Internet Explorer 9 continues its growth this month as more and more people are switching to the latest version of IE. As of the end of September, IE9 now holds 31% share on Windows 7 in the US. Worldwide, IE9 is 22% of all usage share on Windows 7.
Source: Net Applications, September 2011 (latest mainline browsers compared - with exception of Firefox as Firefox 7 just released on Sept 27th).
A lot of IE9’s progress on Windows 7 has come from sites encouraging their customers to pin IE9 to their taskbar. The cyclical impact is becoming increasingly apparent: IE9 users love pinning their favorite sites like Facebook, and as a result these sites are seeing increased time spent engaging with their content. Photobucket is a cool example - they had pinning capabilities enabled, but recently added a dynamic Jump List and a prompt to encourage visitors to try pinning their page to their Windows 7 taskbar. We love seeing scenarios like this come together! From the start, we built IE9 to make sites shine, and tools like BuildMyPinnedSite.com make it easy to add value to your site through features IE9 offers.
Another great trend is the sharp drop of IE6 as more people move towards modern browsers. IE6 has now dropped to 9% usage share worldwide in September (and if you remove China’s figures, IE6 only represents 3.5% usage share worldwide). Poland also crossed an important threshold this month – their IE6 usage share dropped to less than one percent. Gratulacje! It’s super interesting to us to look at sites like the IE6 Countdown and notice that over 50% of the visitors in September were using IE6, and 72% of those visitors were from outside the US. It’s clear that partners around the world are spreading the word about the Countdown and are sharing ways to get their users off of IE6. THANK YOU! If you’ve moved off of IE6 this month, congratulations.
If you haven’t already made the move to Internet Explorer 9 on Windows 7, try it by visiting www.beautyoftheweb.com.
Roger Capriotti
Director, Internet Explorer Marketing
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