The dominance of Internet Explorer as an Internet browser is not matched by the British public’s perception of it, data from BrandIndex had revealed. BrandIndex is a YouGov service which monitors public view of brands, and operates both in the UK and the US.
Taking the impression measure – i.e., people expressing both positive and negative views on a given brand – and look at total impressions, we can see that Internet Explorer is still the browser about which most people have an impression, with over 4 in 10 people expressing some sort of view.
Firefox is not far behind with just under 4 in 10, whilst Chrome has around a quarter mentioning it and Safari about 15%.
Internet Explorer seen in worse light than competitors
This picture changes dramatically when we look at proportional scores (the number that disregards simple amount of impressions and instead looks at positive views minus negative views, to get a net score of people’s perceptions).
Internet Explorer now comes bottom, with a score of 14 on Monday 11th, showing that IE gets nearly as many negative mentions as positive ones.
In contrast, Firefox’s latest score was +83 (which shows that 91.5% of impressions were positive and 8.5% negative), Chrome was on +58 (79% positive and 21% negative) and Safari had +53 (76.5 % positive and 23.5 % negative).
These numbers provide an insight into why Internet Explorer has lost share over the past few years – essentially people perceive its competitors to be better. It still holds an advantage in terms of being the default browser for many but will need to up its game if it doesn’t want to see a further decline; this data shows that, once people try something else, they tend to prefer it.
A version of this article appears here in CityAM
