Firefox is Gaining Ground on Internet Explorer
The Associated Press has reported recently on an interesting trend in browser usage that was originally revealed last week by WebSideStory, an independent Web analytics company. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which had enjoyed a market share upwards of 95 percent as recently as June of 2004, has now slipped below the 90 percent mark in the United States. Firefox, an open-source browser developed by Mozilla, appears to have capitalized on IE’s losses, increasing its share to nearly 7 percent. In fact, Firefox’s growth has been impressive enough that, according to the original WebSideStory report, achieving a 10 percent market share by the end of the year is not unreasonable. The AP story has been picked up by many mainstream outlets, including CNN, ABC News, and, ironically enough, MSNBC.
Incidentally, Summersault has noticed the shift towards alternative browsers–especially Firefox–as well. The usage statistics for a national, high-profile site that Summersault is involved with show that, for this site at least, the number of people using Internet Explorer has decreased by nearly 4 percent in the past 6 months. Meanwhile, the percentage of surfers using Firefox has more than tripled over that same span.
The slippage of IE’s market share has certainly not gone unnoticed by the folks in Redmond, as just today the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports that Microsoft has announced that the next version of Internet Explorer (due out this summer) will include tabbed browsing. Tabbed browsing is just one of the many user-interface and security features that are already de rigueur for browsers these days, and it is surprising that Microsoft is only now jumping on the bandwagon. Clearly, Microsoft is taking the threat that Firefox (and other quality web browsers) poses to IE’s hegemony seriously, but it remains to be seen if Microsoft’s new Internet Explorer offerings will be enough to change the usage trend back to IE’s favor.
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