The latest version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser, IE 11, captured 10.42 percent of the desktop browser market during December, according to a report from web tracker Net Applications. This is more than a three-fold increase when compared to 3.2 percent market share it had in November last year.
The rise in adoption of IE 11 has come at the cost of IE 10's market share, which slipped down from 17.50 percent to 11.05 percent. IE 9 also witnessed a decline, though marginal, in market share. With a dip of 0.29 percentage points, its market share is now 8.96 percent.
Despite a 1.10 percent decline in market share, IE 8 is still the most used web browser in the world, with a 20.64 percent share. IE 7, whose market share is 2.14 percent, managed to gain 0.80 percentage points, while IE 6's market share slipped 0.49 percentage points to 4.43 percent.
On the whole, Internet Explorer still leads the web browser market with a 57.9 percent share in December. Firefox and Chrome occupy the second and third spot with 18.35 and 16.22 percent market share, respectively.
Net Applications has a network of 40,000 client websites from all across the globe. The company compiles its statistics by using data captured from approximately 160 million unique visitors per month.
We should note that the data differs significantly from that collected by Shareaholic in a number of ways, which can explain why Net Applications consistently ranks Internet Explorer as the most used browser while the former claims Chrome is used more than Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer combined. Shareaholic tracked 250 million users over 200,000 websites, collecting and combining pageview data for both mobile and desktop browsers. Net Applications simply tracks desktop unique users, rather than pageviews, which results in more market share for more widespread, but less frequently used browsers such as IE.