Here are the browser statistics for NZS.com over the month of October 2009.

The key trends that we’re seeing in this month’s NZ browser statistics;

• IE8 is now the most used browser on NZS.com with a 3% margin to IE7
• Internet Explorer has dropped by over 1% overall
• Firefox, Safari and Chrome are all gaining in popularity

This month Internet Explorer has dropped by over 1% with most of this drop related to IE6. Over the past few months Internet Explorer 6 has been decreasing rather slowly, but this month has seen it drop by over a percentage.

Is this due to the highly anticipated Windows 7 now being released? Could this be the IE6 killer that us web developers all long and hope for? We will have to wait and see, but next month’s stats could well tell us if there is any truth behind this theory.

This data is taken from Google Analytics on NZS.com over the month of October 2009. You can see more information on the number of visitors the data is sourced from on the NZS.com Statistics page.

Here are the browser statistics for NZS.com over the month of September 2009.

The key trends that we’re seeing in this month’s NZ browser statistics;

• Firefox, Safari and Chrome are all making small but steady percentage gains.
• Internet Explorer on the whole has declined slightly
• IE8 is on the brink of taking over from IE7 as the top used browser on NZS.com

Internet Explorer 8 is again on the move and has taken its gains from IE7 and IE6, bringing it ever closer to being the most used browser on NZS.com. The slow demise of Internet Explorer 6 is arguably due to the “corporate” users whose companies systems rely on IE6, or only upgrade their browsers when they get a new OS such as Windows Vista or the newly awaited Windows 7.

This data is taken from Google Analytics on NZS.com over the month of September 2009. You can see more information on the number of visitors the data is sourced from on the NZS.com Statistics page.

Here are the browser statistics for NZS.com over the month of August 2009.

The key trends that we’re seeing in this month’s NZ browser statistics;

• IE 8 has taken another 5% from IE7.
• Safari and Chrome have taken small percentages away from Firefox and IE

Again IE8 is making strides in its bid to be the top IE browser on NZS.com taking another 5% from IE7. Within the IE statistics the percentages are; IE7 44%, IE8 35% and IE6 at 20%.

This data is taken from Google Analytics on NZS.com over the month of August 2009. You can see more information on the number of visitors the data is sourced from on the NZS.com Statistics page.

As promised late last month, here are the browser statistics for NZS.com over the month of July 2009.

The key trends that we’re seeing in this months NZ browser statistics;

• FireFox is now above 20%
• Chrome has risen above 3%
• IE8 has overtaken IE6

As above, one thing to note behind the Internet Explorer statistics is that in July ‘09  IE8 has stormed past IE6. Within the IE statistics the percentages are; IE7 49%, IE8 29% and IE6 still at 22%.

So, while IE7 is still the dominant browser being used on NZS.com it looks like IE8 could be set to take over the mantle of #1 browser before the end of 2009. The demise of IE6 has not sped up at all over 2009 so it looks like the browser is still set to be around for some time yet, much to the dismay of most web developers.

This data is taken from Google Analytics on NZS.com over the month of July 2009 . You can see more information on the number of visitors the data is sourced from on the NZS.com Statistics page.

For the first month since browser statistics tracking began, the internet browser Mozilla Firefox (often much favoured for its tabbed browsing, add-ons, security and stability) claimed over a 20% market share for net browsers at the end of 2008.

Mozilla remains the second most popular internet browser behind Internet Explorer, the current market leader by a long way with a 69.77% worldwide share. Apple’s Safari captures 7.13% of the market while other browsers Google Chrome, Opera and Netscape each have less than 1% shares.

Mozilla is toting this as a milestone for them as competitors for the big boys Microsoft. “It’s a huge achievement, one a few years ago most would have considered impossible” said Mozilla CEO John Lilly. “The open web is more vibrant than ever, and the thousands of Mozilla contributors around the world have played a major role in making it that way”.

As a New Zealand Search Directory with almost entirely New Zealand traffic (close to 300,000 user sessions; see Nielsen statistics), NZS.com is in a good position to follow New Zealand Internet browser usage statistics.

With the introduction of Internet Explorer 7.0 (commonly known as IE7) in October 2006, the browser statistics on NZS.com have shown a surprisingly gradual change from IE6 to IE7.

The graph to the right shows Internet Explorer percentages over the last five months (May 2007 to September 2007), indicating that IE7 is slowly taking over from IE6 but is taking longer than many expected. With the launch of IE7 a full year ago now, as well as the increased functionality (eg. tabbed browsing) which has been introduced in IE7, there were many expectations that it would quickly surpass IE6 in usage.

A recent blog post on Microsoft’s official IEBlog shows a change this month in the way IE7 is distributed:

Internet Explorer 7 installation will no longer require Windows Genuine Advantage validation and will be available to all Windows XP users.

With this new development, it’s likely there will be an increase in percentage uptake of IE7 over IE6. We’ll keep an eye on our statistics with interest.