Many companies' IT departments do not allow users to install third-party browsers on their work computers. This has caused many people to use IE at work over the past few years and switch to Chrome on their own computers after work. StatCounter's traffic monitoring curve clearly reflects this tendency:
Traffic curve of the world's top 12 browsers before December 1, (image click to enlarge)
We can see that the peak hours of Chrome and IE9 are two days on weekends, while IE8 is the opposite. This means that a considerable number of people are forced to use IE8 at work, and they will immediately switch to other browsers when they go home. Windows 7, which has a large sales volume, is preinstalled with IE8. According to Microsoft's quarterly report, Windows 7 currently occupies 40% of the enterprise market.
According to StatCounter statistics, the Internet Explorer 9 traffic has exceeded Internet Explorer 8 since April, and has become the Internet Explorer with the highest usage. At the beginning of the year, Microsoft announced that it would automatically upgrade the IE browser, just as Google Chrome has been doing. The rapid growth of IE9 may also be related to this. However, it is clear that a considerable number of enterprise users do not enjoy the automatic upgrade of their computers, so many people use IE8 for daily work and IE9 for weekends.
In contrast, Chrome and Firefox are much smoother to upgrade, and each major version update can basically replace the previous version within two weeks.
When IE9 was launched, it was well received because of improved interface design. However, in actual use, I often encounter browser crashes and crashes, I can't find any reason to take it as the main force. IE's share has shrunk by half in the past four years and is now only 2.84% higher than Chrome's. If Microsoft wants to stop the decline in Internet Explorer share for several years, it still needs to work hard. Maybe Windows 8 with IE10 pre-installed will be the beginning.