It has been a few years since IE was the only browser anyone really used. It used to be the dominant browser by far. However, last night on TV, Microsoft were advertising the virtues of IE 9.

So, when I see an established company advertising an established product on TV, it gets me wondering why.  Clearly, Microsoft know they are losing the browser wars.

Here at http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp are browser preferrence stats by month, and reading those you can see clearly the concern. In history, Internet Explorer held 88% of the market, now they hold just 19.5% of the browser share.

Whilst these stats I could take on face value, I thought I’d check my own analytics. Over a range of 9 European based websites, with 25,000 clicks last month,

Internet Explorer	32%
Chrome	25%
Firefox	23%
Safari	20%

So what does this tell us

1. Don’t believe all the statistics you see on the internet
2. Internet Explorer is still important to us, but not as important as it was
3. The majority of traffic comes from Chrome, Firefox & Safari, so we must ensure our websites work with those browser
4. Microsoft need to come out with better, standard compliant products, not TV adverts, if their market share is not to dwindle further

What do you thing, is IE doomed? Will Microsoft pull it back? Does it matter?