Firefox gains on IE in June

InfoWorld ^ | July, 14 2005 | Juan Carlos Perez

[N3WBI3]

The Mozilla Foundation's (Profile, Products, Articles) Firefox browser nibbled off a small market-share portion from Microsoft's (Profile, Products, Articles) Internet Explorer (IE) in June, continuing a consistent monthly trend this year.

Firefox increased its market share to 8.71 percent, up from 8 percent in May, while IE's share shrank to 86.56 percent from 87.23 percent, NetApplications.com, an Aliso Viejo, California, maker of applications for monitoring and measuring Web site usage, said Thursday in a statement.

Since the beginning of the year, Firefox has increased its market share every month between 0.5 percent and 1 percent, mostly at the expense of IE, according to NetApplications.com, which compiles its browser usage data from more than 40,000 Web sites monitored by its HitsLink.com service.

As Firefox approaches the 10 percent market share milestone, it is expected to gain "significant traction" once its acceptance grows among corporations, according to NetApplications.com

Rounding out the top five browsers in June were Apple Computer's (Profile, Products, Articles) Safari with 1.93 percent market share, America Online's (Profile, Products, Articles) Netscape (Overview, Articles, Company) with 1.55 percent and Opera (Overview, Articles, Company) Software ASA's Opera with 0.59 percent.

[N3WBI3]

OSS PING

If you are interested in a new OSS ping list please mail me

[softwarecreator]

As an IE user for many years, I gotta admit FireFox is good enough to give IE a run for it's money.

It's gonna be tuff for FireFox to make BIG dents into the huge marketshare Explorer has but it is on the upswing while IE appears to be stagnant and ready to start freefalling.

[ken21]

i downloaded the new version.

i notice that when i post on fr and hit the enter key, everything squishes together for a moment, but then returns to full view.

firefox didn't do that before the new version.

[N3WBI3]

Whats really going to hold FF back is site compatability for erp packages in the office..

[softwarecreator]

Enterprise Resource Planning?

Really?  Is it that big of a concern?  Which ones would have problems?

[N3WBI3]

Deltek, Great Plains, ESS, pretty much everyone I have ever worked with..

[softwarecreator]

Okay, but in the "real world" aren't these kind of small?  What do they take up, maybe, .05% of the marketshare?

I think FF is, in many ways, better that IE.    At the minumum, it is as good as explorer.  The problem is not really going to be compatibilty with custom, or niche, markets but breaking thru the MS domination.  This is the same problem facing Linux, to a degree.  Linux has other, more serious issues, too.

I think good word of mouth is what is going to help FF gain ground.  That and learning the mistakes of Netscape.

[N3WBI3]

Okay, but in the "real world" aren't these kind of small? What do they take up, maybe, .05% of the marketshare?

Thats true but there are other things the require ie to render correctly (mostly because of poor coding.

I think FF is, in many ways, better that IE. At the minumum, it is as good as explorer. The problem is not really going to be compatibilty with custom, or niche, markets but breaking thru the MS domination. This is the same problem facing Linux, to a degree. Linux has other, more serious issues, too.

I could not agree more

[Calvinist_Dark_Lord]

I think good word of mouth is what is going to help FF gain ground. That and learning the mistakes of Netscape.

i believe that they might have indeed done that. Perhaps i'm being a bit tinfoil, but did you notice that the projected release of Firefox 2.0 appears to be timed to the release of IE 7.0? Whether or not that will be a reality remains open to question in light of the delays of the release of Firefox 1.1.

[Knitebane]

Deltek, Great Plains, ESS, pretty much everyone I have ever worked with..

Great Plains is owned by Microsoft. They are in the process of rewriting all of the software in Visual C++ and .NET. There are expected to be several new, incompatible versions of Great Plains before the changeover is complete in 2008.

Deltek might as well be owned by Microsoft. But they only have about 8000 clients. That's not enough to worry about in the context of the browser market.

SAP and PeopleSoft own the high end. Their apps work fairly well with Firefox.

In the mid-range, there's still Blythco. They are still publishing MAS90 and it's decendants. The MAS500 accounting appliance is OS agnostic.

Additionally, installing Firefox doesn't mean that most users won't still have IE available. IE can't be uninstalled from modern versions of Windows.