While Microsoft’s web browser, Internet Explorer, is still by far the dominant one, holding 62.12pc of the market, its share has dropped by a little more than 6pc since March 2009 while Google’s Chrome has steadily risen from 1.62pc to take 5.22pc of web surfers.
Meanwhile, Mozilla’s open-source web browser, Firefox, has more or less remained stable, according to NetMarketShare, rising to take almost a quarter of the browser market as version 3.5.7 was released last month.
Google recently released a stable version of Chrome for the PC, which added extra functionality, including extensions and bookmark sync.
Although Internet Explorer has lost market share in the last year, it was recently concerned with the latest iteration, IE8, which despite being released in March of last year, has 22pc of the market in comparison to the six-year-old IE6 that is still clinging on to 20pc of the entire browser market as many people chose not to upgrade.
IE6 has had some bad press recently after both the French and German governments urged citizens to stop using it and upgrade due to concerns over security issues.
This version of Internet Explorer was the one through which Chinese hackers attacked Google and broke into its corporate network.
By Marie Boran
