Internet Explorer gains browser market share in February

Microsoft's famed browser, Internet Explorer (IE), is fighting back against its rivals with figures showing its market share rose in February.

The results from NetMarketShare showed IE was responsible for 63.2 per cent of browsing on Windows machines up from 62.4 in January with IE8 rising 1.03 and IE9 rising 0.1 per cent.

However, these new figures were as a result of NetMarketShare collaborating with the Central Information Agency (CIA) to redistribute internet users by location. This gave countries like China a much bigger portion of global market share compared to smaller Western states.

As a result, IE's biggest rival, Mozilla's Firefox, saw its share fall.

"With the new C.I.A. numbers factored in, Firefox loses global share since many of the countries it is most popular in (Western European, in particular) now have a lower percentage of global internet users," said the report.

"Internet Explorer gains as browser usage shifts to countries with higher percentages of Internet Explorer users."

Firefox now holds 21.74 per cent market share compared to 22.75 per cent in January.

The CIA figures put the UK in seventh place with 51,444,000 internet users or 2.83 per cent of the global number. It was the second highest European nation by users behind Germany, which had 65,125,000 or 3.58 per cent.

China topped the list with 389,000,000 users 21.39 per cent with the US in second place on 245,000,000 users 13.47 per cent.