IE slumps in the corporate world and Chrome gains strength
A new study about corporate trends regarding operating systems and browsers made by Forrester Research showed good and bad news about Microsoft.
The good news is that the Windows operating system is still dominant among businesses, running on almost 88% of corporate computers. In addition, Windows 7 is slowly becoming the new standard software, running in 21% of corporate computers, according to the survey.
The bad news? Internet Explorer is in steady decline, while Firefox, Chrome and Safari continue to grow. The Forrester study, which analyzed more than 400 thousand computers in 2,500 companies over the past year, showed that the market share of IE was deeply dejected with the replacement of Windows XP, running IE6, and that abandoning Internet Explorer 6 was not only to migrate to version 8, but also to choose Firefox, Chrome or Safari (if the change has been made from PC to Mac).
IE is still the great champion of the corporate world, with a presence of almost 59%, however this represents a fall of 3% over the previous year. Despite the presence of Firefox is also decreasing (from 22 to 18%) in corporate sector, users of Mozilla’s browser are migrating more easily the new versions of Firefox, with 14.4% using Firefox 3.6 against 1% using Firefox 3.5. In contrast, more companies are using IE7 than the version 8 (34.4% to 19.4% respectively).
Much of Firefox’s market loss is caused by Google Chrome. “In recent years, the alternative browser conquered markets belonging to IE and Firefox” wrote Christian Kane, co-author of the report. “However, in the last year, we saw a part of that market share of Firefox and IE to be conquered by Chrome”.
Google’s Chrome browser showed the biggest growth among corporate world, increasing from 8.8% to 14.1% in the past year. “This increased presence of Chrome between corporate browsers was obtained in large part because of the demand for technology workers more control over the applications that are used in computer work” says the report. Even Safari, Apple’s browser, grew up in the corporate market in the last year, jumping from 6.2 to 8.8%, despite the fact that it is prevalent in Mac OS X and iOS, and often must compete against virtual machines that run Windows on Mac, opening doors for IE, Firefox and Chrome.