Mozilla Firefox

There certainly appears to be more than a little enthusiasm for browser numbers these days, and it’s great to see early adopters adopting the latest browsers across the industry. With Internet Explorer 9, Firefox 4.0, and Chrome 10 all hitting their final releases recently, drawing instant comparisons around downloads or initial usage is a natural temptation, but unfortunately you can’t do it quite yet. Here’s why.

Last month, we saw coverage about Internet Explorer posting a worldwide gain in usage share. That encouraging news continues today with Net Applications’ release of their July usage share numbers. Net Applications reports overall Internet Explorer share grew 0.42% worldwide in July, while Firefox lost 0.90% share and Chrome dipped 0.08% in share.

When customers sit down to browse the web, they have more choice than ever about the browser they’ll use. Here in the Internet Explorer team, we look at usage share as one of several results that come from developers targeting, partners supporting, and customer preferring the latest version of Internet Explorer. Last month we saw some encouraging news about browser preference.