Internet Explorer Still Clinging to Half of Browser Market Share

Another month is in the books, and as usual, Internet Explorer remains the most used browser on the planet with a 54.02 percent share of the market, according to NetMarketShare. That's down only slightly from one month prior, when IE's share totaled 54.05 percent.

After sliding consistently for the past couple of years, when IE's share was above 60 percent, Microsoft's browser seems destined to cling to more than half of the market. The lowest it's been in in the past year is 51.87 percent, and that was back in December 2011. Once 2012 rolled around, IE began to climb at a slow but steady pace to a high of 54.09 percent in April of this year.


Google's Chrome browser, meanwhile, declined for only the second time ever, dropping from 19.58 percent in May 2012 to 19.08 percent at the end of June. That leaves Mozilla's Firefox browser still holding onto second place, with a 20.06 percent share, up from 19.71 percent one month prior. Safari and Opera own 4.73 percent and 1.6 percent shares, respectively.

The numbers over at StatCounter tell a completely different story. According to StatCounter, Chrome managed to overtake IE globally for the first time in a calendar month, ending June with a 32.76 percent share of the marked, compared to IE at 31.31 percent. Why the discrepancy? It has to do with how each firm collects data.

StatCounter bases its figures on a sample size of more than 3 million websites representing over 15 billion pageviews. NetMarketShare's methodology consists of collecting data from its on-demand network of HitsLink Analytics and SharePost clients, tallying 160 million unique visits per month.

Which browser do you use most often these days?