by Playfuls Staff |
12th October 2006
According to a new post by Ars Technica, Internet Explorer has lost serious ground in favor of FireFox and other independent browsers. But according to other posts, IE actually won.[more]
The Ars Technica article states that “Internet Explorer, which has been the market share king for many years now, has been falling steadily since the launch of Firefox 1.0 and has now reached its lowest point in over two years at 82.10 percent. Firefox, on the other hand, has been growing steadily, reaching 12.46 percent market share. Safari holds its third place spot, but sees increasing numbers as well at 3.53 percent.”
But according to the same source, not only FireFox managed to surge into IE’s market share but also Apple’s Safari did too.” Firefox passed the 10 percent mark just under a year ago and has been enjoying continued success on Linux, Windows, and OS X. It has even become the browser of choice for many savvy users. Safari, while holding much smaller numbers than IE and Firefox, is also becoming nothing to sneeze at. A year ago, Safari had less than 2 percent of the browser market but has almost doubled its numbers since then. Netscape and Opera both carry under 1 percent of the market and Mozilla is dead last, just above <
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Apparently, things are rather different from what the site mentions: one web analytics company, OneStat, thinks that the tide is already turning. According to its figures, browser usage in the last quarter showed an increase for Explorer. However, OneStat could not explain the discrepancy: "We track our figures the same way that Net Applications does," the company said. The company didn't have an explanation as to why its figures differed so markedly from other companies' - although it did rule out one explanation. "Microsoft is not a client of ours," it said.
According to analysts at Web metrics firm OneStat, IE picked up 2.8 percentage points of market share between July and September 2006, while Firefox dropped 1.4 points during the same time period. IE had never really lost huge amounts of market share to Firefox, but Mozilla's contender had been picking up market share at IE's expense fairly consistently for about a year and a half. Currently, OneStat says that IE controls about 85.9 percent of the overall browser market, compared to 11.5 percent for Firefox.
Despite the dip this quarter, Firefox continues to rack up impressive numbers for an alternative product that was developed almost solely by enthusiasts. Firefox is the number one browser in countries such as Germany, Australia, and Italy, where it commands between 21.6 and 33.4 percent of the market. In the US, Firefox is second to IE, with 14.88 percent of the market.
While there are other browsers out there, all of them are non-events from a market share perspective. For example, Apple's Safari browser, which is available only to Mac OS X users, fell 0.2 percentage points to 1.6 percent of all Web traffic.
According to various online reports, Microsoft is set to release a major upgrade to IE, called IE 7, sometime this month. While I can't corroborate those rumors, Microsoft had previously stated that it would release IE 7 in the fourth quarter of 2006, around the same time as it completed Windows Vista. Microsoft plans to complete Windows Vista between October 18 and November 8, depending on how its final anti-bug crusade goes.
