It's over! Firefox has passed Internet Explorer . . . at least when it comes to Laptopmag.com users. Checking out our stats today, Firefox has overtaken IE as 38.5 percent of our online audience (past 30 days) visited with the open-source browser while 38.16 percent were using Microsoft's alternative. Google Chrome took third place with 11.65 percent while Apple Safari managed a decent 7.64-percent share. Other browsers, including Opera, made up the tiny balance.
While the difference between IE and Firefox is only .34 percent, it's quite telling that nearly 62-percent of our visitors choose to use something other than IE. That's pretty startling, when you consider Internet Explorer has historically controlled the lion's share of the browser market and, even this week, NetMarketShare.com released a survey showing that, for all Web sites, IE continues to maintain a 62.12-percent share, exactly the opposite of what our users are doing.
Internet Explorer has home field advantage, because it comes pre-installed in all versions of Windows. However, it seems that more and more users are seeing how slow Microsoft's browser is and upgrading to something better. We were shocked last week when we compared IE 8 to Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari and found that it took a whopping 18 seconds to open where others took less than 4 seconds!
In our tests, it became clear that Chrome is the speed king. Internet users must have gotten the message too as 5-percent of them now use Google's browser. PCMag's Lance Ulanoff has looked at the market share numbers and now argues that Chrome is positioned to take the lead.
It seems laptopmag.com users are way ahead of the rest of the Internet in terms of their desire to install new browsers that promise improved performance. Though we don't have access to other tech sites' stats, we'd guess that their numbers look a lot like ours.
Are tech site readers leading the way toward a future that is dominated by Firefox, Chrome, and Safari or is IE going to remain the king? Let us know what you think by posting in the comments below.
