Internet Explorer seemed to be written off in the war between Firefox and Chrome. However, today it appears that the browser is making a comeback.




Statistics, provided by Net Market Share, revealed that for the second time in 3 months, Internet Explorer made large gains, picking up around 1% of market share. Consequently, Google’s Chrome, Firefox, and Safari lost ground with Internet Explorer 9 winning over new users.

According to the latest results, Internet Explorer gained almost 1% for a 54% market share, taking it to a 6 month high. As for Firefox, it suffered a drop in around 0.5% to 20.5%. Actually, this drop is the worst that the browser has been for the last 3 years. Google’s Chrome fell to 18.5%, and Apple’s Safari lost 0.2% to 5%. My favourite Opera, by the way, also lost 0.09% to 1.62%.

Meanwhile, these results fly in the face of previous announcements from Internet analysts who claimed that Google’s Chrome had overtaken Internet Explorer for the first time ever in March 2012. Today’s statistics measures raw pageviews, without taking into account corrections for pre-rendering, or counting unique visitors to a page.

It reveals that Internet Explorer 9 has gained 2.6% of share in the last month, while its 8 version fell by almost the same amount, dropping by 2.2%. Edition 7 dropped a fraction, down 0.1%, and the much maligned Explorer 6, which even its developer wants dead, picked up over 0.5%. This means that users of IE 8 are switching to IE 9 with 34.5% of Windows 7 users choosing the new browser.

Bill Gates’ software giant has been promoting IE 9, suggesting that users should give it a second chance. The company has been moving users of IE 7 and 8 onto the latest version through automatic updates.

As for Google’s Chrome, it appears to be doing well, while Firefox continues to have a large number of users on edition 3.6 and below, who aren’t upgrading.

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