Net Applications, the company that released these figures, says it tracks about 160 million unique visits per month to a worldwide network of more than 40,000 sites.
Their data also shows Firefox and Safari seeing market share losses in January. The browser experiencing gains in January was Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. IE gained 1.09% in the first month of the calendar year, its biggest monthly gain in at least two years.

While each browser has its benefits and drawbacks, all are required to adhere to standards set by the W3C (or World Wide Web Consortium). As these standards are updated, web browsers are required to update their system. Not only does this provide a quality-standard for web browsers, it creates for the user a better Internet experience. Some of the latest features in web development include CSS3, HTML5, SVG, faster loading and more fluid layouts. When you take the time to update your chosen browser, you avail yourself to these features at faster speeds. If you hesitate or postpone these updates, you deny yourself a greater user experience.

If not for any other reason, you should update your browser to maintain the highest Internet security possible. In fact, most of the WC3’s new regulations are established because of security issues. Using an older version of a browser may allow unfriendly websites to read and damage your files, steal your passwords, infect your devices with viruses, etc.

Now that you know how important web browser updates can be, take the time to upgrade yours each time you are notified. You’ll not only have a more pleasurable Internet experience, you’ll benefit from more secure exploring.

Chrome has already surpassed Firefox in the UK, and its energy appears to be increasing on a global scale. Since January, Google Chrome has gained eight percentage points in worldwide market shares, a growth of 50 percent in total shares. Analysts expect Chrome to continue growing at this quick pace.
Chrome’s September global share reported in last Wednesday at 23.6% with Firefox close by at 26.8%. Internet Explorer checked in at 41.7%. Google Chrome will need to continue its current rate of growth to overtake Firefox by the end of December.
Net Applications, a US web metrics company, predicts a longer period of time for Chrome to reach the No.2 spot. They state that if the pace of Chrome’s growth continues, it will surpass Firefox by the middle of 2012.

According to the post at The Chromium Blog, posted by Google Product Manager Mike Jazayeri, “Specifically, we are supporting the WebM (VP8) and Theora video codecs, and will consider adding support for other high-quality open codecs in the future. Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.”

He also added the changes would not be immediate, but would take place over the next few months. WebM project team is currently preparing WebM plug-ins for Safari and Internet Explorer 9, neither of which include it themselves. Basically, WebM is an open, royalty-free, media file format designed for the web. H.264 is a next-generation video compression format. It is not open, or royalty free.

Those in support of Google’s decision point to the fact that H.264 licenses cost money, and that large companies like Google are helping out the little guy by choosing this open alternative. Those against Google’s decision contend that it will set the adoption of HTML5 video back even further. Also, for online video publishers, it could create even more confusion and possibly a massive increase in video publishing costs.

StatCounter Global Stats shows that the family of Internet Explorer browsers has below 50% of the market, down from about 60% a year ago. This is a worldwide statistics. IE is still above 50% in North America, however it has dropped to 40% in Europe. In Asia Internet Explorer is doing peaty good and it dominants with nearly 60% of the market.

Coming back to worldwide stats, Firefox still has a strong position number two, number three is Chrome.

If we compare use of browsers only in North America, we can see an interesting battle for the third place between Chrome and Safari.

Read more at chrome.blogspot.com.

According to the newest data browser version market share looks as follow:
Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.0 – 26.87%
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 – 16.97%
Firefox 3.6 – 16.15%
Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 – 11.43%
Chrome 5.0 – 6.48%

Internet Explorer, Microsoft’s browser is used by more than 6 out of 10 people. Statistics shows that IE8 is used by more than one in four users on the Web. Unfortunately for Website developers and Web designers, IE6’s share is greater than IE7’s. Indeed Internet Explorer 6 gained 0.01 percentage points this month. The reason of it is that business still us using IE6 for customized intranet applications, also we can see that Windows XP (which has integrated Internet Explorer 6) is still more popular than Vista.

Sources: marketshare.hitslink.com

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is still the most popular browser and has 52% of the market. Firefox is a number two with 28.5%.

Results are a surprise, it is enough to image that every single apple computer comes with Safari. Apple’s indeed has now 10% of the computer market share. On the other hand Google’s Chrome is not bundled with any computer as a default browser. Google’s Chrome is also the newest browser in the market, Chrome was introduced 2 years ago.

Browsers market share by Statcounter:
1. Internet Explorer – 52%
2. Firefox – 28.5%.
3. Chrome – 8.97%
4. Safari – 8.88%

HTML5 allows building new features for Gmail. For example one feature that the Gmail design team already created is the ability to drag files from the desktop into the browser. However, this feature works only with very few browsers, one of them is Chrome.

HTML5 is currently under development as the next major revision of the HTML standard. Like its immediate predecessors, HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.1, HTML5 is a standard for structuring and presenting content on the World Wide Web. The new standard incorporates features like video playback and drag-and-drop that have been previously dependent on third-party browser plug-ins such as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Google Gears. Source: Wikipedia