Firefox Continues To Chip Away At IE's Share

TechWeb News ^ | Feb. 28, 2005 | Gregg Keizer

[West Coast Conservative]

Mozilla's Firefox keeps chipping away at Microsoft's massive lead in browser usage, two Web metrics firms reported Monday.

San Diego, Calif.-based WebSideStory, which last released usage numbers in January, said that in the last five weeks, Firefox has gained an additional 0.74 percent to account for 5.7 percent of all browsers used in the U.S. Microsoft's Internet Explorer, meanwhile, now stands at 89.9 percent, a drop from January's 90.3 percent, and the first time WebSideStory pegged IE as falling under the 90-percent mark.

"That 7/10s of a point compares well with previous increases," said Geoff Johnston, an analyst for WebSideStory. "From June to November [2004], Firefox saw a pretty steady half-a-percent-point increase each month."

While there are indications that Firefox's growth rate is slowing -- the latest numbers show a growth of about 15 percent over the previous period, while that period had grown by 22 percent over the one before that -- Johnston saw it differently. "I don't see [the growth] stopping or flattening," he said.

"The buzz around Firefox keeps growing, and it's buzz that drives people to change," Johnston added. "Mozilla's marketing has been very guerrilla. You're not seeing it spend millions of dollars on TV. Instead, it's a powerful ground swell."

"Firefox keeps plugging away with new features," said Johnston, of Firefox. "That's what got them where they are today. Microsoft's lack of development on IE left open a window of opportunity, and Firefox took advantage of it. Microsoft didn't think that window was there, but with the announcement that it's working on IE 7.0, they've realized that they had left the window open."

[jennyjenny]

This was fixed about eight months ago. Firefox now loads in about five seconds or so.

Not on my computer. It was loaded in late December 2004, and it takes at least 20-30 seconds to load, or just never gets there at all.

[Terpfen]

Do computer geeks get paid some kind of fee for installing this on their customer's computers?

No, we just want you to stop using bad products. Most of the traffic on the Internet comes from spam, viruses, worms, and other such nasties that are propagated by people who don't take rudimentary steps to protect their computers--those machines are called "zombie boxes."

If every Windows user ran spyware/virus scanners once a week, and stopped using Internet Explorer, most of the Internet's malware problems would disappear overnight.

And yes, I know, this is an old thread, but I just had to reply to this.