Microsoft did knock Netscape off from their pedestal, and they have remained at the top of the pack for the longest time already. Of course, over the course of time, there has been new challengers along the way such as Mozilla’s Firefox as well as Google’s Chrome web browsers. The very fact that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer had managed to maintain its position at the top is because it comes pre-loaded with the Windows operating system, but their market share has been declining slowly but surely. When Microsoft first rolled out Internet Explorer 11 as part of Windows 8.1 in October last year, before it was made available to Windows 7 users a month after that, it seems that Internet Explorer 11 has gathered a fair amount of steam – with the latest data from Net Applications showing that IE11 is the second most used desktop browser in the world, taking less than 5 months to do so after its release.
Just how reliable are these statistics? Well, it was based on data gathered from 160 million unique visitors to 40,000 websites, with IE11 commanding 12.8% of the browser market in February 2014. Well, we do know that IE 11 too, will be making its way to Windows Phone 8.1 in due time, which should add to its overall fanbase, too.
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