Wednesday, 03 November 2004

Internet Explorer keeps losing US market share
by Joris Evers, IDG News Service

Mozilla doubles market share
__________________________________


Although Microsoft still dominates the Web browser space, its Internet 
Explorer has continued to lose market share in the USA to open-source 
rival Mozilla.

Internet Explorer held more than 95 percent of the US browser market for 
several years, but its share dropped to 94.7 percent in July and had 
declined further to 92.9 percent on Oct. 29, WebSideStory, a San Diego 
Web metrics company, said yesterday.

Benefiting from high-profile security vulnerabilities in the Microsoft 
browser and recommendations by experts to switch, the Mozilla Foundation 
has seen its market share rise. The Mozilla Suite, Netscape and Firefox 
held 6 percent of the market at the end of October, up from 3.5 percent 
in June, according to WebSideStory.

"It is not a fast drop for Internet Explorer, but it might be considered 
a fast gain for Mozilla," said Geoff Johnston, an analyst with WebSideStory.

Firefox is the Mozilla Foundation's stand-alone browser. The Mozilla 
Suite includes a browser, email client, internet relay chat client and 
web page editor. Netscape, distributed by AOL, is based on Mozilla 
technology. The Mozilla open source project was started in early 1998 by 
Netscape.

The rise of Firefox has been especially remarkable, Johnston said. It 
was introduced in February this year when Mozilla renamed its Firebird 
project.

"It was one thing in July to see Microsoft starting to lose market share 
for the first time in a trend-like fashion. But we did not know whether 
it would continue. It has," Johnston said.

Meanwhile, Microsoft delivered some updates to Internet Explorer with 
Service Pack 2 (SP2) for Windows XP and is working on a new version of 
the browser that will ship as part of Longhorn, the codename for the 
next version of Windows due in 2006, a company spokesman said. Also, the 
Internet Explorer development team at Microsoft has emerged from 
obscurity by starting a weblog, at http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/.

Microsoft sees the market share fluctuation as the "natural ebb and flow 
of a competitive marketplace," the spokesman said.

Users who try other browsers ultimately will come back to Internet 
Explorer, the spokesman said. "As they check out the alternatives, we 
think they’ll discover that critical factors such as website 
compatibility, application compatibility and enterprise management and 
support are just better with Internet Explorer."

Ha! Ha! Ha!

-- 
Regards,
Mike

Failed the exam for
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MCSE - Minesweeper Consultant and Solitaire Expert
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