The release of Internet Explorer 7 proves to have little impact over the Microsoft's share of the browser's market. In fact, the Redmond Company has been losing its grip on the browser market while the Mozilla Foundation has been slowly climbing up. In this context, Firefox has been eroding Internet Explorer's market share, and the situation has perpetuated itself after the IE7 and Firefox 2.0 were released.

Both Microsoft and Mozilla delivered high initial download volumes for their respective browsers. Internet Explorer 7 accounted for a total of three million downloads in the first three days following its launching. Firefox 2.0 topped IE7 by passing the 2 million downloads milestone in the first day.

According to data released by Market Share via Net Applications, Internet Explorer has dropped to a share of 80.56% in November from 81.28% in October. Firefox however has grown to 13.5% from just 12.96%.

These figures illustrate the high adoption rate of Firefox 2.0 in the context in which Microsoft has been pushing Internet Explorer 7 as a high-priority update via Automatic Updates at the rate of one million per day since November 14. Firefox has increased its market share even as Internet Explorer is gaining momentum, in the detriment of IE.

Moreover, Microsoft comes dangerously close to the 80% market share. If the current browser tendencies remain unchanged, Internet Explorer will drop under 80% by January 2007. Thanks to the negative evolution of IE, Microsoft has lost a total of 5% of the browser market in 2006.