Recent buzz in the blogosphere is about Firefox market share inching past Internet Explorer (IE) in Europe. Currently, Firefox holds 38.11% in Dec 2010 while IE slipped to 37.52%. Chrome, another browser from Google, has seen a steady incline in market share and now holds 14.58% of the market share in Europe.

Source: StatCounter.com

For the first time, Firefox is able to unseat IE as the most widely used browser in Europe. According to CEO of StatCounter, Aodhan Cullen, this shift is largely due to Chrome stealing the IE market share while Firefox held steady. The same can be said of the worldwide market as IE market share (46.94%) continues to drop as Chrome (14.85%) eats away its market share.

According to Internet Explorer blog, IE 9 has been downloaded 20 million times since launch in September. However, the latest version is not available for Win XP, which still has a commendable market share of 42.74% by end of 2010 in Europe. While Microsoft has been pushing the idea of improved IE 9, its beta release has received mixed reviews from leading tech bloggers. Despite this new release, the overall market landscape for IE looks doubtful.  The reasons are plain and simple.

• Google Chrome has been incrementally improving its browser and the current version 8.0 holds7.32% market share Worldwide.
• Interestingly, Safari, Apple’s browser has also seen some improvement in its market share. It has jumped from 3.48% in 2009 to 4.79% by end of 2010 Worldwide. In North America, Safari saw a sharp increase from 7.94% in 2009 to 10.16% by end of 2010. This is largely attributed to the fact that of huge sale of Apple’s iOS devices (iPad, iPhone, iPod touch) in which Safari browser is provided as defaults.
• Mozilla launch of Firefox 4 in early 2011. This includes major upgrades such as fast user interface, applications tab, extension manager revamp, integration with Firefox Sync and support for multi touch displays. It also supports HTML5, CSS3, WebM and WebGL formats and includes new JavaScript engine called JagerMonkey.
• Opera for its part has also been gearing up to release its latest version 11, with major focus on speed and usability.

Despite being the world’s most used web browser, IE has tough competition ahead. It has to make good on its promises and release its latest version with better features.

The year 2011 is definitely going to be a year of browser evolution. As internet becomes more mobile orientated, it would be interesting to see how each browser adapts and excel themselves to these changing conditions.