New CIA Web User Stats Boost Internet Explorer, Hurt Firefox Share

Updated numbers from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) about the number of Internet users on a country-by-country basis helped boost Internet Explorer market share last month and resulted in a loss for Mozilla's Firefox.

Internet Explorer global market share was up slightly from 56 percent in January to 56.77 percent in February. Firefox, meanwhile, dipped from 22.75 in January to 21.74 percent last month.

Those numbers, however, include the new data from the CIA, which showed tremendous growth in Internet access use in China, but a decrease in other developing countries. In January, for example, the CIA numbers showed 298 million Web users in China; with the new data, that jumped to 389 million last month.

"With the new C.I.A. numbers factored in, Firefox loses global share since many of the countries it is most popular in (Western European, in particular) now have a lower percentage of global Internet users," Net Applications said in a statement. "Internet Explorer gains as browser usage shifts to countries with higher percentages of Internet Explorer users."

The U.S. now has 245 million Internet users, the CIA said, followed by Japan with 99 million, Brazil with 76 million, and Germany with 65 million.

Google's Chrome managed to stay above the 10 percent mark that it cracked last month. The browser inched up slightly, from 10.7 percent in January to 10.93 percent last month.

Safari, meanwhile, was at 6.36 percent, followed by Opera at 2.15 percent, a very slight increase and decrease, respectively.

In terms of what version of the browser people are using, IE8 is still tops with 34.95 percent of the market. Firefox 3.6 comes in second with 17.82 percent, followed by IE6 at 11.33 percent and IE7 at 8.05 percent. Chrome 9 rounds out the top five at 7.56 percent.

On Feburary 10, Microsoft unveiled the release candidate for the next version of its browser, IE9. It secured 2 million downloads in its first week, and has since hit 11 million downloads, Microsoft said in a Tuesday blog post.

In total, the IE9 Beta and IE9 RC has been downloaded more than 36 million times since September, said Roger Capriotti, director of IE product marketing.

According to Net Applications, about 0.59 percent of worldwide Internet users are accessing the Web via IE9, up from 0.50 percent in January, and 0.46 percent in December.