In 2013, Internet Explorer reversed some of its historic losses, Google released Chrome for Android, and Windows 8 surpassed OS X and Windows Vista to become the third most widely used desktop operating system.
Compared to last month, Internet Explorer actually fell slightly, declining by 0.45 points. Firefox, Safari, and Opera also fell, down 0.19, 0.08, and 0.06 points, respectively. The month's winner was Chrome, which picked up 0.78 points.
Over the course of the entire year, Internet Explorer was up 3.14 points on 2012. Firefox was down 1.47 points. Chrome was also down by 1.82 points. Safari rose 0.58 points.
In spite of the poor result in December—Internet Explorer's biggest drop for more than a year—2013 was overall a good year for Redmond's browser. With Internet Explorer 9 being generally regarded as a decent enough browser and versions 10 and 11 held to be downright respectable, Microsoft has at last put the dark days of the mid-2000s behind it.
Just as long as you use a recent version of its operating system, that is—there's no good version of Internet Explorer available for Windows XP.
