FireFox & Others Eating Away IE Market Share
Microsoft Internet Explorer continued to lose customers to competitor Mozilla Firefox in 2008. Where 75% of all Internet users used IE as their browser at the end of 2007 that number had fallen to 68% one year later. At the same time, Mozilla Firefox’s share increased with 4% (from 17% to 21%).
Not only did IE lose part of its market share to Firefox but also to other competitors such as, first and foremost, Apple’s Safari (from 6% to 8% market share) and Google Chrome (1% in one year time).
Safari is a product of Apple, which produces Mac computers. These computers use their own software which is considered far more reliable and handy than Microsoft Windows and is often used by professionals. Safari too is considered faster, cleaner, saver and more reliable than market leader Internet Explorer but was only used by Mac users. These days, however, increasingly more Windows users are also browsing with Safari, which Apple made available to Windows as well as Mac users.
After several issues with my own computer I have scaled my browsers down to three: Flock, Mozilla Firefox and Safari. I do not use Internet Explorer (for it is too slow and unreliable) and I stopped using Google Chrome recently because it does not offer me the handy gadgets the others offer while it is not much faster nor more reliable than its competitors. Nonetheless, if I would use another browser it would certainly be Chrome and not IE.
Research shows that most professionals and individuals such as myself, who use the Internet several hours a day in order to write, do research (for study, blogging and columns) in quite an active manner tend to use other browsers than IE. Especially Firefox is popular among this group of users.
IE remains the market leader for now but it seems to me that it will lose this position within a few years if it does not drastically improve its product. The only reason it became market leader in the first place is because IE is automatically the standard browser of Windows-driven computers whereas one has to go to the trouble of research and downloading in order to install other browsers. Luckily for Microsoft, most Internet users were seemingly unaware of other options and / or uninformed about them for years.
Recent developments indicate that Internet users are becoming more informed about alternative options, however, making it likely that IE will continue to lose ground in the years ahead.
You’re right in some ways, but what evidence is there for a blanket statement? I’ve seen some accounts in the past year that would argue otherwise.
Firefox is a free shareware browser, IE is dumped down the throats of PC users. The typical Internets users doesn’t know the difference between Firefox and IE.
I agree with Michael that saying firefox is “far more reliable and handy” is a stretch. I use both browsers (firefox at home and ie at work), and both are very similar. I do like firefox more, but not “far more”. And I think I’ve seen firefox crash just as much as IE.
And in any case, if you’re comparing Firefox 3 with IE 7, it’s not exactly a fair comparison since IE 7 was released about a year before Firefox 3. IE 8 will include more features, including one that is perhaps the most significant gap between the two browsers: the ability to make more than 2 requests at a time, which is a high-demand feature because of web 2.0 websites that do a lot of AJAX. (I believe this is why Gmail claims to be twice as fast on firefox, but perhaps it’s for other reasons). Also, I recently did some memory tests for work, and in my experience IE 8 is comparable to firefox in memory usage under heavy lead (IE7 is worse).
But one things for sure: the competition is heating up and that’s a good thing.
(One thing I like about firefox: spell-check in text-boxes like this one. I don’t know if IE 8 will have it, but I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t.)