For the first time in the past year, Mozilla Firefox lost its grip on the browser market dropping by almost 1%. In contrast, Microsoft's Internet Explorer managed to take itself off the downright spiral debuted in May 2006 and even pick up a little share of the market. With the platoon of followers including Safari, Netscape and Opera having experienced only minor oscillations of their position on the browser market, it is obvious
that Internet Explorer took back a part of the territory lost to Firefox.
According to statistics published by Market Share by Net Applications, Microsoft has turned the tables on Mozilla as Internet Explorer grew from 78.03% in April to 78.67% in May 2007. A share of 0.67% of the browser market might not be representative, but for Microsoft it signals a potential turnover from the carousel that has eroded its dominant position by approximately 10% in favor of Firefox.
Microsoft has experienced a small breath of fresh air between December 2006 and January 2007 when it gained just 0.11% in the context of the recently launched Internet Explorer 7, the Windows Vista business launch and the prefiguration of the commercial release of Microsoft's latest operating system. But IE then dropped yet again to 79.09% in February, to 78.57% in March and to 78.03% in April, just to gain back market share and increase to 78.67% the past month.
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At the same time, Firefox has sunk no less than 0.88%, the first time in the last year that Firefox drops coincides with an IE gain. But this is no coincidence. The fact of the matter is that the IE adoption is driven by Windows Vista sales. And with Microsoft shipping in excess of 40 million licenses to its operating system, IE was also boosted. However, Mozilla's browser market share loss cannot be entirely attributed to IE. The fact of the matter is that Mozilla has announced since April that it will drop support for Firefox 1.5 and urged users to upgrade to Firefox 2.0. And as on May 31 Mozilla released the last update for version 1.5 of its open source browser, it is clear that some of the Firefox 1.5 users have upgraded alright, however, not to Firefox 2.0, but to Internet Explorer instead.
