Earlier this year we covered a story about the decline of Internet Explorer. And last year I went on about why Firefox is my favorite browser.

But the latest Internet stats show that I might have been a bit premature in predicting the demise of Internet Explorer (IE).

Against the trends, IE market share actually grew in June 2010 for the first time in a year, to back over 60%. The growth was less than 1%, but it’s against a background of constant and significant declines.

The figures were compiled by Statistics from Net Applications, who have attributed the growth to recent advertising campaigns for the latest version of the browser, IE8.

Despite this growth, IE has a lot to do to regain previous highs. As recently as July 2008 it was being used by over 75% of Internet users.

The re-growth of IE was at the expense of my favorite browser Firefox, which dropped from 24% to 23%.

Another loser was niche browser Opera, which dropped a fraction of a % to just over 2%. Google Chrome and Apple’s Safari were up slightly too.

Have you seen the ads for IE? Have you switched back to IE? Have you ever left IE?! What’s the best browser for a website builder? Leave us a comment below.

Last year we talk about the different browsers you have the choice of using when surfing the Internet. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has long been the most popular browser, not least because it comes packaged with almost every computer sold.

IE on a Downward Spiral

Over the last 4 years however, Internet Explorer’s (IE) grip on the market has been loosening. The first upstart to dislodge IE was Firefox, a free browser developed by the Mozilla foundation. More recently, Google have tried to muscle into the market with ‘Chrome’. Last Christmas Google spent a fortune promoting Chrome which they claim is lighter, faster, and crashes less.

Proof from Google Analytics

If you have Google analytics on your website, you can see which browsers your visitors are using to access your website. Here’s a screen shot from WebEden.co.uk’s very own Google analytics:

As you can see IE is still very much the biggest player. But it’s being caught, most noticeably by Firefox. Chrome, whilst small, is growing at the fastest rate.

Indepedent Data

Whilst these figures are for WebEden, independent data from NetApplications has shown that IE market share dropped below 60% in April, for the first time ever. Firefox is 2nd overall with 24.6%. And Chrome has 6.7%.

Google Eating Microsoft

According to Netapplications, Google Chrome’s growth is at the expense of IE rather than Firefox. As Google provides significant funds to the Mozilla foundation, its going to be interesting to see what happens when Chrome starts eating away at Firefox’s user base.

My Favourite

For my part I like Firefox. It’s easy to use, quick, and very customisable. If you need a regular task completed, the  chances are that you can find an extension to do that for you. Others here in the WebEden office prefer Chrome. I can’t find anyone still on IE.

Which is your favourite browser and why? Leave us a comment below.

The Mozilla foundation officially launched the latest version of their popular web browser Firefox yesterday. Imaginatively called ‘Firefox 3.5’, it can be downloaded from the Mozilla website here.

Rather oddly, Firefox 3.5 was originally going to be called 3.1, but the company felt that the new browser was such as step change from the old that they had to bump it up a it. Software eh? It’s a crazy world.

We weighed up the strengths of different web browsers – the application that sits on your computer so you can look at websites – a few weeks ago, and I explained why I like Firefox more than Internet Explorer. Apart from all the great extra features you get, along with much faster web browsing, Firefox has the warm and cuddly vibe of being not-for-profit.

And it’s becoming increasing popular. Here’s a screen grab from the Google analytics for our website (webeden.co.uk) which measures what percentage of our website visitors are using which browser.

As you can see, Firefox is in 2nd place behind Internet Explorer with just under 20%.The other contenders are Safari (5.8%, which just works on Macs) and Google Chrome on 3.4%.. Official figures place the Firefox market share at 22%.

Firefox 3.5 isn’t yet the ‘full-fat’ version its going be in the future, but Mozilla reckoned it would be good enough for general release. As they develop new bits and pieces for it, the software will update itself.

So what new stuff does it have? For the techies, there’s something called ‘TraceMonkey’, a Javascript engine that makes it much, much faster.

It also has location aware browsing, allowing you to search for and find things in your proximity much quicker.

But perhaps the most exciting thing for those of us using the WebEden website creator is that it means our HTML widget will now work in all browsers. Our HTML widget allows you to place any HTML on your website, which is really useful if you want to place any code from any application or software on your website. We’ve had so much positive feedback about this feature; it feels great to know we will soon be able to take it out of Beta. Here’s where you can read more about the HTML widget.

Which browser is your favourite and why? Leave us a comment below.

The previous two posts covered how to delete cookies in different browsers. So whilst we’re on the subject, of browsers, here’s why I like Firefox more than Internet Explorer.

1. Firefox crashes (less)
Maybe I am just unlucky but IE seems to freeze far too often.

2. Firefox starts quicker
If you’re like me, then waiting for your browser to start is painful – I want to get online! Firefox seems to start so much quicker.

3. If it does crash, you can restore to the same place
If (and it can happen) Firefox crashes, you get the option to restore the session right back where you were before. No effort needed.

4. Finding websites that you’ve been on before
With Firefox, you can type in any part of any URL for a website that you have been on before, and it will list all those sites with those letters in the URL.

Lets say for example you are trying to get back to ‘About Me’ page on paganmoontarot.com. The actual URL for this is http://paganmoontarot.com/#/about-me/4528302172. If you couldn’t remember the URL, you could just type ‘about’ in the address bar on Firefox and it would bring a up a list of all websites you’d visited in the last 30 days where the word ‘about’ existed in the URL.

5. Remembering passwords
You know IE offers to remember your passwords? Well if you get the password wrong the first time you enter it, or you choose not to remember the password at that point, that means that IE will always remember the wrong password (or no password at all). With Firefox, you can wait until you get the password right, enter the site, and then click ‘remember password’ – so it always remembers the right passwords

6. Finding words on a webpage
Although IE has now updated their ‘Control F’ tool, Mozilla led the way. If you want to find anything on a website (EG a particular word on a page), you press ‘control f’ and it starts looking for whatever you type, as you type it. IE always used to wait until you finished typing and then pressed ‘find’. However, they have updated that now.

7. Philosophy
I love the idea that Firefox is an open-source collaboration built by developers, and that any developer can add and contribute to the project. Check out http://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ – lots of add ons that anyone can use. Anyone can add stuff to it, create extra tools and extensions. Seems a nice way to do things, and judging by the iphone, facebook and gphone app stores, it is the way ‘things’ are going.

Have I convinced you?

If you want to try out Firefox and don’t already have it installed on your computer then you can download it here.

Of course, there is always Google Chrome… More of that later!

Which browser do you prefer, and why? Leave us a comment below

Once again, if you don’t know what a cookie is then read our post on ‘what is a cookie‘.

For those of you I am yet to convince to change to Firefox, here’s how you delete cookies in Internet Explorer (IE).

Go to ‘Tools’ and then ‘Internet Options’. You’ll get a dialogue box like this:

Half way down, where it says ‘Browsing History’, press ‘settings’. The new dialogue box will look like this:

Half way down choose ‘view files’. You then get a massive list of files that Internet Explorer has downloaded from websites that you’ve visited. Some of these will be your cookies; they’re usually listed as ‘text documents’ under ‘file type’.

This is where Firefox has the edge. In IE you have to go through these files one by one to find the cookie for the website that you want to delete. Once you’ve found the cookies for a particular website, right click on it and then choose ‘delete’.

The easy option is to just make the switch to Firefox ;-)

Good luck!