Firefox Still Hurting Internet Explorer’s Market Share

By Jim on March 1st, 2005

Great, I’m happy to see this continuing.

While Mozilla Firefox has slowed its growth pace, the open-source browser still is making enough inroads to knock Microsoft’s Internet Explorer below 90 percent user share for the first time in three years.

Web browser user-share data released Monday show that Firefox’s rate of growth has dropped slightly since its Version 1.0 release. The browser had been increasing about one percentage point a month since November, but the pace has fallen this month, reports Web analytics provider WebSideStory Inc.

For the five weeks that ended Feb. 18, Firefox usage had jumped 0.74 percentage points to 5.7 percent. That growth was enough to hurt Microsoft Corp.’s IE, which dropped 0.43 percentage points to 89.9 percent, WebSideStory reported. The last time IE dropped below 90 percent in WebSideStory’s surveys was in early 2002.

More competition is better for web users and will force web designers to adhere to true standards rather than just coding for IE. Let’s hope the exodus to Firefox continues…