IE Loses Market Share While Bing Stays Strong

Since last week, the latest release of Mozilla Firefox (version 3.5), has now been downloaded over 13.7 million times. And according to Statcounter, Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE 6, IE 7, IE 8) has lost 11.4 percent market share to other browsers since May.

At the current moment, IE (IE6+IE7+IE8) all together holds only 54.4% of the web browser market which is a 11.4% drop since March, 2009. The majority of that lost market share was captured by Firefox 3.0, which currently has 27.6% market share.

Conventional wisdom would dictate that the 11.4% lost browser market share would cause a dramatic decrease in Bing usage, since Firefox, Safari, and Chrome all have Google set as the default search provider. However in reality, Bing has actually increased market penetration in both the U.S. and around the world.

(Source: http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-US-weekly-200917-200928 )

In summary, in the U.S. Microsoft search market share has jumped from 7.41% in May to 8.45% at the end of June. On a global scale, Microsoft search market share has rose from 3.08% in April to 3.30% in June. While Google, still dominates the global market with 89.80% market share in search.

However, this should be taken as very positive news for Bing because while Internet Explorer has lost 11.4% market share Bing has actually increased its total global reach.