Internet Explorer market share now below 60 percent
It’s been a while since I talked about the market share of various browsers here. It seemed more important around six or seven years ago before Internet Explorer’s market share started to decrease from levels above 95%.
Back in those days, sites that were built exclusively for Internet Explorer and actively blocked visitors with newer browsers like Mozilla or Safari were pretty common. Nowadays they are rare, at least in my experience. I can’t remember the last time I visited a site that told me to go away because I wasn’t using IE.
Now that less than 60 percent of web users worldwide use Internet Explorer, as reported by Ars Technica in Chrome continues surge as IE drops below 60% market share, I doubt that building IE-only websites will become more popular again any time soon.
The stats for 456bereastreet.com are by no means indicative of browser share among your average web user, but it might be interesting to note that Internet Explorer dropped below 20% during April 2010. IE6 is down to less than 3%.
I’d better add that I don’t want to see any browser become as dominant when it comes to market share as IE did in the early 2000’s, no matter how standards compliant it is or how fantastic it is to use. We need a healthy and versatile web browser ecosystem to prevent developers from going back to developing for a single browser.