Internet Explorer Falls Below 60% Market Share
Microsoft's Internet Explorer dropped to a historic market share low in April, according to Net Applications. The company estimated IE's market share at 59.95% in April, which is about the range that was reached by Internet Explorer 4 more than 11 years ago in early 1999.
Context & Ripple Effects
Internet Explorer’s share had already fallen below 70% in late 2008, and a September 2009 report described Firefox regaining share as IE tumbled. The April reading extends a multi-period erosion rather than marking an isolated monthly move.
The threshold matters as Microsoft is publicly arguing for HTML5 and participating in W3C standardization: a smaller IE footprint gives web publishers and rival browser makers more reason to treat cross-browser behavior as the baseline.
First-order effects
- Microsoft enters the next browser release and standards debates with Internet Explorer reaching a smaller portion of measured users than at any point in the supplied coverage.
- Firefox and Chrome gain a clearer competitive opening with web publishers, as IE’s sub-60% share reduces the practical case for designing primarily around Microsoft’s browser.
Second-order effects
- Web developers face a less IE-dominated compatibility target, increasing the value of testing sites across competing browsers and implementing shared web standards.
- Microsoft’s stated HTML5 position becomes more commercially important: standards compliance can help retain relevance with publishers even as browser share fragments.
Third-order effects
- If the slide persists, browser competition shifts from a market led by one installed base toward a standards-mediated market in which developer support and interoperability carry more weight.
- A more distributed browser market makes any one vendor’s proprietary web implementation harder to treat as the default, strengthening the incentive for W3C-based compatibility.
The trend: The browser market is moving away from Internet Explorer’s historic dominance toward multi-browser competition organized around interoperable web standards.