

Internet Explorer is hemorrhaging user like blood from a one-legged knight, but, like the stubborn knight of Monty Python fame, it isn’t dead just yet. The latest numbers show Internet Explorer closing out the year with a 68.15 percent share of the web browser market — still the majority of web users, but down significantly from its starting point of roughly 75 percent back in January of 2008.

The three major browsers profiting from IE’s dwindling numbers are Firefox, Safari and Chrome, which all saw a jump in users during December. Google’s Chrome browser even managed to top the 1 percent mark for the first time — not bad for a browser that’s barely out of the beta stage stage.

Of course browser share is a notoriously slippery number — every survey reports slightly different numbers — and web metrics vendor Net Applications cautions that these latest numbers are preliminary and have not been fully reviewed.

Still, even allowing for certain errors, things don’t look good for the future of Microsoft’s web browser.

The question for Microsoft is whether or not the coming Internet Explorer 8 will help turn the tide of defectors.

The next revision promises a number of enhancements, including private browsing features, a better bookmark manager, a much more standards-friendly rendering engine and more.

But nearly all the features slated to arrive in IE 8 are already available today in its competitors.

It seems likely that, while IE 8 might mean that Internet Explorer has temporarily caught up with the rest, those who have already left IE will have little reason to return to the Microsoft fold.

One the other hand, for those still using Internet Explorer, IE 8 coulld offer enough in the way of improvements to make them stick around.

And with IE losing perhaps as much as 7 percent of its users in the last year, winning new converts would be nice, but even slowing the losses probably looks pretty good to Microsoft. If the current defection rates shown in Net Application’s survey continue, Internet Explorer will drop below 50 percent in just over two years.

See Also: