Internet Explorer pulls ahead in market share

[Hivetyrant]

Hmm, its not extremely new, but this is strange and troubling news, as I thought Firefox was doing much better....

Internet Explorer Pulls Ahead of Firefox in Market Share Web monitoring firm NetApplications has published browser usage figures that show Microsoft's Internet Explorer pulling market share from rival Firefox for the first time in many months. Internet Explorer was used by 87.2% of web surfers in July, up from 86.56% for the month of June. Firefox, on the other hand, dropped from a June mark of 8.71% to 8.07% in July. We find it interesting that Firefox lost almost 7/10% of its market share in a month after converting to a for-profit corporation, but it may just be coincidence. Firefox also passed another milestone in the fact that it passed 80 million downloads over the weekend. Firefox and Internet Explorer account for over 95% of the market share, with Safari coming in third with 2.1%. Opera and other browsers round up the pack. [Co-published with friend site GeekCoffee]

[Jorath Calar]

Heh, funny coincidence...
it's almost a month since I stopped using Firefox, was kind of forced to because all I use these days are the computers on campus and they all use IE...

[LennonCook]

Stats are useless.

Given the user-agent switcher, the number of sites that lock you out if your user agent string isn't IE6/Win, and the fact that IE hits the server again for the data even if it has no reason to and doesn't use that data (eg, going back), means that IEs stats will be bloated more than a little. Also, alot of scripts don't recognise the UA string properly: some identify Opera as IE6 (since by default it uses something like "IE/Compatible (Opera 8)"), the various "I know what you're doing!" images identify me as using Firefox (when I actually use Epiphany), etc.

And where do they get their data from? Given the nature of the web, it is infeasable that they have monitored any more than a small subsection of it - which will always be atleast a little biased.

EDIT: And Firefox didn't "convert to a for-profit corporation". The non-profit Mozilla Foundation founded a for-profit subsidary, the Mozilla Corporation, which is wholly owned by MoFo - it is still a non-profit organisation, they were just worried that the amount of donations they were getting were putting them on the (extremely) high end of what a non-profit can earn.

[ 09-30-2005, 04:46 AM: Message edited by: LennonCook ]

[Thoran]

Hmm... I would've guessed that Firefox had more penetration than 8%... there are a whole lot of people who just hate M$ and since Firefox is in many ways a better browser... there's only a few reasons to switch back once you try it. I use it as my primary browser, not because I hate Microsoft but because it's a good product and Microsoft desperately needs competition.

Also... I have no doubt that if IE wasn't bundled with Windows it wouldn't be the dominant browser AT ALL. While other companies have been innovating , IE has been entirely stagnant. The thing is a dinosaur.

[Morgeruat]

I only use IE occasionally for sites that use alot of javascript which Firefox still has trouble dealing with, I suspect that the numbers are skewed towards sites like that where even with recent improvements Firefox users switch in order to make the pages less troublesome.

[mad=dog]

Alternative heading "Fluctuation shows slight decrease in Firefox' share after a nearly unbroken period of increase". Selective reading.