Firefox's Traction
According to Netapplications.com, Firefox's share of the browser market climbed to 8.71% in June from 8% in May, while IE's share shrank to 86.56% from 87.23%. Netapplications, which monitors 40,000 Web sites, said Firefox has been adding 0.5% to 1% of market share a month since the beginning of the year. As Firefox gets close to the 10% level, you have to ask whether its growth is close to being fully realized - now that all the geeks, bleeding-edge and leading-edge folks are on board - or whether Firefox is poised to hit the mainstream, and on its way to 20% to 25% of the browser market. It will be interesting to see whether IE7 with its tabs and increased anti-virus features can stem the tide. According to the Mozilla Web site, Firefox has been downloaded 64 million times.
July 16th, 2005 at 10:37 pm
It'll be interesting to watch. I think Microsoft has finally started to move after (eventually) realising that IE was not going to be the 95% used browser of yesteryear.
I think Firefox will struggle to reach around 20% market share - because it seems that MS are going to do what everybody wants: tabbed, rss, better security ….
What Mozilla (with Firefox) has done has been great for internet users. They have pushed Microsoft to do better with IE - that's the natural consequences of competition … the winners will be us, the user.