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Since November 2004, when Mozilla came up with the open source browser called Firefox, Internet Explorer’s massive reputation started to shake. Nevertheless, IE still offered enough features to convince most of their users not to change to other web browsers. But since Google released Chrome, Internet Explorer started to drop in charts, even if the most used operating system in the world, Windows, comes with IE as default browser. The release of the improved IE 8, in March 2009, did nothing to help the continuously dropping shares. IE 8 is vastly improved over IE 7 and IE 6, but it seems not enough to surpass Firefox or Chrome.

In January 2009, IE 6, 7 and 8 were used by 44.8% of the users; Firefox was used by 45.5%, while just 3.9% ran Chrome. One year later, in January 2010, the charts look different. IE has 36.2%, Firefox has 46.3%, while 10.8% use Chrome. Even if IE still has a big advantage in front of Google’s browser, the statistics show that Internet Explorer drops like a rock, while Chrome rises like the sun, so it may not take a long time until Chrome will be the 2nd most used browser in the world.

Because it was released earlier than Chrome, and it was also there when IE had security problems, Firefox is leading and will, probably, lead for a long time from now on in this competitions of the most used browser. Even if it’s the slowest browser from those three (with IE being the fastest in statistics – which, by the way, I doubt; I think Chrome is the fastest), Firefox’s security features seem to prove that speed does not matter that much.

It might have not been the best time to talk about IE dropping last summer but now, when Microsoft released a stunning operating system, they should’ve released a better Internet Explorer too, because the 8th version is really not that good. And if Microsoft was not able to improve IE until now, it’s not a surprise that customers are quick to turn to alternative browsers, rather than stick with IE 8.