Following the success of my last year study about browser usage in Romania i decided to repeat the study this year, around the same time (June – middle of the year). The methodology is the same , i took browser data from trafic.ro for a few sites (the most visited in Romania) and made an average of them.
The numbers gave me the following chart which covers the period from November 2007 to June 2010
This chart covers all browser versions that have more then 0.25 percent market share in Romania. As you can see, from December 2009 Internet Explorer 6 started to loose market share rapidly and i put this on the account of Google. Last December i think was the time when Google announced that they won’t support IE6 on many of their apps anymore. Also since my last study IE8 is steadily taking share from her older siblings IE6 and IE7 while Firefox 3 was taking share also from IE6 and IE7 claiming the title of the most used browser version in Romania.
My last year’s prediction that Google Chrome will reach 10% by the end of the year didn’t become a reality, now Chrome being somewhere over 7%. This is understandable because Google Chrome failed to deliver its initial promises as i recently pointed out. Still i think that because of the aggressive promotion conducted by Google it will reach well over 10% this year. Opera is steadily at 4% while Safari being under 1%. Firefox 1 is the least used browser in this study with an average of 0.29%. I guess next year we can ignore it and we can also ignore his younger sibling FF2 which is below 1% and is dropping fast.
This time i made another chart that covers browser market share by vendor. More specifically i didn’t break up specific versions so all Internet Explorer versions appear as IE and all Firefox versions appear under FF.
It is well pointed out in this chart that IE took a serious hit last December and the main gainer of this hit was Firefox. Chrome’s rapid ascension can be observed too.
I will not come up with any predictions this year. But i can say this. 2010 will enter in browser history books as the year of demise for IE6. By the end of the year i think everyone will drop support for this ancient browser. It is time.
Laszlo Bodor
