Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) has continued to lose web browser market share as users adopt offerings from rivals - particularly Google's Chrome browser. Experts predict that IE's market share will slip below 50 per cent by March of this year.
Use of IE has been declining relatively steadily for many months - albeit with a one-month pause in December of last year. It currently holds 51.9 per cent of the market share, according to Net Applications, a company based in California.
Over the past year, IE market share has fallen by seven percentage points. Google Chrome, meanwhile, is edging ever closer to 20 per cent market share, increasing its user base by 0.9 percentage points to 19.1 per cent.
However, the browser landscape looks very different from the perspective of StatCounter, another web analytics specialist. It claimed that in November of last year, IE's market share was already well below the 50 per cent mark - falling to 38.65 per cent. This was just under 13 percentage points higher than Google Chrome in the same month.