August, 2011: Google Chrome, Safari Share Up; Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera – Down
It’s Friday, Friday…
Another month passes by as we look at the August market share stats to find out, how web browsers competed at the end of summer.
Internet Explorer is approaching the 50% market share mark, as it’s now down another 1.13 point, from 52.72% to 51.59%.
Firefox is the new IE and it continues to show, this time its market share has decreased by 0.4 point, down from 21.47% to 21.03%.
Another month and another gain for Google Chrome, in August Google’s web browser market share grew by another 0.97 point, from 13.49% to 14.46%.
Combining both desktop and mobile versions of Safari, its market share continues to climb as well, up from 7.37% to 7.71% (0.34 point increase).
Despite reporting growth in the latest financial report, all major trackers show Opera’s market share contraction, this time it went down from 1.62% to 1.58% (0.04 point decrease).
That’s all for now, folks.
Thanks to Net Applications for the graph.
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.
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really starting to suspect that opera users are actually stable, just not growing enough in respect to the total amount of web capable devices…
According to: http://www.opera.com/company/investors/finance/
Q1 desktop had 54mill users, Q2 they hit 55mill users. So yeah, while their market share has fallen, actual user levels are stable/creeping up slightly
Opera is one of the most common mobile browsers, thanks to Opera Mini.
i was referring to smartphones actually, where it’s not growing so much, see also the “other” category
Sucks to hear that about Firefox and Opera.
Three points.
1/ Rarely are the best products the best selling products. I’m enjoying my Audi R8 (Opera), I hope the Dasun Cherry (Firefox) and Austin Princess (IE) users enjoy their browsers/cars.
2/ The entire internet userbase is expanding, that is why Opera’s userbase can increase and yet their marketshare % can decrease.
3/ These numbers are US-centric and don’t really do Opera any justice on the global picture. If you pay and select the global picture, I would imagine it’s a rather different story.
1. You are partially correct, however your analogy fails because Opera is far from being the best at what it is supposed to do. Frankly, for the average user Opera is garbage and the only browser that I would consider it being better than is Safari. And I would know, because Opera is my main and practically only browser and has been so for around 4 to 5 years now (I sometimes have to use IE9 when Opera fuck ups). The reasons for that are the very customizable UI and panel bookmarks (I have over 200 bookmarks, half of which I visit regularly). I would switch to Chromium/Chrome or even Firefox in a second if they implemented a similar way of navigating through my bookmarks.
2. That is correct, however most website developers look at the market share of the browsers and then try to make their websites compatible to the ones that have the largest market share. I’m not saying that it is the correct way of doing things I’m just saying that it’s the way things are done.
3. Then you would imagine it wrong,Mr.Clown Face – because the numbers you see here are actually global, and not US-centric.
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-monthly-201108-201108-bar
http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php?year=2011&month=8
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
http://www.getclicky.com/marketshare/global/web-browsers/#/marketshare/global/web-browsers/opera/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Wikimedia_.28April_2009_to_present.29
For panel bookmarks in FireFox check out Speed Dial for FireFox from FireFox addons. http://speeddial.uworks.net/
Your car analogy doesn’t compute. Cost isn’t a factor in browser choice – Most anyone can choose whichever one appeals to them the most. That choice has more to do with personal preference and what they are used for than benchmark comparisons or what one can afford. I love that they are different, free, and that I can choose whichever one I want according to my purpose or whim.
which are the home nation of each browser?
For the main browsers it is simple to answer:
Opera – Norway
all the others: USA