Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2.0 are neck and neck in the race for audience. This is the conclusion presented by the statistics published by Internet metrics company W3Counter. At the beginning of October 2007, IE7 is credited with a market share of 20.18% while its direct competitor from Mozilla accounts for a percentage of 18.30%. With a difference just under 2% between the two browsers, it seems that Firefox is finally managing to catch up with Internet Explorer.

IE7 and Firefox 2.0 hit the market almost simultaneously back in October 2006. But of course, the latest version of Microsoft's proprietary browser benefited from a few advantages that can be considered a shortcut to increasing its audience. Since November of past year, Microsoft has been serving IE7 as an automatic update via Microsoft Update, Windows Update and Automatic Update to all IE6 users on Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003. In contrast, Mozilla only began distributing Firefox 2.0 as an update after it retired support for Firefox 1.5 in mid 2007.

Still, W3Counter used a rather limited Internet audience in making the report. "This report was generated 10/01/2007 based on the last 35,933,003 unique visits to 5,932 websites. The last 25,000 page views to each website are analyzed to identify unique visits. Some visits may occur before the month of the report," W3Counter stated. Although almost 36 million users is an impressive number, the focus on just 6,000 websites might be detrimental to painting a more accurate picture.

Alternative Internet metrics firms such as Net Applications and OneStat offer a different perspective altogether over the browser market. According to data from OneStat, back in July 2007, Internet Explorer 7 has a market share of 27.71%, while Firefox 2.0 was at 11.48%. Although delivering different figures, Net Applications shares OneStat's view, revealing that, at the end of September 2007, IE7 accounted for 34.60% of the browser market while Firefox 2.0 was trailing at a distance with 13.57%.