IE lost share to Firefox, Safari and Chrome in December

Web sites saw visitors deserting Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser in favor of Apple's Safari, Mozilla's Firefox and Google's Chrome in December, according to Web analytics company Net Applications.

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Internet Explorer was used by 68.15% of Web surfers monitored in December, down from 69.77% in November and 71.27% in October, according to preliminary figures published by Net Applications on its Hitslink Web site Friday. IE's share has slipped from around 75% since the start of 2008.

Safari, Firefox and Chrome all profited from the slide in IE's popularity.

Firefox's share rose to 21.34%, from 20.78% in November and 19.97% in October, while Safari's climbed to 7.93%, from 7.13% in November and 6.57% in October.

Google's Chrome browser topped the 1 percent mark in Net Applications' survey for the first time, with a share of 1.04%, up from 0.83% in November and 0.74% in October.

Opera's share remained steady at 0.71%.

Net Applications warned that decreased workplace use of the Internet in December may have biased its results.

"The December holiday season strongly favored residential over business usage. This in turn increases the relative usage share of Mac, Firefox, Safari and other products that have relatively high residential usage," it said.

However, Internet Explorer's market share actually declined more slowly in December than it had done in November, according to the company's figures.

Operating system statistics provided by Net Applications suggest that Macintosh owners are more faithful to the browser provided by their operating system manufacturer than are Windows users. Mac OS market share increased slightly in December to 9.63%, from 8.87% in November, mirroring the rise in Safari usage. while desktop Linux usage by Web surfers remained steady at 0.85%, compared with 0.83% in November. Windows usage dipped to 88.68% from 89.62% in November, a smaller decline than that in IE usage.

Net Applications tracks browsers visiting sites that use its traffic monitoring service, compiling data on around 160 million visitors per month, according to its site.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.