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Web apps that rely on features that only modern browsers can offer are becoming a standard feature on the Internet. Sadly, though, the fact that a lot of users don't regularly upgrade their browsers (or that their IT departments don't allow them to upgrade) complicates matters greatly for those developers who want to use the latest and greatest features of modern browser technologies like HTML5. The latest data from Pingdom and StatCounter, however, notes that a surprisingly large number of users (71%) already run the latest official versions of their browser.

Digg's users are still in the middle of their fifth major revolt on the site and the effect of this current uprising is now starting to become more apparent. According to the latest data from Statcounter, referral traffic from Digg to its network hit its lowest point ever on Monday, while traffic from Digg competitor Reddit increased dramatically. Statcounter's CEO Aodhan Cullen notes that "Abandon Digg Day" on Monday turned out to be a "Redd Monday" for Reddit.

After months of slow but steady increases in its market share, Bing's share of the search market in the US and globally fell for the first time in September. According to StatCounter's Global Stats, Bing's share of the search market in the US fell from 9.64% in August to 8.51% last month. Globally, Bing didn't fare much better, as it went from 3.58% to 3.25%. Yahoo's share went from 10.5% in August to only 9.4% in September. The combined share of Bing and Yahoo has now fallen to 17.91%.

We already knew that Bing, Microsoft's new search engine was doing quite well, but today, Microsoft released its own data about the state of the service. Bing launched just a bit more than one month ago, and since then, we have seen reports from numerous third-party web analytics firms that Bing was indeed doing quite well. According to Microsoft's own data, Bing saw an 8% growth in unique users in June compared to the previous month. The company also noted that the number of users who would be "likely to recommend" Bing to others doubled in June.

Yesterday, Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 finally came out of beta, but according to the latest data from StatCounter's GlobalStats, users are not exactly in a rush to update their browsers to IE8 just yet. Even though IE8 had been in public beta testing for a year, its market share only rose from 1.39% on its launch day to 1.56% today.

StatCounter, one of the larger free online stats services, just released a new online research tool that monitors the market share of search engines, browsers, and operating systems. StatCounter Global Stats' focus is different from other services like Compete, Alexa, Google Trends, or Quantcast, as it doesn't break out data by specific sites, but only focuses on these high-level statistics. StatCounter's data goes back until the middle of last year and allows you to break the statistics down by continent and country.