Firefox eats away at IE market share
Microsoft Internet Explorer has maintained some overwhelming market share against alternative browsers, but it seems that the browser is slowly losing some of that market share every month. According to Net Applications, Microsoft Internet Explorer’s market share has shrunk from 74.8% in March 2008 to 67.55% in January 2009. In contrast Firefox, Safari, and Chrome have seen small gains since that time.
The clear leader of the alternative browsers is Firefox whose market share rose from 17.83% in March 2008 to 21.53% in 2009. Safari’s market share rose from 5.82% to 8.29%; while Chrome has seen a steady climb from 0.78% to 1.12% during the same time period. Opera on the other hand went up and down almost every month during the period ending their market share in January 2009 at a mere 0.7%.
I hope this sends a message to Microsoft. Clearly, Internet Explorer’s market share isn’t as insurmountable as Windows. It seems to me that Microsoft is paying dearly for its original decision to only upgrade Internet Explorer with its Windows operating system. Firefox took full advantage of that poor decision and now the Firefox browser is closing in on being on a quarter of all web browsing computers.
