February, 2011 – Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari Share Up; Firefox, Opera – Down

By | March 1, 2011 | 17 Comments

February, 2011 - Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari Share Up; Firefox, Opera - Down

It’s the 1st of March already, so let’s dive into February market share data.

With the release of Internet Explorer 9 RC, Microsoft has taken some share back, up from 56.00% to 56.77% (0.77 point increase).

While everyone awaits the final version of Firefox 4, an open source web browser continues the downtrend, from 22.75% to 21.74% (1.01 point decrease).

Google Chrome does not seem to be stopping anytime soon as we see a yet another increase, up from 10.70% to 10.93% (0.23 point increase).

Things look good in the Safari camp as well, this time its market share has increased by 0.06 point, up from 6.30% to 6.36%.

After some recover, Opera has lost 0.13 point of the market share in February, down from 2.28% to 2.15%.

Thanks to Hitslink for graph.


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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.

  • Lola

    Firefox :O!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    • Ggilocauu

      is the most overrated browser.

      • Canna

        It’s the best one too.

        Lol. The others are just jokes of a corporation trying to steal the web all for themselves.

  • Geek

    Firefox is going down. Every geek which was installing Firefox on every computer he could get his hands on, now is doing the same with Chrome. Around my friends more and more are using Chrome, because somebody recomended it and they are sick of IE or Firefox

  • Welloh

    Isn’t it odd how Opera’s market share was higher in the months where it was losing users, while now that it’s growing again Hitslink says the market share is going down? Go figure.

    • mr.lutze

      Figure out this:
      Opera mini is also in hitslink stats and have 1,12% market share. Desktop version – 2.15%.
      However, when we look in number of users it looks quite different:
      Opera desktop – 53 mln users
      Opera mini – 93 mln users

  • http://www.facebook.com/smiley97111 Doug Hood

    Netmarketshare doesn’t really know how many users a browser has, they’re posting statistics of browsers that visit their membership’s websites. It’s still a pretty good survey sampling, about 160 million unique visits per day, so they’re still my favorite trend source. I use them to monitor progress on my Internaut IQ Index.

    February was definitely a fascinating month on the index.

    http://www.pmaco.net/~smiley/journal/201103/IIQindex_February_update_SJ110301_.html

    Smiley

  • Mistake

    Opera: “down from 2.15% to 2.28%.”

    • http://www.favbrowser.com Vygantas Lipskas

      Fixed! :-)

  • DeoDomuique

    Well… Just wondering…

    The most popular Firefox add-on is Ad Block Plus, right? Long time ago….

    The lists, especially “Easy Privacy” for instance, doesn’t affect the results? Because these lists always blocking such counters… I’m pretty sure Firefox numbers are a bit bigger than those companies announcing… The most wronged browser, in my opinion. I don’t know how exactly it works, to be honest. Unless the only criterion is the “User Agent”.

    • mr.lutze

      All (good) browser like Firefox, Opera or Chrome have build-in or working as extension function to block stats counting websites. And from what I remember only 2% of Firefox users have Adblock Plus installed.

  • Armin

    In February of 2011, Firefox lost more market share than Internet Explorer managed to gain. The fact that Internet Explorer gained market share to begin with is…

  • http://twitter.com/st0rmbr1nger MrG

    I don’t care about marketshare. It’s a measure of marketing budgets. Obviously the Microsofts, the Googles and the Apples of this world can pore endless amounts of money into.

    I care about features, security, performance, web standards.

    That’s why I use Opera. Frankly anyone using other browsers is either a mindless moron that follows the crowd, or a mindless moron that assumes marketshare is a measure of quality.

    • http://twitter.com/bricky149 Shane Bundy

      I use Minefield along with the Opera snapshot builds. Does that mean I’m an idiot?

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_VSGDKSO7XN2DMFPAMVQB4BVUFQ George

    Opera is easily better than anything else out there. This “news” just reaffirms my believe that consumers are generally idiots that just like being told what to buy, what to use.

    • http://twitter.com/bricky149 Shane Bundy

      Not exactly true. While Opera can be considered the ‘future of the web’ it’s up to what others believe is best for them. For example IE9 is said to be the ‘fastest’ but really it isn’t for me. Either Minefield or Chromium is best in terms of speed IMO but Minefield has super drag and drop which I use a lot.

  • Radio_Cloud

    Opera is so much better than Chrome. It just gets less attention because Google doesnt own it.

    Firefox still has the most features, but got really slow and bloated, but now its reasonably fast again with firefox 4 and still offers more in the way of user experience without being too slow.

    Chrome is fast, but its not that awesome, and unless your are using Iron (a hacked version of Chrome), its going to spy on you and use you for a data mining project.

    Opera is the FASTEST browswer in real time…yes, faster than Chrome or Chromium. There are some really awesome things you can do with it too if you know how. Extensions now too? Awesome widgets, built in torrents by default, ability to easily turn your PC into a server with your browser as the server software, play music off your friends computer or stream podcasts to the world without any other software slowing you down…..page rendering even faster than Chrome!!!

    Opera kicks ass and is fastest, Firefox still has the best modding community (though chrome is catching up slowly), but now that firefox is tolerably fast people might be less and less willing to sacrifice so much functionality and their favorite addons and modding options for differences in speed that you dont even notice…..firefox used to be bloated and slow for a while, but now everything opens about as fast as you need it to……fast enough is fast enough. It only mattered when it wasnt ‘fast enough’, but now that the difference is miliseconds who cares which is technically faster by an amount of time the human eye cant even catch? Maybe not QUITE there yet, but soon.

    If you need lite weight and fast on older hardware, OPERA not chrome is the way to go.

    If you want the full featured experience and fast enough, firefox 4.

    Firefox 3.6+ was too bloated and slow, and unstable in Linux…..I was pissed at firefox, but firefox 4 is a winner.

    Chrome isnt terrible, but I would suggest using Iron if you must use chrome.

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