Firefox and Chrome .Both are equally useful.