April, 2011: Chrome, Safari Share Up; Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera – Down

By | May 4, 2011 | 16 Comments

April, 2011: Chrome, Safari Share Up; Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera - Down

It’s May already as we look at the browsers market share results for the last month, April that is. Were there any drastic changes? Let’s find out.

It looks like Internet Explorer 9 is not yet good enough to prevent users from switching to other browsers as Microsoft lost market share yet again, down from 55.92% to 55.11% (0.81 point decrease).

Mozilla is facing similar situation as Firefox web browser market share decreased by 0.17 point, from 21.80% to 21.63%.

With the upcoming Google Chrome 13 release, WebKit based web browser is now responsible for the 11.94% market share, up from previous 11.57% by 0.37 point.

Apple Safari is picking up the pace as its market share continues to increase, this time by 0.84 point, up from 6.61% to 7.15%.

What about Opera? Its market share remains pretty much flat, down by 0.01 point, from 2.15% to 2.14%.

Thanks to Net Applications for the graph.


About (Author Profile)


Vygantas is a former web designer whose projects are used by companies such as AMD, NVIDIA and departed Westood Studios. Being passionate about software, Vygantas began his journalism carrier back in 2007 when he founded FavBrowser.com. Having said that, he is also an adrenaline junkie who enjoys good books, fitness activities and Forex trading.

  • Tiago Sá

    I think Firefox 4 proved that Chrome is not gaining market because of its interface (that sucks, by the way) or because of its speed, but because of its marketing. Firefox 4 made no difference whatsoever to Firefox market share. And thank god for it too, we wouldn’t want to see Firefox stealing market share from Chrome and make hackers attack Firefox users more than Chrome’s :)

  • grreg

    What do you expect from ones who are losing right now. IE is only worried about being native. Opera is only worried about there speed dials. Firefox dont even care if they win the race they only worried about being ahead of Microsoft. They all need to learn from Chrome and Safari cause obviously there doing something right.

    • Tiago Sá

      Just like IE6 was doing something write in 2005?

      Not necessarily. Well, Safari isn’t doing anything right, because that number includes the mobile version. The desktop version is crap. And Chrome, yeah, Chrome is doing something right: marketing.

      It’s what I said.

      • Geek

        Was Firefox better than Opera? No. It was just marketing. Now Chrome is beating FF in its own game. Stop crying. For majority of people who are doing basic tasks all browsers are equal. They don’t use extensions, they don’t use sync, they don’t use panorama. Safari is growing because people are satisfied even with very limited Safari version on iPad

        • Tiago Sá

          It wasn’t better than Opera? The simple fact that Firefox is open source and we can customize it any way we want with much more ease makes it the best.

          And I’m not crying, you dumb ass. Firefox’s marketing was better than Opera’s and it is one of the reasons why it fares better than Opera. But just because something’s marketing is good doesn’t mean the thing itself is bad. Chrome is no different. And Chrome has qualities, no doubt. It’s just qualities nobody cared about before they convinced everyone they cared about those qualities. Like speed in benchmarks, for example :P

          • Geek

            Majority of users (95%) doesn’t care if it’s open source. Also FF customization is very unintuitive, to customize many features you have to go deep or install extensions and majority of users don’t do that. Ever. EVER. Firefox market share doesn’t not reflect its quality. It was just aggresivelly promoted and installed on every computer geeks had hands on. Users didn’t chosen it – they was almost forced to use it. And now when I go to non-geeky friends house and see Chrome on their PC, they told me that it was installed and recommended by some friend. And they were using Firefox before. Why they are using now Chrome – because its fast, easy UI. And they don’t even want to try FF v4. Firefox soon will be obliterated. FF market share will drop to about 5%, their main income comes from Google (for using google serach engine) and with such market share, there will be less money. With less money, more and more people will leave Mozilla. Less people to develop Firefox. Firefox will be outdated and left behind. End of story. Opera have many commercial partners so it can survive even with tiny market but (open-source) Firefox will doomed. After about 2-3 years, to use Firefox will be like using Myspace or AOL mail. Niche.
            So first Microsoft “forced” users to use IE, then (open-source) geeks – FF and now Chrome. Apple is “forcing” Safari. Open-source as argument is important only for geeks. Benchmarking too

          • Tiago Sá

            Actually, the majority of Firefox users use extensions. And the minority that goes deep into the source code to create extensions benefits the majority that doesn’t go deep but does use extensions.

            Sure, the majority of users don’t care if it’s open source, at least that’s what I think too, but I also think that the majority of users doesn’t give a damn about browsers. They just use whatever. Doesn’t matter. If you want to argue about Firefox’s quality, then I’ll get started:

