Image via CrunchBaseInternet Explorer falls behind Firefox in Europe for first time, says StatCounter | Technology | guardian.co.ukMicrosoft's browser - all versions - now trumped by open source product, with the losses apparently due to rise in use of Google Chrome. But is that because of the 'browser ballot' in Windows?
Firefox has narrowly overtaken Internet Explorer in Europe, according to StatCounter
Statcounter, a web statistics company, says that Firefox has now passed Internet Explorer, for the first time ever, to become the most-used browser in Europe.
The screengrab above (or see it on their web page) shows what happened, with Firefox trundling along at 38% or so, and Internet Explorer falling to about 37.5%.
On which the company remarked, "This is the first time that IE has been dethroned from the number one spot in a major territory," commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. "This appears to be happening because Google's Chrome is stealing share from Internet Explorer while Firefox is mainly maintaining its existing share."
Indeed, that's what the figures seem to show. Comparing the North American market (see pic) shows a broadly similar trend, but Internet Explorer is miles ahead there.
Internet Explorer share is holding up in North America, StatCounter says
Arguably, one reason why Firefox is so prevalent in Europe might be Germany, where it is streets ahead of anything in market share terms - at least according to StatCounter's numbers.
But another theory I've heard put forward is that IE's decline is due to the browser ballot, launched in March, in which the 200m or so Windows users in Europe were offered a sort of roulette where they could choose to install a different default browser from a randomly shuffled group of 12, with the top 5 (IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera) presented first in what turned out to be only a quasi-random order that slightly favoured Chrome, until it was fixed.
So was it the ballot wot won it? Looking at the graphs, it's hard to say that there's any evidence of a sudden upward lurch in Chrome's share, nor a sudden downward one for IE. Nor does Firefox show any dramatic difference, which you might expect if the ballot had really influenced people. True, StatCounter was reported as claiming late in March that the ballot was "already having an effect" (though there's no actual link to that study on its site). But looking at the numbers, it's not so evident; all that seems to be happening is a long-term trend as more and more individuals - and particularly businesses - adopt other browsers.
Even so, the advent of more competition in the browser market does have one good side effect: it increases the pressure for standards, and especially compliance (by browser writers) to standards like CSS2 and CSS3, and to emerging standards such as HTML5. Microsoft hasn't given up there - it's working on IE9 as you read this. But it's quite possible that the days when Internet Explorer was the only browser to code for are gone forever. In the future, the W3C's HTML standard might be what coders develop against.
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