Bad News for Firefox

If we are to judge by the figures the traffic monitoring agency, NetApplications has published, the days when Firefox successfully challenged Internet Explorer are numbered.

NetApplications, that released yesterday the figures for September, has recorded a new decrease of Firefox's market share. According to the monitoring company, the open source browser has reached 7.55%, after having an 8.27% market share in August.

The last time Firefox recorded such a value was in April 2005, when it had a 7.38% market share.

Vincent Vizzaccaro, Executive Vice President of Marketing and Strategic Relationships at Net Applications, considered that there is no reason for concern, this decrease being caused by Netscape. As Vizzaccaro explained, Netscape 8.0 was erroneously mistaken for Firefox (AOL's browser included both rendering technologies, Firefox and IE).

Only after Netscape has reached the 8.0.2 version, in June 2005, the browser started to be accurately identified, which coincided with the beginning of Firefox's market share decrease. Vizzaccaro considers that only the September figures show the exact value of Firefox's usage.

In fact, Netscape is also the browser Vizzaccaro sees as the winner, especially since HP and AOL have signed an agreement which says that Netscape will be preinstalled on the systems shipped by the PC producer.