Browser Wars: IE down, all others up

StatsCounter data has released its Dec stats for worldwide browser usage, showing that all browsers gained market share, except for IE which lost nearly 2% market share.

IE ended the year with only 38.65% usage (down from 40.63%), while Chrome continued its growth with a solid second place 27.27% (from 25.23%), ahead of Firefox's 25.27% (from 25.23%). Even Safari managed to increase its market share to 6.08%, up from 5.92% the month before.

Hrmmm, wonder if new computers over Christmas time will have an effect on these trends in January!

On a personal level, what browser do you guys prefer? I've been such a fan of Firefox that I haven't really given Chrome a chance. Should I switch?

I've been a big FF fan, but was rather disappointed with the last couple of updates. Too many bugs and crashes. So I've tried Chrome on my laptop and as more and more addons are available for Chrome it becomes more useful for my daily work.

For the benefit of FF I have to say that it seems like they've fixes most issues with the last update. So I'm not sure if I'm going to change over to Chrome permanently, but I'll keep it as the standard browser on my laptop for more testing and comparison.

I had to go to FF 10 (beta) as version 9 had a problem with it crashing on macs. Even with the update v 9.0.1 it still crashed several times a day. The only reason I have not gone to Chrome is because I love my ff plugins.

Personally, in the last six months to a year I've transitioned from FF being my primary browser to Chrome. FF has felt to be more of a bloated memory hog than Chrome, at least me in my experience. (I can keep Chrome open 24/7 without system performance loss as opposed to FF with seemed like there was a memory leak.)

In terms of traffic, my gay porn blog got less than 50% of its traffic from IE (FF 17%, Chrome 13%). My personal/technical blog (kirkman-enterprises: had 51% from IE, 19% from FF and 19% from Chrome). A third site I run had only 38% using IE , 28% from FF and 16% from Chrome. So it seems somewhat distributed for my case.

I haven't done the analysis, but it may be interesting to see how mobile browser hits (iPhone/Andriod/Nokia) have increased in the last year.

--Christian