            - browsing speed: the majority of people can’t detect a difference between the three main browsers (Firefox, Opera and Chrome), and there’s actually little between them;
            - opening speed: Firefox lags behind, but not far behind. A clean installation will be about as fast as a clean installation of Opera and Chrome;
            - customization: Firefox wins, no question, although Chrome has come a long way, no doubt. It’s still far behind though. Opera comes a close second, as I think it’s pretty customizable, but not in a few aspects like appearance, for instances;
            - memory usage: Firefox 4 is fatter than the competition, but the majority of users don’t care about that;
            - standards compliance: while Chrome supports more standards, I believe Firefox includes more important stuff, like a better implantation of html5 video, for example. It’s my personal belief that Google lags behind in implementing relevant stuff and just try to implement all of it for the sake of it, without prioritizing. The average user doesn’t care about how many HTML5s his browser has, but how well it works with the web, and I think Firefox wins this one. Dunno about Opera;
            - usability: I think Firefox 4 wins over Opera because Opera is a bit too much jammed into the browser (as it always has been, I believe). Firefox does a load of stuff, and does it well, out of the box, and the interface is pretty good and usable. Unlike Chrome, which sucks in terms of usability;
            - features: I think Opera wins, and there’s no real distinction between Firefox and Chrome. If we’re talking about out of the box features. Chrome has some interesting stuff like page translation (which is a pain in the ass, but that’s me) or inbuilt PDF and Flash readers, while Firefox 4 goes all out with Panorama a secure synchronization;
            - extensibility: creating extensions? Firefox. Choosing extensions? Firefox (well, the tiny extensions of Chrome are very limited to compare, to be honest). Using extensions? I think Chrome does a better job. Does Opera have extensions?

            Your claim that Firefox isn’t as good as its market share leads to believe is rubbish. It’s your opinion, but until you back it up, it’s rubbish. Chrome is not easy, Chrome is basic. Until not long ago it had two different menus that had no clear logic between them, for example. It’s so basic that it doesn’t even take into account users who would want to have more than a few open tabs!

            You do realize that your doomsay has been around for years, right? And yet it never happened. Firefox is loosing market share now, but the number of users keeps growing, because the market keeps growing. Firefox fared well when it had 9%. No! Firefox fared well when it had 3%, so there’s no reason why it wouldn’t fare well again, if it dropped to so low. Which it won’t, of course, not as long as it is the only big open source browser in the market. The more I read your post the more I think you’re just a sorry loser trying to destroy Firefox with your wishful thinking. Meanwhile, the REAL heroes (well, internet heroes anyway) are working their asses off to make sure you keeping having a choice. Mozilla is a public service organization, it lives and works for the better of the web, and Firefox lives and is developed for the better of the web. Every user using Google Chrome because they choose to is a victory of Mozilla, in ensuring that people care about their browsing habits and the browser they use. Mozilla keeps growing every day, not just in terms of profits but in terms of people associated with it. And the web is better for it.

            That’s one of the reasons why I use Firefox. But that’s THE reason why Firefox will always be the best choice.

          • John Smith
            Actually, the majority of Firefox users use extensions.

            Sorry, but the vast majority of Firefox users don’t even know what extensions are.

            Your whole post is basically crying about how Chrome sucks despite its growing market share, and how great Firefox is and its market share proves it. Grow up, then you might realize how retarded your posts were.

          • Tiago Sá

            Well, the stats tell a different story, and I’m speaking with them in mind. I don’t have any links, so sorry about that, but last time I saw the stats (somewhere), it was like 60% of users had at least 1 installed extension, and 35% of those had more than 5… Something like that.

            And you’re gay!

            How’s that for childish and retarded? I hope it satisfies your standards.

          • Geek

            http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2009/08/11/how-many-firefox-users-use-add-ons/
            “at least a third of Firefox users have an add-on installed”. Now guess why we have only statistics that are 2 years old? New data hardly is the same, i guess Mozilla just don’t want to show that new users care about extensions even less.
            Also so many users installed only 1 extensions to try it and found all extensions concept unnecessary for him? How many extensions were silently installed by 3rd parties? How many extensions where installed like addon to installed programs (like for download managers – they can integrate with other browsers without extensions but for FF they use extensions). Or geek that instaled FF also installed osme extensions that users haven’t ever used? Or how many extensions users have to install just to get Opera functionality, so extensions statistics just shows that FF lacks some basic functionality like sessions and users have to do some extra work to get features that Opera have out of box. Also those users have to pray that extensions don’t break with new FF version. And with faster FF development extensions will break more often.It’s clearly to me that FF share is droping. And extensions is just geeky thing that almost nobody cares about.
            https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/extensions/
            and sort by Downloads. Top 21 extension IE Tab 2 75,625 weekly downloads. Nearly 4 million a year (and how many were downloaded by the same user?). And FF have more that 400 millions users. 1%.
            Top1 extension Adblock Plus. about 1 million weekly downloads. About 50 million a year (and how many were downloaded by that same user?). 12%
            I rest my case

    • Anonymous

      grreg doesn’t even make sense.

      • grreg

        Maxthon 3>>> your browser

        • Anonymous

          Maxthon 3 < IE6. Maxthon keeps losing users.

  • http://profiles.google.com/yaoqq2009 yao qq

    Come on Internet Explorer! Although I don’t use you but I like the browsers which based on you such as Avant browser,maxthon. You also occupy this part of users because they must have IE installed first.

  • Anonymous

    Do people still think marketshare is a measure of browser quality?

    In this topsy turvy world, Opera is easilly the best browser, but it has a very low marketshare. Why? Because Microsoft and Google (and Apple), have bottomless advertising budgets, and Mozilla have a userbase of people that don’t know any better (they picked an alternative browser once, why look at anything else ever again?)

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_JBUI2UOUTBXMH2TLRS4AHZNU4U Rosa

     http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-monthly-200807-201105http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-monthly-200807-201105

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