IE on a rebound, browser share data shows

Computerworld - Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) in April again gained usage share, the third time in the year's first four months, to stay well above the 50% mark and remain the world's top browser, a Web analytics company said today.

Google's Chrome's share also climbed in April, said Net Applications, ending that browser's three-month decline.

IE boosted its share by about three-tenths of a percentage point last month to average 54.1% in April. That returns IE to a mark comparable to its September 2011 share.

Since Jan.1, IE has increased its usage share by 2.2 percentage points for a 4% gain since the end of 2011. The turnaround has been IE's largest and longest since the browser began shedding share years ago to Firefox, then later, Chrome.

Microsoft has pinned its hopes almost entirely on IE9, the 2011 edition that runs only on Windows Vista and Windows 7.

On Tuesday, Microsoft again stayed on message, highlighting the gains made by IE9 on Windows 7 -- the pairing the firm has said is the only metric it cares about -- but ignoring the overall IE increases this year.

IE9 accounted for 35.5% of the world's browsers used on Windows 7 last month, an increase of one percentage point from March, said Microsoft, and owned a 52.9% share of the Windows 7 browser market in the U.S., a jump of four points. Both increases were significantly smaller than those claimed last month over February's numbers.

The browser's global share on all operating systems, however, is much lower, and for April stood at 15.9%, a bump of seven-tenths of a point.

Other versions of IE reported mixed results.

IE8, the last in the line for Windows XP users, gained eight-tenths of a point to scramble back to 26.2%, while IE7 unaccountably grew by two-tenths of a point to 7.1%.

IE6, the browser that Microsoft has been trying to put in the grave for years, lost three-tenths of a percentage point, closing April with 4.1%.

The shifts within IE's editions may have been partly due to Microsoft's new philosophy of automatically upgrading older versions. Late last year, the company said it would begin silently forcing Windows to upgrade IE to the newest-possible edition, ending its earlier practice of asking users' permission before making such a move.