It looks like a fresh batch of the Internet Explorer TV ads and videos targeted at hipsters were not enough to accelerate the growth of Microsoft’s web browser, at least in a short term.

According to the latest report from StatCounter, Google Chrome has recently surpassed the IE and became the most popular web browser.

However, earlier this year, Microsoft has stated that they prefer HitsLink over the StatCounter, which, of course, still shows IE dominating the market with 50% vs. 17.41% respectively. Personally, we find it strange that there is such a difference between statistics.

Example:

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Still, with the launch of Windows 8, Windows RT and Windows Phone 8, we expect to see the Internet Explorer trend reversing in the near feature. Do you?

For one day only.

Just after Microsoft’s post about the inaccurate market share reports from StatCounter, the company behind one of the most popular monitoring sites has published a report of their own.

However, it has nothing to do with the HitsLink vs. StatCounter, in fact what they did is revealed that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has been overtaken by Google Chrome for the first time in history on Sunday 18 March.

While IE remains the number one web browser as of today, Aodhan Cullen, CEO of web Statcounter said that Google Chrome usage peaks over the weekends when people don’t work and can freely choose what web browser to use.

With the upcoming release of Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and Xbox Next, which might have IE pre-installed, it will be interesting to see how IE’s market share changes over the course of next year.

With the release of Windows 8 Consumer Preview, guys at Neowin have managed to benchmark the latest version of IE10, which is Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview 5, running in both desktop and Metro modes.

What’s the difference between IE10 Metro and Desktop? IE Metro (aka Immersive web browser) uses the 64 bit libraries by default.

Tested browsers

Internet Explorer 10 (IE10) PP5
Google Chrome 17
Firefox 10
Opera 11.60

Benchmark results

This is a guest post by Mark Subel.

It’s that time of year where the ghosts and goblins come out and we get ready for Halloween night. Kids are making last minute changes to their costume and parents haven’t yet figured out what they’re wearing to the Halloween party. Whatever the case, you won’t run out of options for dressing up your browser this Halloween season. Firefox, IE and Chrome users have a wealth of options for decorating their browsers this year with several amazing Halloween themes available online. Here are our favorite Halloween themes for your browser:

Firefox

Animated Lightning Theme

This creepy theme found in the Firefox personas gallery showcases a spooky haunted house with streaks of animated lightning bolts lighting up the sky. The imagery in this theme is just amazing with a dark sky and full moon to further accentuate the Halloween theme.

Halloween Watching Hour – Animated

Another theme in the Firefox Personas gallery, this Halloween theme displays brilliant imagery of Halloween with black cats, haunted houses, bats, a full moon and cemetery. This theme is animated and you’ll see lights flickering on and off in the house, bats flying and a surprise from a spider right in your browser. We’ll let you try it out to see where the spider appears.

Hello Kitty Halloween Theme

Not all Halloween themes have to be scary. This Hello Kitty theme features your favorite characters in a beautifully designed Halloween scene with happy pumpkins, a bright orange and yellow background, and your favorite Halloween characters like bats, spiders, and witches.

Firefox and Internet Explorer

Halloween 2011 Interactive Personas

This unique Halloween theme developed by Brand Thunder, features Jack-o-Lanterns dipped in a fiery orange molten substance, black and orange background and “Trick or Treat” imagery. Perfect for Halloween lovers. Taking it a step further, this theme is “interactive”, as it provides quick links to Halloween costume websites, Halloween safety tips and a video sidebar showing the spookiest Halloween related videos.

Please note: Brand Thunder themes come with a WebSearch+ toolbar.

Google Chrome

Happy Halloween Chrome Theme

Chrome users will enjoy this “Happy Halloween” theme made specifically for them. A beautifully designed pumpkin graphic with a dark black background and “Happy Halloween” saying displayed underneath. The tabs and bookmarks tab are tinted with light and dark orange to complete this slick theme.

It’s Friday, Friday…

Another month passes by as we look at the August market share stats to find out, how web browsers competed at the end of summer.

Internet Explorer is approaching the 50% market share mark, as it’s now down another 1.13 point, from 52.72% to 51.59%.

Firefox is the new IE and it continues to show, this time its market share has decreased by 0.4 point, down from 21.47% to 21.03%.

