The most popular web browsers

This graph shows the most popular PC & Mac web browsers in early May, 2011, based on visitors to my websites. The sample size is 1,424. My stats are pretty close to the stats listed in The New York Times:

About 45 percent of computers use one of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browsers, according to StatCounter, a Web analytics firm, while Chrome has only about 18 percent of the market. ... Firefox, a browser produced by Mozilla, has 30 percent of the market while Safari, Apple’s browser, has only 5 percent.

According to Wikipedia, back in 2004 Internet Explorer had about a 90-95% market share. Competition is a good thing.

The browser race is closer than it appears. While it looks like a four-way battle of web browsers, it is really a three-way battle of rendering engines because Chrome and Safari both use WebKit. Based on the stats of my visitors, the rendering engine battle looks like this:

1. Trident (Internet Explorer) — 45%
2. Gecko (Firefox) — 30%
3. WebKit (Chrome & Safari) — 25%