IE is going down

Apr 28, 2005 10:38 GMT  ·  By

FireFox, the outlaw of browsers everywhere and the pride of the open source community, is quickly heading for the 50 millions threshold. In other words, Internet Explorer's market share, which didn't seem to budge from its 90% level, has started to decrease. And Firefox is the one to blame for this, the browser succeeding in only a few months to grab 8.69% of the market.

Although the increase rate has slowed down in the last period, recording only a 0.24% rate, browser is still growing in popularity and Microsoft has all the reasons to be concerned. Prior to the browser's launching in last year's November, Microsoft Internet Explorer had a 95% market share, and now, only a few months after Firefox's launch, its market share has decreased to 86.63%, maintaining a constant rate of 1% each year.

The slowing down of FireFox's increase rate can be explained by the recent flaws reported by experts which although have been solved in an amazingly short time, have cast a shade of doubt over the users relying on this browser's infallibility.

Safari for Mac looks like a worthy competitor for both browsers and more and more users of the Internet Explorer for Mac are reorienting towards Safari, and this trend is backed up by ratings and figures.