I began playing with browsers when I heard about Netscape Mosaic. It was still beta at the time, I think somewhere around 0.71. I stuck with Netscape for years, and used it alongside Internet Explorer on several computers. But MSIE kept getting better while Mosaic lagged behind and continued to have instability problems.
A lot of people have a kind of instinctive hatred of Bill Gates and Microsoft as a monopolistic bully. But Internet explorer is just plain better and faster than the various forms that Netscape has morphed into. I think the reason for the numbers is that a lot of uninformed users went over to Firefox because many publications pushed it. Then they got tired of it and reverted.
Confirmed Firefox users are another kettle of fish. Presumably they will stick with it.
"But Internet explorer is just plain better and faster"
Srry, your'e living in the past there. It was better than netscape, especially when netscape was still lagging in it's rendering engine.
Now IE is in no way superior to firefox. As long as they continue to include the horrible ActiveX, it will continue to suck.
MS's usual policies of "innovate until you dominate" are at work with IE. Now the've stagnated an any 'innovation' they throw out is just a rehash or a copy of something firefox already does.
Ha. Haha. Bwahahaha...Oh man you're killing me! Haha. ha.
Oh my god, I think you might be serious....