2008: Bad Year for Internet Explorer

According to the Dallas Morning News (and several other online PC blogs), Internet Explorer took a beating in market share in 2008, particularly towards the very end of the year.

In November, IE’s market share fell below 70% (first time) to 69.77% while Mozilla’s ever-so-popular Firefox rose to 20.78%. Apple’s Safari web browser had 7% of the world’s market share in November.

December’s numbers don’t show much hope for Microsoft either. According to PC World, IE fell down to 68.15% while Firefox and Safari continued to rise ever-so-slightly for the month of December.

The beginning of 2008 had IE at 75% of the entire browser market share, so most analysts believe Microsoft isn’t too happy about this. Will this bring a bigger marketing campaign for IE 8 when its launched officially this year? Time shall tell.