Social Machinery

Net Applications has just published the Global browser market share figures for December 2009, unveiling several interesting surprises.

First, Chrome consolidates its advantage over Safari, something that started back on November last year. The latest figures give Safari a 4, 46% marketshare vs. Chrome 4.63%. The gap grew from 0.03% to 0.17% consolidating the upward trend for Google’s browser. 

And as something that we are getting used to watch, Internet Explorer lost market share. This time it fell almost 1 full percentage point (from 63,61% to 62,69%), accumulating 7% drop over 2009. Meanwhile, Mozilla lost a negligible 0.1% to settle at 24.6% and Opera is still lagging behind with a minuscule 2.31%.

In the other hand, it is interesting to see that users moving to IE8 are mainly at the expenses of Internet Explorer 7, leaving intact the market share of anachronistic IE6 (which is around 20%). This confirms the thesis that those who are still using Internet Explorer 6 is not because disinformation, or because they do not feel like upgrading, but because they are forced to stay with Internet Explorer 6 due to other reasons like preserving the  compatibility with their company intranet. Until this situation doesn’t change millions of users will be still tight to IE6. Let’s see if IE9 can change things during 2010

More info | Net Applications