Chrome passes 25% market share, IE and Firefox slip

In April 2015, we saw the naming of Microsoft Edge, the release of Chrome 42, and the first full month of Firefox 37 availability. Now we’re learning that Google’s browser has finally passed the 25 percent market share mark.

Between March and April, here is how the browser market changed, according to the latest figures from Net Applications:

• Internet Explorer: down 0.71 points to 55.83 percent
• Chrome: up 0.69 points to 25.68 percent
• Firefox: down 0.19 points to 11.70 percent
• Safari: up 0.12 points to 5.12
• Opera: up 0.05 points to 0.48 percent

Breaking the IE figure down further shows good news for Microsoft’s browser: The latest version, IE11, grew 0.82 percentage points back over the 25 percent mark. IE10 and IE9 both slipped a bit (0.17 and 0.21 percentage points respectively), while IE8 fell a solid 1.26 percentage points.

In October, IE11 managed to pass IE8 to become the world’s most popular browser, and the gap continues to widen. This new trend became possible when Windows XP, whose users can’t upgrade past IE8, started to lose significant share. As a result, IE11 can grow unchallenged, until, of course, Edge arrives.

Among the really old versions, IE7 gained just 0.03 points to 0.37 percent and IE6 fell 0.06 points to 0.92 percent.

Google’s Chrome gained 0.69 percentage points this past month, and for the first time has passed the 25 percent mark. In other words, one in four Web users now use Chrome.

Chrome 42 captured 7.69 percent, Chrome 41 slipped 1.80 percent, and Chrome 40 fell 5.56 points. Older versions will continue to plummet as the latest version takes over, as is typical with Google’s numbers.

As we’ve noted before, Mozilla’s Firefox has been hitting new lows for months. The browser hit a new low of 11.6 percent in February, and it’s back down very close to that figure once again.

Thankfully, Firefox’s built-in upgrade system continues to work well. Firefox 37 grabbed 6.12 points to hit 6.45 percent, while Firefox 36 dropped 5.24 percentage points and Firefox 35 fell 1.21 percentage points.

Net Applications uses data captured from 160 million unique visitors each month by monitoring some 40,000 websites for its clients. This means it measures user market share.

If you prefer usage market share, you’ll want to get your data from StatCounter, which looks at 15 billion page views. The operating system figures for April are available here.