StatCounter shows big spike in Internet Explorer use – good news, or another market share reporting glitch?

Kip Kniskern

StatCounter shows big spike in Internet Explorer use - another glitch?

Earlier this month, NetMarketShare published their December 2014 stats, which appeared to show a significant drop in market share for Internet Explorer, but turned out to be a glitch in the system.  The company posted revised stats that instead showed that not much had changed month over month.

Now another set of numbers has been posted, this time from StatCounter, and these numbers show almost the opposite of what the original flawed NetMarketShare numbers showed, that is a significant *rise* in market share for Microsoft’s web browser:

StatCounter shows big spike in Internet Explorer use - another glitch?

Maybe a whole bunch of people bought themselves new computers with IE installed for Christmas, or maybe people are fed up with Google’s shenanigans, or maybe this is just another glitch we’ve come to expect when we have to rely on 3rd parties to provide market share numbers.

In some other interesting web browser share numbers, it looks like many of those Firefox users who got switched to using Yahoo! (powered by Bing) with the latest Firefox update are just as quickly switching back to Google, so the uptick in usage for Yahoo! and Bing is apparently short lived.