In a blog post today, Microsoft revealed that Internet Explorer 9 has now passed a 20% usage share worldwide on the company’s Windows 7 operating system, beating out Google’s Chrome browser and Mozilla’s Firefox browser.
“This month we hit some pretty important milestones in the IE business. IE9 has now passed 20% usage share worldwide on Windows 7 as of the last day of August. In the US, IE9 closed out the month at 28% share on Windows 7. IE9 was built to take advantage of the unique capabilities of Windows 7 and it’s great to see more and more Windows 7 users picking IE9 as their browser of choice to get them to their favorite sites,” Microsoft stated.
From what Microsoft is reporting, Internet Explorer 9 (which was released in March of 2011) has a 20.4% worldwide browser share on Windows 7, compared to a 18.3% share that Chrome 13 holds. Firefox 6 has a 13.2% share, according to Microsoft’s figure.
Microsoft attributes Internet Explorer 9’s growth to the combination of a great operating system and a great browser. “Growth of IE9 on Windows 7 is really just a reflection of how the web experiences we all enjoy get better when using a browser and operating system designed to put those experiences front and center,” Microsoft explains.
Microsoft also attributes the new pinning feature in Internet Explorer to its success. “Pinning sites like Facebook in Windows 7 is become increasingly popular among our IE9 users.”
Further reading: Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft