IE market share reaches record low

According to recently published data from StatCounter, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is showing signs of losing the browser battle in Australia. IE’s Australian share of the browser market has fallen for the first time below the 50% mark, an unprecedented event.

In the space of a year, IE's market share in Australia plummeted from 54.31% to 49.78%. Advances made by Firefox in the last few years combined with heavy adoption of Google’s Chrome and Safari in more recent months has led to this decline. StatCounter’s data suggests that Chrome’s market share has more than doubled from 4.8% to 10.58% in the last year alone, with Safari’s growth slightly more mundane growing to 9.41% from 6.87% in the same time period.

In a bid to overturn this decline, Microsoft released the beta version of IE9 to the public last month. According to Microsoft, it is a totally revamped browser and addresses many of the common issues users faced when using previous versions of the browser. IE9 is touted as a reinvention of the browser and promises to improve its compliance with HTML 5 and other modern standards. Another IE9 highlight is its improved performance. It achieves this by utilising hardware acceleration to improve the rendering speed of graphics, videos, GUI, and JavaScript execution by accessing the GPU through Windows.

The battle of the browsers is heating up, which in our eyes is terrific news as it promotes innovative thinking and further product development. Firefox and Chrome are currently also testing their hardware acceleration solution. We’ll be keeping a close eye on this front and will keep you updated as more news becomes available.

In the meantime, please share your thoughts and experiences with IE9. Do you think Microsoft has hit a home run with a product that delivers what it promises and get back in the game, or is it all just a marketing exercise to slow down the death of IE? Which browser do you prefer and why?