Microsoft claims 100 million IE7 installations

Redmond (WA) - Microsoft claims that Internet Explorer has been installed on more than 100 million computers in less than three months.

Tony Chor, group program manager for the Internet Explorer division at Microsoft, recently wrote on the IE team blog that already more than 25% of all visitors to websites in the U.S. were using IE7, as of last week. Quoting market data provided by WebSideStory, Microsoft believes that IE7 now is the web's second most used browser after IE6.

While WebSideStory has not made that data publicly available, the company indicated in December that IE7 gained nearly 14 percentage points between its October 18, 2006 launch and December 13, 2006. The firm estimated the browser's market share at the time at 16.29%, with shares rising on the weekends to up to 21.37%. However, Firefox 2 also continued to gain market share, reaching about 4% by December 10. WebSideStory said that both browsers "appear to be taking market share from their predecessors as the overall market share of each browser (all versions) has remained fairly stable."

Of course, we had a quick look in the TG Daily site statistics and found that 39.6% of our readers are using Firefox 1.5 or 2.0. Internet Explorer 6 came in at 32.5% and Internet Explorer 7 at 21.7%.