Truism: Internet Explorer sucks, in terms of user experience.

Want another? Firefox’s spread across the web is due almost entirely due to the buzz generated by it’s users.

This is the sense that we all had who sit around pontificating about these sorts of things on a daily basis. The folks over at ViralHeat have used their natural language interpretation tools to analyze the public timelines of multiple social media silos to get a handle on the buzz around the various major browsers.

The highlights:

– Chrome is overwhelmingly more popular amongst its vocal users, far more so than any of the other browsers: 60.6% of posts are positive.

– As popular as Chrome is with its users, IE is almost as unpopular: almost half of vocal users are ticked at IE.

– Despite being bundled with the most popular OS of all time, IE is the least talked about browser: 13.6%

These numbers could be indicative of a couple of things.  I imagine that this is a fair representation of actual user sentiment, but as you move up the spectrum of “coolness” in browsers as indicated by perception from the early adopter market (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome), you’ll see the positive sentiment of buzz about that browser follow a general rise.  Early adopters are going to be more densely crowded onto social networks than mainstream users, and an early adopter wouldn’t be caught dead saying something positive about Internet Explorer.

It’s an interesting dataset that tends to back up with hard numbers the general sense many of us had already.