I doubt it. If I'm seeing 41% among humans that include a disproportionate number of users who have no choice...

The good news is that they're looking at the wrong numbers. Since MSIE is pretty much only available for Windows operating systems, that's where you need to look. (This is assuming for the sake of discussion that browser options are not a big factor for the ordinary human selecting a computer.) When you do this, the number leaps upward.

On my large client sites I'm seeing roughly 50% IE, 15% Firefox, 15% Chrome, 15% Safari, and the remaining using miscellaneous browsers like Opera.

75% strong on mine
FF 2nd place

IE had 13.19% market share last month up from 11.77% the month before; human visitors, not bots.

- John

These stats beg to differ
[w3schools.com...]

recently we had a highlighted thread where chrome was reported the new market leader according to statcounter.

there is something seriously wrong with these so called web analytics companies. of course there are extreme differences in countries and site demographics. so you should only trust your own stats. but then again, they could break down these numbers instead of generalization in the headlines, otherwise it makes absolutely no sense. and above all it seems that they also count bots, fake requests, caching, google web preview etc. one would expect from a web analytics firm that they can erase that traffic in their stats. obviously it isn't so.

what is the business purpose of these companies? are they related to one or the other browser maker and only doing pr sh*t for them?

[edited by: moTi at 7:59 pm (utc) on Oct 3, 2012]

The more technical a site is in nature such as the w3schools example above, or many other technical related sites, probably here on WW too -- the more the trend will be away from IE. Technical users are more aware of the issues with IE and tend to steer away from it. The only way of getting an accurate assessment is through sites that have general worldwide appeal across all fields of topics throughout the internet.

Technical users are more aware of the issues with IE and tend to steer away from it.

You don't even need to go that deep. Technical users are more aware that there exists a type of application called a browser, and that it is in their power to find and install a different one.

otoh, highly technical users are also aware of UA spoofers and may dress up as MSIE 8 simply to avoid attracting notice ;)

:: wandering off to pursue line of inquiry prompted by the above ::

In one closely restricted-- but definitely human-- pool of users I get:

exactly 50% FF
32% Chrome* (gotta say this figure surprises me every time)
12% MSIE (8 or 9)
and the rest Safari, including mobiles
No Opera in the pool, though I know they exist.**

The OS is almost 80% Windows, with the rest split between Linux and Mac, including mobiles. No allowances made for spoofers.


* This figure includes the wise guy who asked for /humans.txt when he thought I wasn't looking.
** Psst! Time to close some tabs again!

At a large bank, I see the figures for September as
IE = 53.6%
Firefox 14.4
Chrome 13.3
Safari 10.7
Opera 0.1
Netscape = 0
Other = 0
AOL = 0

For the year to date, IE has declined from 57.3% to 54.4%; FF declined from 15.0% to 14.5%, Chrome increased from 10.2% to 13.5%, Safari declined from 11.7% to 10.0% and Opera stayed at 0.1 although the actual numbers declined marginally. So at least in consumer land in Australia, Chrome picked up the losses made by others.

just a side note, im seeing chrome installed at the OEM level.

its like the new google toolbar.

I quickly remove it because I've never seen a user say yes I use that browser... its always, i have no idea what that is but sometimes it pops up *due to browser conflicts*
even if you shove it under their nose they always go back to the "blue E"