
IE may not trigger the same level of excitement as the like of Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox or even safari to geeks. The buggy, sluggish performance and not embracing the open standard, no Webkit support are some of chief reason the perception stays until today.
But that doesn’t stop Microsoft from continuing developing the next gen IE 9, which some of the leaked images were discovered by tech blog. Not much reveal from there except the brand new download manager and the most frequently visited websites. The first you will notice is how clean the UI is. The menu bar has gone, following the steps of Chrome and Firefox 4. Ironically, the default search engine is Google, not Bing though. Anyhow, that’s all we have now, and according to news, the developer preview will available in 4 weeks.
via: Downloadsquad source: cnBeta

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The folks at StatCounter just release the statistic of how web browsers are performing for the period of July 08 to March 09. Internet Explorer continue its dominance with 63% market, drop 8% from 68%, while Mozilla Firefox gain 2% to 27%.
IE experience lowest ever percentage of Internet Explorer usage had in recent years, thanks to its own image. It has something to do with the bad perception that tech savvy internet users had, toward Microsoft and its product, including Internet Explorer which is slow, bug-happy and malware-magnet. The emergence of better and open source web browsers such as Firefox and Chrome also contributing to the loss when users are looking for more secure, openness and promote standardization web browser.
The new StatCounter Global Stat is useful for in depth view of the stat. It is flexible, as you can filter the statistic based on period and region as well as the statistic type as bar or line statistic. There is option for you to download the data in .CSV format, or turns the statistic to image (.JPG).
Please note, this stat built from the data collected ONLY from websites that running StatCounter script. Hence it didn’t provide overall pictures of how this web browsers are performing.
Global

Asia
In verall, Asian countries still favor Internet Explorer over Mozilla Firefox with market share 74.72% to 20.79 respectively.

Malaysia
Unlike Asian statistic, Malaysian internet users are more favorable toward Mozilla Firefox compared IE with almost 36.61% to 59.13% market share respectively. For Firefox, this percentage is higher than Firefix global stat. The trend showing Mozilla Firefox is consistently capturing more percentage, while IE is consistently losing its market to Firefox and other rivals.

Beside adding and enhancing its basic features, 2 major enhancement on Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer is the Chrome’s new tab page style, and Quick Search Box. While most people quite familiar with the new tab page style, but how many of you heard about Quick Search Box before?
Quick Search Box or QSB is the shortcut to open Google search box, outside of internet browser. If you take a look at it, which is placed just beside the Windows start button, you can guess that it was aimed squarely to Live Search which by default powering Internet Explorer search box. Google Toolbar for Firefox doesn’t have this feature, because of one reason… the default search engine is already powered by Google…
QSB does not limited for only perform search, it can open small applications such as notepad and solitaire as well. It works like the ‘run‘ command on Windows start menu, but the number of applications it can opened this way is limited such as, it can’t open Microsoft Office application using key phrase such as ‘winword’.
With all these features including Windows start menu looks alike button, does this sign that one day Google will come out with its own operating system?

Via Statcounter blog, it is mentioned that Firefox has slightly gained in web browser market share.
Overall, Firefox’s share of the browser market has increased from 34.9% to 36% over the two day period while Internet Explorer drops slightly from 56.3% to 55.4%.
Usage of Firefox 3 jumps from 7.8% to 18.9% between June 16th and 18th.
For a note, this static is gathered from data of 55 millions pageviews collected from 1400 websites.

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Bravo firefox! But the situation might change with the release of IE8 slated this August. Check out statistics from other resources (data is available as of May 2008 only).
Statistic from W3schools

Statistic from Hitwise

Statistic from Wikipedia
