14 DAY TRIAL // The inevitable has happened. Microsoft's continuous descendant trajectory on the browser market has taken yet another step down in December 2007. In this context, Microsoft now accounts for a share of 79,64% of the browser market with Internet Explorer, revealed Market Share by Net Applications. The release of Internet Explorer 7 has had no impact on Microsoft's evolution. In October, when it was released, IE had a market share of 81.28%. Even with the release of Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft has lost 1.64% in just under two months. At the beginning of 2006, IE's market share was 85.31%.
While Microsoft has gone under the 80% milestone by the end of December 2006, and into January 2007, Firefox, Safari and Opera have all increased their market shares at the expense of the Redmond Company. The most notable growth belongs to Firefox, that has increased its market share from 9.50% in January 2006 to 14.00% in December 2006. Firefox has taken the lion's share out of the percentages lost by Microsoft with a growth of 4.5% in 2006. The rest of the 5.67% market share lost by Microsoft was distributed between Safari and Opera that, at the end of 2007, had grown to 4.24% and 0.87% of the market.
According to data from Market Share by Net Applications, the release of Firefox 2.0 had an impact equivalent to that of IE7. As IE7 failed to resolve the decline of Microsoft's browser market share, so did Firefox 2.0 fail to pick up the pace for Firefox.