Internet Explorer’s Market Share Keeps Falling
During the last few months, IE has steadily loss market share to Firefox. IE’s share has fallen from 95.5% to just under 90% in the last few months since Firefox released their “stable” version. The company, WebSideStory, that collected this data, samples more than 30 million daily Internet users from more than 200 countries to determine the browser-usage shares. Doing the quick math, the numbers suggest that 1.5 million of the daily websurfers have made a switch from IE to some other browser.
The percentage of users browsing with IE has steadily fallen since June, while Firefox and some other competing browser have shown gains. Over that time, IE use has dropped a total of about 5 percent from its perch at 95.5 percent.
Surveys from another Web analytics provider, OneStat.com, have reflected a similar pattern and even put IE’s worldwide share below 90 percent.
Firefox, which is Mozilla’s standalone browser, was released as a stable version in November.
WebSideStory tracks Mozilla’s other browser with a category that includes browsers from America Online Inc.’s Netscape unit. That category dropped slightly to 2.6 percent in mid-January from 2.8 percent a month earlier.
Remaining browsers, which largely are Opera Software ASA’s namesake browser and Apple Computer Inc.’s Safari browser, showed a gain of almost a full percentage point. They reached a 2.1 percent usage share, compared with 1.3 percent a month earlier, according to WebSideStory.
It is good to see that people are starting the realize that there are other safer and better ways to visit the web. Firefox, being the catalyst of the movement, will build steam as their browser gains the word-of-mouth momentum. Microsoft will really have to examine what the people want in a browser if they are to keep their dominating piece of the pie.
January 21st, 2005 at 1:09 pm
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January 21st, 2005 at 6:47 pm
those stats numbers are misleading. I have a very busy website, with non-platform specific contents and standards compliant. The share of IE has never been more than 81%. Currently, IE’s share on my site is about 69%.
Those stats companies keep track of too many visitors to sites that enforces the usage of IE, like sites that use Active X controls. So of course, those sites will skew the stats towards IE, and if they’re big, they’ll skew them sharply.
I don’t believe for a second that IE’s real market share (where users have the choice) has ever been more than 85%.
January 22nd, 2005 at 1:26 am
Of course, every website depending on topic is going to vary greatly. Also, on some sites, I have to tell it I’m running WinIE even though I’m running SAfari. Just like how many people do not know how to redirect their IE NOT to load MSN as it’s first and on every browser page open?