The two biggest players in the browser market saw the outcome of their new releases today as the new market share statistics were released by Hitslink.
It saw Internet Explorers market share drop by 0.85% placing it at 55.92% overall whereas its rival Firefox saw a gain of 0.06%. Although not a huge gain by Firefox, it places them at 21.80%.
The biggest surprise is the great deal of market-share that IE has lost despite early figures suggesting that their newest release, IE9 was doing exceedingly well. Neowin reported last month that the IE9 RTM had been downloaded 2.35 million times in 24 hours which was a great target for Mozilla to beat when they released Firefox 4. Not so surprisingly, Mozilla did beat the 2.35 million and racked up 7.1 million in its first 24 hours.
Overall however, IE9 did see an increase of 0.05% with the biggest loss of IE market-share coming from the previous versions of the browser, significantly from IE8 which lost 0.54%
It could be said that Firefox had the high ground on Microsoft straight away, as they released their browser with support for Windows XP whereas IE9 is only Vista/7 compatible.
Unsurprisingly, Google Chrome again had a huge jump in market-share and taking the biggest chunk, with a jump of 0.64% placing it at 11.57%. Safari also gained with a jump from 6.36% to 6.61% - a gain of 0.25%. Unfortunately for Opera, they saw no change and remain at 2.15%.