Another month and another gain for Google Chrome, in August Google’s web browser market share grew by another 0.97 point, from 13.49% to 14.46%.

Combining both desktop and mobile versions of Safari, its market share continues to climb as well, up from 7.37% to 7.71% (0.34 point increase).

Despite reporting growth in the latest financial report, all major trackers show Opera’s market share contraction, this time it went down from 1.62% to 1.58% (0.04 point decrease).

It’s August already as we look at the July’s web browser market share numbers. As you will see form the stats below, this month was awful for everyone but WebKit.

Internet Explorer is first in our list and there are no surprises here. It has lost some of its market share again, down from 53.68% to 52.71% (0.97 point decrease).

Firefox 5 did not change the situation for Mozilla as its browser market share continues to grind lower, down from 21.67% to 21.47% (0.2 point decrease).

Google’s Chrome growth is in a steady uptrend, nothing new here, up from 13.11% to 13.49% (0.38 point increase).

Ever wanted to create a simple theme for the web browser of your choice? Then BT Engage, an interactive skin creator by Brand Thunder is a tool you’ve been waiting for.

The process is pretty straight forward. Upon starting, user is presented with a web browser screen that can be customized according to your individual needs, from backgrounds and logos to widgets.

However, if you are not keen on trying such activity, feel free to check ThunderThemes, which includes over 40,000 already created skins.

As Internet Explorer is heading towards the 49% market share mark and Firefox continues its downtrend, we see interesting times are approaching indeed, but as for now, let’s focus on what had happened over the course of June.

No surprises here, Internet Explorer has lost some of its market share again, down from 54.27% to 53.68% (0.59 point decrease).

After slightly increasing its share in the month of May, Firefox resumes its downtrend as it goes down again, down from 21.71% to 21.67% (0.04 point decrease).

In the expense of other web browsers, Google Chrome share continues to climb higher, up from 12.52% to 13.11% (0.59 point increase).

It looks like WebKit web browsers are on the roll, as Safari managed to increase its market share by another 0.2 point, up from 7.28% to 7.48%.

Opera took another big hit (-15% this time), losing 0.3 point of its market share, as it went down from 2.03% to 1.73%.

Firefox/Chrome/IE: Swidget is a browser add-on that swaps banner and box ads for useful widgets, like the weather, news headlines, or even your Facebook feed. More »

With the release of the Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview 2, Microsoft has decided to post results of the JavaScript Standards Test, which scores are available below.

The following web browsers were tested:

Internet Explorer 10 (Platform Preview 2)
Internet Explorer 9
Firefox 5
Google Chrome 13 (13.0.782.41)
Google Chrome 12 (12.0.742.112)
Safari 5.0.5 (7533.21.1)
Opera 11.50

As you can see from the results, IE10 has scored 99%, followed by Firefox 5.0, IE9 and Google Chrome 13 Beta. Surprisingly or not, Opera 11.50 has scored only 65%, lowest of all the web browsers.

What is test262?

test262 is a test suite intended to check agreement between JavaScript implementations and the ECMA-262 Specification (currently 5th Edition). The test suite contains thousands of individual tests, each of which tests some specific requirements of the ECMAScript specification.

Surprised, excited or both?

If you're stuck on an office computer and forced to use Internet Explorer because your system is locked down, Google has your back. The new version of Chrome Frame brings the features of Google Chrome to IE and doesn't need administrative rights to your PC to install. More »

According to TNW, Internet Explorer is the only modern web browser (Opera was not tested due to temporary issue with the test page) that is not affected by the recently found memory leak.

One of the developers has created a test site with the Google’s App Engine to demonstrate the issue.

Once the site is back online, users can reproduce the bug by following these steps:

- Request an image from a server.
- Image result contains “Cache-Control: no-store”.
- Display the image.

Instead of freeing allocated memory, none of the tested web browsers did that. Here are his tests results:

Safari 5: Failed
Firefox 4.x: Failed
IE 7/8/9: Passed

As THB said, No-Store attribute was created so browsers would not store image on the local disk. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Furthermore, it looks like the issue is not OS related and was confirmed by both Windows and Linux users.

So here you have it folks, today Microsoft has a good reason to smile about.

