November, 2012 Desktop Market Share: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera – Up; Google Chrome – Down

By | December 3, 2012



It’s the last month of the year as we check the market share results for November. Were there any surprises? Let’s find out.

It looks like Internet Explorer wont slide below the 50% mark for quite some time as its market share continues to edge higher, up from 54.13% to 54.76% (0.63 point increase).

Mozilla’s Firefox in the meantime continues to consolidate around the 20% range, up from 19.99% to 20.44% (0.45 point increase).

Google Chrome, a web browser that just kept growing and growing is reversing the majority of its gains, down (again) from 18.55% to 17.24% (1.31 point decrease).

Safari on the other hand has reached the highest market share mark in its recent history, up from 5.21% to 5.33% (0.12 point increase).

Good news for the Opera fans too as their browser market share has increased by 0.03 point, up from 1.64% to 1.67%.

That’s all for now, 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 career 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.

Comments (7)

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  1. Tiago Sá says:

    Chrome dropping that much is a surprise, but the rest of the stats aren’t. Mozilla is doing a good job, and so is Microsoft in their marketing department. Google’d better start fixing the stupid “bugs” they’ve had since 0.1… or else people will keep leaving them for their competition.

  2. Aaron Toponce says:

    Gotta love NetApplications. They are the only site reporting browsers out in left field, and the only one reporting that IE has the majority market share.

  3. Chrome has turned into something what Firefox used to be – a big memory hog. Also it’s bloating up with every new release. No surprise why it’s losing market share. On the other hand Firefox has improved a lot since version 4, specially in the memory usage part. And I have to admit that Microsoft has done a pretty good job with it’s last two IE versions – IE9 & IE10.

  4. I used to use Chrome but switched to Firefox in September, because Chrome has had many crashes and memory usage.

    • Tiago Sá says:

      Whenever people leave Firefox for Chrome because “Firefox crashes and hungs and is too heavy”, I tell them “Chrome will be the same way for you after a while”.

      People just need to take care of their computers. Switching browsers is just a bandaid. Computers full of crap will get bloated and crashy browsers. End of story.

      • Guesty Guest says:

        Fully agree with you on the computer thing. People are either lazy or ignorant when it comes to basic maintenance/housekeeping.

        It takes no time at all. I’m not even that technical and I can do it.

        I have uninstalled all the software that I don’t use and don’t install random junk from the internet.

        I have Ccleaner and Defraggler from Piriform installed. I keep them both updated and run Ccleaner once a week and Defraggler once a month.

        I use Firefox beta as my default browser, and have it set so that it doesn’t remember the browsing or download history, and so that it clears the cache and “offline website data” whenever I close the browser.

        I find my laptop and browsing performance is brilliant. I also do the same on my on my girlfriend’s and Mum’s low spec Vista laptops and they run like a dream.

        I’ve tested Chrome alongside Firefox and both of them are really fast, I just prefer Firefox for a number of reasons.

        • Tiago Sá says:

          Browsing history really isn’t as much of a performance hit as some people seem to think. It does depend on your machine, but my history file is about 40MB and my Firefox runs very smoothly, even when accessing the awesome bar.