Market share of Internet Explorer declines, again

Web analytics firm Onstat.com is reporting in its latest browser survey that the market share of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser continues to slide. Compared to January of this year, the software’s share has decreased by 0.65 percentage points from 85.82% to 85.17%.

Almost every other popular browser was able to take advantage of this scenario and posted slight growth. Firefox climbed 0.56% to 11.79%, Apple’s Safari gained 0.14% to 2.02%, and Opera inched up by 0.02% to 0.79%. The exception was Netscape, which lost 0.01 points and ended up at 0.15% market share.

As these market share estimates are based on the evaluation of a very specific set of websites, different surveys tend to come up with sometimes very different numbers. For example, web analytics firm Websidestory put Firefox’ market share in its most recent report closer to about 6%.