
We all know the by now woeful tale of Internet Explorer 6, which close to a decade after its arrival still has a significant share of the web browser market. Its users have been extremely slow to abandon it in spite of there being two newer and much improved versions of Internet Explorer freely available. And this is with Microsoft actively encouraging an upgrade. You could even argue the same for Internet Explorer 7; why haven’t the vast majority of Internet Explorer users switched to version 8 by now?
This conundrum made us wonder how the other web browsers fare when it comes to getting their users to upgrade to newer versions. How quickly do Firefox, Safari, or Google Chrome users upgrade their browsers when new versions arrive?
We have studied the upgrade pattern for Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and Opera and found some drastic and quite interesting differences.
Although we don’t have actual upgrade statistics, we can see how the market share for the various versions of a web browser changes, and that is good enough for our purposes. We used data from StatCounter, who provide browser statistics based on tracking of approximately three million websites globally.












