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Firefox continues to swallow IE's market share

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September 1, 2009, 3:33 PM EST

Over the years, Mozilla Firefox has steadily chipped away at Internet Explorer's market share. Last month, Microsoft's browser lost its greatest slice of the pie since November 2008 -- and Firefox ate most of it. Internet Explorer's share dropped 1.1% to 66.6% during August, and slipped 8.6% in the last 12 months. All the while, Firefox's cut grew .8% to 23.8% in August.

Within the ranks of Internet Explorer, IE6 lost 2.4%, slipping to 24.8%, IE7 dropped 1.9% to 21.2%, and IE8 rose 2.7%, claiming 15.2% of the browser's total share. Apple's Safari gained slightly, up to 4.1%, Google's Chrome saw a .3% rise to 2.9%, and Opera grew .1% to 2.1%. These figures may change significantly in the months to come, though.

Following a suit in the EU, Microsoft has proposed to include a "ballot screen" with its upcoming operating system, Windows 7. Slated for an October 22 launch, European versions of Windows 7 will prompt users with a list of major web browsers. The ballot will contain the top five web browsers, and market share will determine their position on the list.

In addition, Google recently landed a deal with Sony which will have Chrome pre-installed on Vaio-branded laptops sold in the US. Where do you think the shares will stand a year from now?

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User Comments (5)

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EXCellR8
on September 1, 2009
3:40 PM
I installed Firefox on a whole bunch of computers this past month, I wonder if I contributed to that

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Guest
on September 1, 2009
4:19 PM
I would like to see schools & government institutions mandate that any/all browsers used are fully compliant to open web standards.

Try the following acid3 test on IE and compare the results to Firefox/Chrome/Safari/Opera. IE 8 is certainly better than IE6/7, but still fails miserably.

http://acid3.acidtests.org/

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TomSEA
on September 1, 2009
4:29 PM
I have a lot of friends jumping on the Chrome bandwagon. It's still too basic for my tastes. Been a Firefox user for 2-3 years now. As far as what the percentage shares will be a year from now? Idon't think it will be that dramatically different from what it is now. You still have a huge share of users that simply don't care and are perfectly happy with IE8. Also, large businesses and corporations use IE simply because it's packaged with the OS licensing agreement.

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poundsmack
on September 1, 2009
5:38 PM
"Firefox continues to swallow IE's market share"
so thats what the kids are calling it these days... sorry, my mind went to an odd place while reading a tech headline.
Honestly I must have been giving the average user far to little credit. I deal with users on a daily basis that think the internet it that "e" logo on their desktop. I supose more users are becoming educated, or at least trying something new. I don't see firefox bundled to much on new pc's any more than it ever was, so this is kind of interesting to see this kind of adoption.

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tengeta
on September 1, 2009
11:15 PM
And what do you know, people actually try Opera.
But seriously... its nice to see the percentages go up, especially since it wasn't the stupid Windows 7 ballot box in Europe that did it.

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