Google’s Chrome Market Share Declines For The First Time, Firefox’s Drops Below 20%

By | February 1, 2012 | 26 Comments


New Year brings big changes.

It’s February already as we look at the January’s browsers marker share numbers. As it turns out, there were few substantial differences for major vendors.

For the first time since eternity, Internet Explorer has actually increased its share from 47.76% to 48.16% (0.4 point jump). Is IE cool again?

Continuing its steady downtrend, Firefox has now less than 20% of the market share as it dropped from 20.09% to 18.97% (1.12 point decrease).

Just as we thought that Google Chrome will continue to grow forever and ever, its market share has deceased for the very first time ever, down from 17.58% to 17.20% (0.38 point decrease). Such change deserves this:

Animated Monkey GIF

With all the iPhones and iPads sold that include Safari, Apple’s web browser user base grew by 0.6 point, up from 8.67% to 9.27%.

After few shaky months and market share increase last time, Opera’s user base grew by 0.01 point, up from 1.66% to 1.67%.

What about Opera’s mobile web browser? Actually, Opera Mini is doing quite well, this time its share increased by 0.1 point, up from 1.89% to 1.98%.

That is all for today, folks.


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.

  • Madis

    WTF? Not fair :(

    • Saex Conroy

       what?

      why do you even care.. use your browser and thats it

      • Irrelevant

        What are you doing here if you don’t care? We who are affected by the changes care.

        • Saex Conroy

          explain to me how is this affecting you?

          from what i understand ordinary people are like that:
          using their browser, minding their own business.. etc

          HOW EXACTLY does browser share affects YOUR experience???????

          • 1234– FF UX IS THE BEST!!

            It gives you a sense that the browser you might be using is either likes by people, or might be disliked. So you always have a thought in your mind that what if I am using the oworst browser in the world and actually liking it rather than using other good browsers and taking advantage of thier own features… That is how it effects me.. don’t know abt u..

  • Mikah

    Google’s left hand caught its right hand being naughty & slapped itself on the wrist last month.

    Google demoted the PageRank — the rating Google assigns based on how many other sites link to a URL — for Chrome’s download site after it admitted a marketing campaign had violated the company’s own rules against paid links.
    Seems its penalised itself for at least 60 days.
    http://searchengineland.com/google-chrome-page-will-have-pagerank-reduced-due-to-sponsored-posts-106551

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

      They must not know how long 60 days is, Chrome is back up as the first result if you look for it now.

      • Mikah

        No its not what you are taking about is a paid ad , ads are nothing to do with Page ranking.
        Paid  ad is exaggerating whatever they charge its free.

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

          It wasn’t a sponsored ad, but it doesn’t matter now.

  • IE & Opera Fanboy

    Happy to see two of my favorites has very slight increase. But I think these are just transient. IE will only when more people move to Windows 7 + IE 9. Opera needs to do load more to make the users feel light weight than Chrome & IE to attract more users.

  • Anonymous

    I am going to sue you for using the last line

    “That is all folks”

    Well SOPA anyways.

  • Elfsn Chung

    Poor firefox. It’s not fair. Firefox is good in my opinion. It runs faster  and more stable in my win7 64 bit PC compared with chrome.
    No only these teo browser itsef, but also the firefox engine and chrome engine in my Avant browser.
    Obviously, the firefox engine is more stable there.

  • Apriorimeister

    This provides us with a fairly different picture: http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-monthly-201112-201201

    • Dante

      StatCounter use stupid methodology without weight.

      • Mikah

        So you think NetMarketShare is any better ?

        StatCounter   Stats are based on aggregate data collected by StatCounter on a sample exceeding 15 billion pageviews per month collected from across the StatCounter network of more than 3 million websites.

        Net Applications Use over 40,000 sites. We collect data from the browsers of site visitors to our exclusive on-demand network of live stats customers. The data is compiled from approximately 160 million visitors per month. The information published is an aggregate of the data from this network of hosted website statistics.

        Personally I think Statcounter using over 3 million sites trumps NetApplications paltry 46,000 sites , the probability is both are not accurate.

        • Dante

          “So you think NetMarketShare is any better ?”
          Yes. Because NetMarketShare statistic use a weight. They can compare market share difference between China and Spain and StatCounter not.

          StatCounter receive about 400 millions hits from China and about 390 millions hits from Spain. Weight of market share data from both countries is same.
          NetApplications receive any data from China and Spain. They know that China is bigger region then Spain and use weight to market share data. China have about 480 million internet users and Spain about 30 millions. 

          • Mikah

            “StatCounter receive about 400 millions hits from China and about 390 millions hits from Spain. Weight of market share data from both countries is same.”
             are these figures from StatCounter or made up for an example. ? 

            Net applications country level weighting use CIA data from 2009, basing weighting on old data seems a bit like guessing.

            Visiting the Wiki usage share of browsers Net Applications IE global stats are approx 10% to 20% higher than other sources on the page  apart from StatOwl  80% of the the site’s they monitor are in the USA  . I wonder what proportion of Net Apps 40,000 sites are from the USA ?
             

             

          • Dante

             ”are these figures from StatCounter or made up for an example. ?”
            Number of hits are from StatCounter FAQ: http://gs.statcounter.com/StatCounterGlobalStatsMay10_SampleSizeCountryBreakdown.csv

            StatCounter methodology: We do not manipulate the data in any way. We do not collate it with any other information sources. No artificial weightings are used. We simply publish the data as we record it.

            That is same as methodology from w3schools witch consist of they pageviews: These facts indicate that the browser figures above are not 100% realistic. Other web sites have statistics showing that Internet Explorer is a more popular browser.  

            I found article where someone try use Europe data from StatCounter and put together it with weight from InternetWorldStats. And the result? Different market share data as they publish.

          • Mikah

            To use China as an example it has more than 50% Internet users compared to the United States yet StatCounter hits are 10 to 1 in favour of USA.
            Because of language difficulties & government blocking of foreign sites  most of China’s Internet traffic is probably internal.
            http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-14138267
            A Chinese Internet user probably has a much smaller Global Internet presence than a US user.

            Net Applications use the CIA Internet Traffic by Country table to weight their data do the CIA monitor Internal Chinese traffic accurately or are  they more concerned with traffic flowing between China & the rest of the world.

            probability is both StatCounter & Net Applications are not accurate

          • 1234– FF UX IS THE BEST!!

            you both are wrong.. Net counter is the best :P

      • Anonymous

        So they are exactly the same as NetMarketShare then?

  • Vibin

    This is just because Google penalized Chrome’s page.

  • adumpaul

    Google chrome  and Firefox both are popular web browser.

  • Martin Suchan

    Maybe the IE share increase is related to the launch of Nokia Lumia phones – IE9 mobile counted into this score?

  • Armin

    It’s a pity to see Opera have such low market share and Firefox losing market share as well now.

    • 1234– FF UX IS THE BEST!!

      I think users now go more at the look and feel of the browsers.. you now how there is a loading ball moving in chrome? you don’t see tht when firefox is loading a page.. and tht causes poeple to think tht the browser with the loading ball will view the page quicklier..

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