Internet Explorer enjoys usage upsurge, Chrome and Firefox remain blips on IE’s radar

Beyond personal preference and taste, it should come as little surprise to all ye PC enthusiasts that Internet Explorer keeps towering above its traditional desktop browser adversaries. IE boosted its market share in November, while both Chrome and Firefox’s numbers slipped away.

According to the all-knowing Net Market Share data collection agency, Internet Explorer accounted for 58.94 percent of online visits made over the last 30 days on a global scale. That’s up from 58.49 in October, and 58.37 in September.

Related: Internet Explorer and Chrome following grows in October, Firefox falls again

We’re talking marginal increases, no doubt about that, but once you hit such a high and go over the 50 percent mark, any small gain is a great bonus. Especially when your two arch-rivals fail to mount a serious title challenge, and see their scores drop.

Google’s Chrome remains the silver medalist with a 20.57 percent share, down from 21.25 in October. This result is well below Chrome’s September share of 21.19, too.

Meanwhile, Mozilla has even bigger problems on its plate, as Firefox just reported its third consecutive loss. Back in August, the third most popular browser accounted for over 15 percent of web traffic. The figure tumbled to 14.18 in September, 13.91 in October and 13.26 in November.

If Firefox keeps that pace up it could collapse to single-digit share numbers in a matter of months. Which would of course be good news for Safari, Apple’s OS X-focused contender. Safari actually performed best among all web browsers in November, including Internet Explorer, surging a staggering 0.8 percent, from 5.1 to 5.9.

Related: Wondering what the best web browser around is? This comparison should help

To our knowledge, Safari didn’t receive any updates or stability fixes of late to explain the sudden hike in popularity. But maybe that new OS X Yosemite build solved the highly publicized Wi-Fi glitches after all, convincing Windows fans to leave their favorite ship and board Apple’s bandwagon.

Bizarrely enough, both Chrome and Firefox have recently received updates that look pretty major at a first glance, whereas Internet Explorer hasn’t. Then again, Windows PC sales tend to grow around the holidays, and IE comes pre-installed on them all, so perhaps that justifies the splendid form of Microsoft’s proprietary browser.

While these figures look good to IE, it’s worth noting that StatCounter, another reputable source of usage share, does not agree. It currently shows Chrome in the lead with a hair over 50% of the market; IE is behind with only 21.65%. Why the gap? StatCounter shows raw, unweighted data while Net Market Share weights its data based on country of origin to eliminate possible over-representation of a specific region in its statistics. Net Market Share also counts only daily unique page views while StatCounter collects all page views.

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Firefox 4 hits the streets

Mozilla has released Firefox 4, revving up performance, improving security, and offering users a broad range of personalization and customization options.
Competition in the Web browser market is heating up, and fresh on the heels of Microsoft releasing Internet Explorer 9, Mozilla has set Firefox 4 loose upon the world. Long the number-two browser behind Internet Explorer, Firefox 4 offers to give users a new look at the Web with improved performance and new technology, enhanced security features, and a wealth of customization and personalization options that enable users to make the browser truly their own. However, the stakes have perhaps never been higher for Mozilla, which faces stiff competition from the likes of Google Chrome, as well as Microsoft’s brand-new IE9.

Like Chrome and IE9 before it, Firefox 4 looks to streamline the browser interface, eliminating clutter, moving tabs to the top of the window, and shifting the application’s emphasis to discoverable features rather than in-your-face annoyances. However, that doesn’t mean Firefox 4 is more difficult to use—in addition to performance enhancements (like support for hardware graphics acceleration, the new JägerMonkey JavaScript engine, and other serious performance boosts) Firefox 4 features a new “Awesome Bar” that enables users to type terms and words into the address bar to match bookmarked sites, browsing history, open tabs, and bookmarks, making it easy to get back to things. The Awesome Bar also adapts to users’ habits, adjusting its offerings based on what users select.

Many Web users keep some sites open all the time—like email, social networking, and other services—and in Firefox 4 those sites can be set up as “App Tabs”—permanent icon tabs on users’ tab bars. Firefox 4 also offers a tab “Panorama” view that enables users to visually organize their tabs into logical groups. Firefox 4 also sports a new sync feature that enables users to manage their browsing histories, bookmarks, and open tabs across mobile and desktop versions of Firefox. Firefox 4 retains access to the vast array of skins and add-ons that have been developed for the browser, so users can enhance and customize their browsing experience.

Under the hood, Firefox 4 includes support for a number of new technologies, including WebGL 3D graphics, support for open font formats like TrueType, OpenType, and WOFF, substantially improved support for CSS3, support for high-definition video and Google’s WebM video format, a new graphics engine that support things like inline SVG graphics—plus Firefox 4 makes audio data accessible to JavaScript, supports Windows 7 multitouch, and an experimental Web console that lets the curious see how the Web operates under the hood.
Firefox 4 also takes steps to improve users’ security online: a new “Instant Web Site ID” feature offers one-click access to a site’s identity information, including details like how many times a user has visited it. (Hint: if a site claims to be PayPal and you’ve never been there before, it’s not PayPal.) Firefox 4 also offers a Private Browsing mode, a new “Forget This Site” feature that wil remove any trace of having visited, and a new “Do Not Track” feature that tries to tell sites that you don’t want to be included in any behavioral tracking they do—of course, sites have to play along with that and actually honor the request from Firefox.
Firefox 4 is a free download for Mac OS X (Intel-based Macs running Mac OS X 10.5 or later only), Windows 2000+, and Linux. And if you’re curious about how the Firefox 4 rollout is going, check out glow.mozilla.org.

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