Once and Still a Techie Weblog

Internet Explorer 8 Most Used Browser

Less than a year since it’s launch in March 19, 2009, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 is now the world’s most-used web browser based on this post from the Windows Experience Blog:

This week, Net Applications released their January browser market share report. Their report shows that Internet Explorer 8 is not only the most popular browser on Windows with 27.9% usage share, but that it now has 25.6% of market share across all OS’s on a worldwide-weighted usage share basis (data provided by Net Applications). We launched just less than a year ago, so it’s both humbling and thrilling to see so many people choose our product so quickly – making it the most popular browser of choice worldwide.

There are many reasons people choose which browser to use. Most people want to know and trust the company behind their browser. And people are looking [for] a browser that protects them – and their privacy online. In an August 13th, 2009 post on the IEBlog, we announced Internet Explorer 8’s SmartScreen Filter had hit over 80 million malware blocks. But that was back in August. As of today, Internet Explorer 8 has done over 350 million malware blocks. You can see Internet Explorer 8’s SmartScreen Filter in action in this blog post. Internet Explorer 8’s SmartScreen Filter blocks malware over 2 million times a day.

Together, Internet Explorer 7 and 8 have blocked a total of over 125 million phishing sites.

One possible reason for the increase in IE8 usage is that more and more users are jumping the IE6 ship. Another likely reason is just a few months after launch, Windows 7 now has 10% of the operating system market share based on this Net Applications report. Windows 7 has Internet Explorer 8 as its default browser.