January 2010 Browser Stats

Mashable has posted information about browser usage (Browser Usage Stats: Chrome Grows While IE and Firefox Shrink) stats from Net Applications. In short, Chrome continues its climb at the expense of Explorer and Firefox. The original data comes from January of 2010 and shows that Chrome has gained 0.57% to get to 5.20% of browser share. Firefox dropped (-0.20% to 24.41%) as did Internet Explorer (-0.51% to 62.18%). Opera and Safari hardly moved.

It’s no surprise Chrome has climbed. It’s a good browser for those who are technically inclined and don’t need all the bloated features of the other browsers. It’s speed (especially with JavaScript) and memory management have made it my default browser on my Ubuntu netbook, even though it still has issues rendering Facebook’s message inbox and photo gallery management tools. Even though Firefox 3.6 was just released, the average user won’t see a huge benefit from switching browsers and probably won’t bother as a result (although I do like the new type support).

Internet Explorer is the troubling one in the mix. IE8 is now up to 22.31% of the market, but IE6 still beats out IE7 (20.07% and 14.58%, respectively). That equates to 1 in 5 users is still surfing on IE6, known for its security holes and buggy rendering.

Many people (web sites, developers, forums, etc.) have been calling for the demise of IE6 in some way for quite a while now. Google has just joined the list (Modern browsers for modern applications, from the Google blog), announcing that they will phase our support for IE6 in Google Docs and Google Sites as of March 1. You can see other sites (far smaller, for the most part) who are trying to push IE6 out to pasture, just visit ie6nomore.com. Whether or not this will speed the end of IE6’s reign is to be seen. Catch up on some anti-IE6 articles at Mashable using their IE6 Must Die tag.

I am curious, though — am I the only one who still uses Lynx?