Some time ago, TomsHardware has published a nice list of benchmark results for the top 5 web browsers. Unfortunately, they did not test the final version of Firefox 4.

Well, this is no longer the case as the most recent tests now include the following:

Internet Explorer 9
Firefox 4
Google Chrome 10
Opera 11
Safari 5

Startup

Now here is a new benchmark for you to talk about: power consumption.

Turns out, Microsoft optimized Internet Explorer 9 not only for the performance but also for your wallet and productivity.

According to IE Blog, when it comes to power consumption, IE9 and Firefox 4 are the browsers to die for.

Want some good news? Just by using Internet Explorer 9 over Opera 11 you can have an extra hour of the battery life on your laptop!

What do you think about the results? For even more details, visit the original post.

TomsHardware has posted a nice benchmark and compared some of the most popular web browsers. Unfortunately, Firefox 4 was not included.

Browsers
Google Chrome 10.0.648.134
Firefox 3.6.15
Internet Explorer 9
Opera 11.01 (build 1190) 51
Safari 5.04 (7533.20.27)

Startup Times

Page Load Times

If you're a social networking butterfly, or if you have the malevolent aspirations of one day becoming a 'social media expert,' you almost certainly spend a vast amount of time surfing the Web. You probably use a modern browser like Firefox or Chrome, and you almost certainly have a ton of tabs open at the same time.

It can be hard work, keeping track of multiple websites. Hitting F5 is a pain in the ass -- and waiting those few seconds for a page to reload can be mighty frustrating. Then there's the matter of remembering all of your login names and passwords (because you don't use the same password on more than one site, right?)

Wouldn't it be great if there were some add-ons and extensions that could make light work of your surprisingly busy social networking lifestyle? Even if you only use Facebook or Twitter, there are still plenty of annoyances that could be offloaded to add-ons.

If you have found that onclick event does not work on Google Chrome, Firefox and Safari web browsers, then here is quick way to fix it:

Replace onclick form id with its name

For example, let’s say you have the following:

id=”form1″ name=”checkform1″

Find JS event:

onclick=”document.form1.cSSld.value=””

Replace with:

onclick=”document.checkform1.cSSld.value=””

All set. It now works with all web browsers.

It’s the 1st of March already, so let’s dive into February market share data.

With the release of Internet Explorer 9 RC, Microsoft has taken some share back, up from 56.00% to 56.77% (0.77 point increase).

While everyone awaits the final version of Firefox 4, an open source web browser continues the downtrend, from 22.75% to 21.74% (1.01 point decrease).

Google Chrome does not seem to be stopping anytime soon as we see a yet another increase, up from 10.70% to 10.93% (0.23 point increase).

Things look good in the Safari camp as well, this time its market share has increased by 0.06 point, up from 6.30% to 6.36%.

After some recover, Opera has lost 0.13 point of the market share in February, down from 2.15% to 2.28%.

With a great year for web browsers that 2010 was, it’s time to dive in directly into 2011 and check the very first month market share stats.

Internet Explorer continues the downtrend with a 1.08 point drop, from 57.08% to 56.00%.

With the upcoming Firefox 4 release, Mozilla’s web browser is still struggling to gain any significant market share, this time it lost a 0.06 point, down from 22.81% to 22.75%.

As stated in the title, Google Chrome has now more than 10% of the market share, up from 9.98% to 10.70% (0.72 point increase).

Just as iPhone and iPad popularity grows, so does Safari’s market share, its market share has now increased by a 0.41 point, from 5.89% to 6.30%.

With the release of Opera 11 Final, Norwegian web browser gained 0.05 point of the market share and went up from 2.23% to 2.28%.

Proving the Old World can still be positively refreshing when it comes to some things, the unstoppable decline of Internet Explorer in the motherland has finally left Firefox with the European pole position.

Internet Explorer, across all versions, lost about 8% of its market share between December 2009 and 2010. Firefox, on the other hand, by losing just 3% of its share, has ended up on top. The biggest winner, and seemingly the only browser to gain market share, is Google's fleet-footed Chrome browser, which began the year at 5% and ended at almost 15%.

In the rest of the world, Internet Explorer is still by far and away the most popular browser (at least according to StatCounter). In fact, the only other territory where Firefox is in the lead is Antarctica...