The above graph shows market share by browser type from 2006 to 2009 for my cocktail making site. I reviewed the traffic to both cocktail making and paper airplanes which have very different traffic types and global compositions but together make 300k visits a month now and millions of page views so have a relatively large sample. As such both sites have a non tech audience which I think makes them good subjects for reviewing this data and it is very similar across both sites.
Bottom lines:
Chrome (% below is surging)
Safari is still growing strong (most likely driven by mac market share which I will share data for another time):
Firefox growth seems to have slowed significantly (at least in terms of market share they are capturing):
and internet explorer is in continual market share decline:
All of this is purely data from my websites but it is a pretty large sample set and I think what is very interesting is that after a long time of being on the sidelines Google and Apple are leveraging their dominant market share in their particular markets to be really competitive in the browser market. I am personally not convinced this is market share leakage driven by competitive products rather than by different companies leveraging their different dominant market positions (in different markets) to succeed in this one and again I am not convinced there is true innovation happening in the browser business… it feels to me like getting your browser installed is just a ploy to get more searches on your service (not that there is anything wrong with that).
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