the sephone blog

Back in June of last year we published a report of browser market share for some of our most visible sites. As we explained then, these statistics are really helpful for web developers in order to find what people are using to view sites and, in turn, what technologies developers can use to create those sites.

It’s been six months, and we wanted to go back and look how the usage stats in December compared to those in June. As we did in our first report, we looked through our Google Analytics reports for six of the most-visited sites we developed and maintain in real estate, tourism, news, education, and other markets.

Here’s a look at the trends of browsers over the last six months:

And a look at market share by reporting period:

The past six months have seen an overall loss of market share for Internet Explorer 6 and 7 and a gain across the board for Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. In addition, Internet Explorer 8 usage more than doubled over the last six months on all of the six sites we surveyed. Safari’s spike in market share may be due to the popularity of iPhones, which run a mobile version of the browser. Google released a version of Chrome for Mac and Linux systems which may have contributed to its increase in usage in December. And web developers everywhere can rejoice: in our survey, the Internet Explorer 6 market share we found ranged from 7.0 – 10.3% as compared to 15.3 – 17.1% in June.

We’ve published an introduction to the major web browsers in the past as well as a post about our views on Internet Explorer 6 support. Please consider reading those posts for more information.

Read on to see the full report data with percentages and methods.

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