The majority of Firefox users have upgraded to Firefox 2.0

Apr 2, 2007 12:41 GMT  ·  By

The adoption of Internet Explorer 7 is growing in momentum. Back on October 18, 2006, Microsoft made available for download the final version of Internet Explorer 7. The release was designed for Windows XP. Windows Vista ships with its own variant of Internet Explorer 7 that also had a ?+? in the name to a certain point.

Five months later, IE7 has slowly replaced other versions of Internet Explorer. Market Share by Net Applications revealed that the latest version of Microsoft's browser now accounts for no less than 29.99% of the entire IE market share. As of January 8, 2007, Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer 7 was installed over 100 million times. Microsoft is counting the installations and not the actual downloads of IE7, because it is pushing the browser as an automatic update.

Announced initially for November 1, 2006, the IE7 worldwide distribution by Automatic Updates was pushed back until November 13. But since then, Internet Explorer 7 has been served automatically to all Windows users.

Out of a total market share of 78.57%, IE7 has 29.99% while IE6 still holds 47.99% in March 2007. The remaining market share is divided between other editions of Microsoft's browser. These percentages indicate the fact that IE users are not too keen on upgrading to Internet Explorer 7.

With Mozilla for example things are a tad different. Firefox accounts for a market share of 15.10% in March 2007. This share is largely divided in two- between Firefox 2.0 and Firefox 1.5. Firefox 2.0 was made available for the general public on October 24 2006 and since then, 9.38% of the users of the Mozilla open source browser have upgraded to the new edition, leaving a share of just 4.83% to Firefox 1.5.