IE Market Share slipped in 2009

From The Microsoft Blog:

In one short year, Google’s Chrome Web browser tripled its market share. In December, it overtook Apple Safari as the third-place browser as the reigning leader, Microsoft Internet Explorer, continued slipping during 2009.

According to Net Applications, Chrome ended 2009 with a claim on 4.63 percent of the market, after starting out at just 1.52 percent. During the same period, Safari and Mozilla Firefox also each gained market share, chipping away at IE’s still-dominant hold on the browser market.

In January 2009, Internet Explorer had a 69.72 percent share. By the end of December, its market share dropped to 62.69 percent, according to Net Applications. That’s a seven-point drop in just one year.

The only time I use IE (7) is because I have to for work to run our main CRM application. For everything else I do at work it is Firefox. We even encourage our customers (especially those who are using our website builder application) to use Firefox. Even our web based email works better in Firefox (and Firefox is more user friendly with its security settings, that is not burred in a long list of settings like IE).

At home it is a split between Firefox and Chrome. I use Chrome for Flash based browser games such as those on Facebook as I find it is more stable than Firefox. With Chrome even if the Flash Plug-in crashes it is contained to that tab and doesn’t crash the entire browser. That is something Firefox needs to (and should be later this year) improve uopn.

There was one comment in this article that I can really relate and was along the lines on who Microsoft is trying to force or sneak the update to IE8 as an (Important) Windows Vista update. They even make is sound like going to IE8 is a good thing: