IE keeps firm grip on half of the browser market
How the other half browses on the desktop: Firefox and Chrome mostly, with no one mounting any kind of surge against Internet Explorer, according to the latest data from Net Applications.
Microsoft's Internet Explorer still grabs more than half of all traffic among browsers, at least as viewed by Web tracker Net Applications.
Leading the desktop browser market for September, IE took home a share of 53.6 percent. That left Firefox in second place with 20 percent and Chrome in third with almost 19 percent.
Trailing the top five were Apple's Safari with 5.2 percent and Opera with just 1.6 percent.
IE's lead has dipped over the past few years. A high of 79 percent in November 2007 fell to a low of 51.8 percent last December before recovering a bit the past year. Firefox captured a high of 25 percent in November 2009 before slipping to 19.7 percent this past May.
In the meantime, Chrome continues to slowly but surely inch its way higher. Since its debut four years ago, Google's browser has seen a steady rise up the charts, hitting a high of 19.5 percent in May. Chrome could have handily outpaced Firefox by now had it not experienced a decline over the past few months.
Drilling down to specific versions, Internet Explorer 8 was the leader, grabbing 24 percent of all browser traffic seen by Net Applications. IE 9 was second with 19.4 percent. That left Chrome version 21 with 14 percent and Firefox 15 with almost 11 percent.
Among mobile phone and tablet browsers, Apple's mobile Safari was on top with a 64 percent share, a healthy gain from 55 percent a year ago.
Android's built-in browser was second with almost 21 percent, up from 16 percent in September 2011.
Opera Mini, the BlackBerry OS browser, and the Symbian OS browser all saw their share of traffic continue to plummet as more users adopt iOS and Android devices.
Net Applications records the number of unique visits to its network of more than 40,000 Web sites and includes only one unique visit per site per day. The company typically tracks around 160 million unique visits per month.