It's not often that Microsoft celebrates the fact that its browser is losing market-share, but this week the company is proudly announcing that Internet Explorer 6 is finally heading towards extinction. The nine-year-old browser has dropped below five per cent market-share in many countries, though it continues to thrive in some parts of the world.
While market share is below five percent in Europe and just a little higher in North America, global usage still rests at around 17 per cent. However, this was almost a per cent lower than the previous month. This decrease - and more - was picked up by IE8, which grew 1.17 per cent to a total of 32.04 per cent worldwide in August.
Unfortunately, that remaining five percent of users on IE6 in mature markets is likely to represent businesses and institutional users who will be slow to move on from the dated software.
In the wider market, things remained largely unchanged, with no single browser moving more than a few tenths of a per cent. While all versions of Internet Explorer combined saw a slight decrease in popularity, they managed to stay above the 60 per cent mark that the browser has been hovering around for the last six months. Chrome saw a slight increase in usage, but only by about a third of a per cent.
Microsoft will continue to encourage users to leave IE6 behind, though it clearly has a significant challenge ahead of it as emerging markets become more web-connected. In the mean time, it will hope that the forthcoming release of Internet Explorer 9 will convince more people to wave goodbye to the maligned browser.
