Web trends show Firefox slipped in January

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 03 February 2010 12:12

Your IT - Home IT

The latest web statistics always make interesting reading, but the latest set do little more than confirm the trends. One exception is that Firefox took a small hit.

The NetMarketShare (formerly Net Applications' Market Share) report for January shows that Internet Explorer is still losing share while Chrome, Safari and Opera Mini all showed gains.

Internet Explorer slipped from 62.69% to 62.12%, continuing the trend of the last couple of years. Internet Explorer has make some small gains during that period, but they were almost always reversed in the following month.

The exception was in May and June 2009, when Microsoft's browser grew its share for two consecutive months. Internet Explorer 8 was pushed out to most users users via Automatic Update in late April 2009.

Safari continues to show small month-to-month gains, rising from 4.46% in December 2009 to 4.53% in January 2010.

But Chrome has cemented its place as the number three browser, increasing its share from 4.63% to 5.22% in January.

Firefox is the odd one out: please read on to find out what happened.