Firefox 3.5 Gains 4.54 Percent of the Browser Market

Firefox 3.5 is barely a month out the door and already commands 4.54 percent of the overall browser market, according to numbers from Net Applications, while Internet Explorer 6 and 7 continue to lose market share. Still, the overall picture is pretty much unchanged, with Firefox 3.5 and IE 8 cannibalizing on their older versions with most of the IE 6 and 7 users upgrading to the latest version and very few going to other browsers.

The same is true for Firefox 3.5, which has gained most of its share thanks to the browser's automated update system, with Firefox 3.0 users going down 3.8 percent, from 20 percent in June to 16.2 percent last month. That leaves only 0.7 percent coming from other browsers but still a notable growth for just one month. It took Firefox five years to reach roughly 20 percent of the worldwide browser market share but it's only going to get harder now with the increased competition from other browsers, most notably Google Chrome, but especially with the much-improved versions of Internet Explorer.

Microsoft's browsers are still reining supreme, though, dropping slightly in the last month from 65.0 percent in June for all versions to 62.7 percent in July. Unsurprisingly, IE 8 has seen a significant rise, having gone from 8.6 percent to 12.4 percent last month; however, the biggest share came from IE 7 users and not IE 6 like many would hope. IE 7 went from 27.2 percent in June to 23.0 while IE 6 only dropped 1.9 percent, from 29.1 percent to 27.2 percent this past month. Still, even this small drop is sure to please many web developers, which are becoming more vocal about dropping support for the aging browser.

These numbers may differ from those of other research firms but they may provide a much more accurate picture of the overall worldwide market especially now that Net Applications has changed the way it arrives at the stats by having the size of the country's Internet population weigh in more even if the number of measurements may be smaller – for example China now has a greater significance than the U.S.