14 DAY TRIAL // July has not been a good month for Firefox, as Mozilla's open source browser continued to lose users. Firefox initially showed signs of a weakened adoption from April to May 2007. While the Foundation was pressing users to upgrade to Firefox 2.0 from version 1.5 of its browser, it managed to lose market share while at the same time boosting Internet Explorer. It seems that cutting support for Firefox 1.5 was a move that impacted the open source browser's market share. And the timing could not have been worse, as the following month Apple unveiled Safari 3 for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows Vista and Windows XP. Immediately after Safari's availability for Windows, speculations ensued related to the fact that Apple's browser would begin converting Firefox users.
While in May, Firefox was down to 14.54% from 15.42% the previous month, Internet Explorer, dislodged from its descendant trend, jumped from a share of 78.03% in April to 78.67%, according to data from Market Share by Net Applications. In this context, it is clear that the users that abandoned Firefox moved to IE, with Windows Vista adoption also increasing in the background. May was in fact the month when things turned around for Internet Explorer after the browser spent the last year on a downslope courtesy of Firefox. IE's market share on the browser market further increased in June to 78.84% and then in 78.98% the past month. These results are by no means impressive, but they do point to a stagnation and even a slight regain of market share.
And while IE seems reinvigorated by Windows Vista, Firefox gets to taste market share erosion. The open source browser is down to 14.37% in July from 14.55% in June. And this time the browser equation on the Windows platform is more complicated with the involvement of Safari. Apple's Mac OS X browser, transitioned to Windows for the sake of the iPhone jumped from a share of 4.49% in June to 4.56% in July. There is little consistent oscillation on the browser market at this time, but it is obvious that Firefox is losing ground to both IE and Safari.
