Safari Tops 8 Percent Market Share in January, IE Drops Again

February 2nd, 2009 at 11:34 AM - News by Jeff Gamet

Apple's Safari Web browser pushed up over 8 percent market share in January to hit 8.29 percent, topping December's 7.93 percent. In comparison, Microsoft's Internet Explorer continued its multi-month decline to dip down to 67.55 percent of the Web browser market, according to data from Market Share.

Firefox also maintained its upward trend moving from 21.34 percent to 21.53 percent, chipping away at even more of Internet Explorer's market share. Google's Windows-only Chrome Web browser pulled up the tail end of browsers with any significant market share at 1.12 percent, up slightly from December's 1.04 percent.

With over a year of steady increases for Safari and Firefox, and a continuing downward trend for Internet Explorer, it looks like users are jumping from Microsoft's offering for alternatives even though the browser is pre-installed on Windows PCs.

While the statistics are handy for getting snapshot overviews of a particular Web browser's popularity, looking at the numbers over time offers a better impression of overall popularity. In this case, the numbers seem to indicate a growing interest in Safari, Firefox and Chrome at the expense of Internet Explorer.