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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Reddit to remain in Conde Nast stranglehold

Don't believe reports that Reddit.com is up for sale, says the site's operations manager, Jeremy Edberg.

A report from All Things Digital‘s Peter Kafka claiming that Condé Nast plans to sell a portion of its social news site Reddit.com is false, says Reddit operations manager and senior product developer Jeremy Edberg.
Citing unnamed sources, Kafka said that publisher Condé Nast planned to spin-out  Reddit, opening it up to outside investment, while hanging on to a significant chunk. The alleged sale would put Reddit at a $200 million valuation, sources said.
“Taking Reddit outside of Condé Nast’s corporate structure would make the site that much more valuable,” writes Kafka, “and would give it a better chance to compete for capital, managers and employees alongside the likes of zippy startups like Quora, StackExchange, etc.”
Steve Newhouse, who runs digital operations for Advance Publications, Condé Nast’s parent company, would only say, “We love our Reddit asset, and it’s a core for us, and it’s getting more valuable every day.”
According to Edberg, however, the Kafka report is entirely made up.
“This article is a complete fabrication,” Edberg (Reddit username “jedberg”) wrote in the comment section for one of the article’s submission on Reddit. “[Kafka] should be ashamed to call himself a journalist.”
Edberg further backed up his assertions, saying that he confirmed the story’s falsehood “with the Newhouse family,” which owns Advance Publications.
While Reddit users appeared to be relieved that the site would not be subjected to a sale, issues with the site still remain, including regularly overloaded servers and a gutted staff, despite being owned by a major corporation like Condé Nast. (Reddit currently has only one full-time engineer. One.)
The site has made attempts to improve its revenue flow with a self-service ad program and a Reddit Gold membership option. Additional investment could help Reddit better handle its growing pains.
Reddit has grown rapidly, surging to a billion (yes, with “b”) pageviews in a single month. It has become one of the 100 most popular sites on the Internet. And unless Condé Nast does something crazy, Reddit seems to be headed nowhere but up — especially without Digg to worry about anymore.
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