Dutch Web Analytics firm OneStat released a report this week which claims that the global usage share for the Firefox web browser is now at 12.93%, while Microsoft's Internet Explorer is down to 83.05%. That's a growth of 1.14% from mid-May to early July for Firefox, and a drop of 2.12% for Microsoft over the same period.
Focusing on the United States, the numbers are even more dire for Microsoft. Here they hold just 79.78% market share, while Firefox stands at 15.82%. Niels Brinkman, co-founder of OneStat, says that the sharp increase for Firefox is a surprise. "It seems that the global usage share of Mozilla Firefox starts to grow rapidly again after a period of no growth," he stated.
Viewed over a longer period of time, these results aren't so surprising, but the OneStat report released in mid-May had suggested that Microsoft had begun to hold onto or even regain ground. Today's report reveals that finding as a temporary blip on an overall trend of decline for Internet Explorer as Firefox slowly gains favor around the world.
The next version of the Firefox browser is due soon, and a "public beta" version of Firefox was released today. The new version of Firefox does not promise any radical changes, but does add a spell-checker and many internal improvements aimed at security and crash-recovery.
Microsoft discontinued development of Internet Explorer for several years, but faced with steadily declining usage of the browser, they have begun development on version 7. A "public beta" of that browser is also available, and is a more dramatic update. Early reviewers say that it brings the two browsers very close to parity in terms of features, with Internet Explorer gaining tabbed browsing and improved support for web standards.
Firefox is most popular in Germany, where 39.02% of web pages are viewed with the browser, while Internet Explorer is most-used in the U.K., where it maintains an 86.23% share of the market. Still, even in the U.K., Microsoft's share has dropped from 87.88% less than two months ago.
The site statistics here at Blogcritics.org paint a much bleaker picture for Microsoft. Here Internet Explorer is responsible for only 72% or 73% of our pageviews, depending on the source. Other sites clearly favor Firefox less.
Article comments
1 - Steve
thats because IE sucks, i dont use it no more because it eats my memory and cpu to system crashin point so instead of fixing the problem i turned to firefox, more features more stability and plenty of addons which are easy as pie to install.