September 30, 2005

IE market share holds steady against Firefox

Written by Brian Turner

According to web analytics company WebSideStory, Firefox’s success in gaining market share from Internet Explorer is beginning to falter. The company says that Firefox, an open source browser, has increased its market by just one percentage point over the last five months - from 6.75 per cent in April to 7.86 per cent in September. When Firefox was released, in November 2004, it initially gained one percentage point in market share per month.

Internet Explorer is now maintaining its market share after losing ground to Firefox in the period immediately after the browser’s release. WebSideStory, which monitors usage figures from thousands of websites, estimates IE’s market share at 88.46 per cent in September, only slightly down on 88.86 per cent in late April. The gains Firefox has made in the last five months are largely at the expense of browsers such as Opera and Apple Safari.

In an inteview with â€˜Information Weekâ€™, Geoff Johnston, an analyst with WebSideStory said: “It looks like Firefox has hit the push-back point. We always knew there was a finite number of early adopters out there and a finite number of Microsoft haters who would switch to something new”.

Filed Under Software