Firefox passes 10% market share

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Written by Tim

Friday, 04 November 2005 15:44

OneStat.com, the online statistics surveyors, has announced that they have seen an increase in FireFox use. A year ago Firefox's share of internet users was 7.35%, which then rose steadily to 8.45% in February 2005, then to 8.69% a few weeks later. The latest figures put FireFox's global market share at 11.5% - its highest ever - though it still lags far behind Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which has lost 1.2% since April, falling to 85.5%.

At a country level, FireFox is most popular in the US with 14.51%, while a mere 4.94% of net-connected Brits use the alternative browser; IE dominates the market UK browser market with a 93.37% share. Naturally, tech-savvy types like the bit-tech readership are well ahead of the curve: in October, 40% of you used FireFox, 5.4% used Opera and just 50.1% used Internet Explorer. A year ago, only a quarter of you had made the switch to FireFox and 66.2% used IE; interestingly, Opera's share has remained virtually the same over the period.

The trend is expected to continue: Mozilla have just release the first Release Candidate for FireFox 1.5 and will continue to improve as they head towards FireFox 2.0, dubbed The Next Big Thing. Microsoft are struggling stem the flow of users fleeing Internet Explorer, as their next release, IE7, isn't expected until Windows XP is replaced with Windows Vista. No release date has been announced, but a Microsoft spokeswoman said: "We expect Windows Vista to be broadly available in all channels - as retail, full-packaged product and on new PCs - in the second half of 2006.

"Our timeline is driven by the quality of the product. When we feel the product has effectively incorporated the consumer feedback we receive during the beta process, we will release the final product. At this point, we are on track for general availability of Windows Vista in the second half of 2006 or the holiday timeframe."

written by Geoff Richards
found on bit-tech.net