The Survival of Internet Explorer Past Firefox 3.0 - Onward to IE8

With the explosion that was Firefox 3.0, which climbed over the 8 million unique downloads just in the first 24 hours since the launch on June 17, heavy clouds seemed to have gathered on the horizon for Internet Explorer. But the fact of the matter is that IE has managed to survive virtually undamaged, according to statistics made available by Net Applications. In this regard, the scenario is rather simple, users did crowd to Firefox 3.0; however, they weren't necessarily running IE, but a previous version of Firefox, namely v2.0.

In fact, it was Firefox 2.0 which took the heaviest hit in terms of market share with the release of its successor. Firefox 2.0 dropped from a high of 17.17% in may 2008, to just 16.13% in June and 13.02% at the end of July. At the start of August, the market share of Firefox 3.0 had climbed all the way to 5.67%, boosting Firefox's total share to 19.22%. In this regard a trend is clearly visible. Users of Mozilla's open source browser are far faster than those of Microsoft's IE to adopt new versions as they come out.

This is why Mozilla can afford to force the migration of the entire install base of Firefox 2.0 to version 3.0 by December 2008. In contrast, Microsoft ties support of IE with the Windows operating system, and users are very sluggish to upgrade even if the newer version is superior in every aspect.

Even in the context of Firefox 3.0, the market share of Internet Explorer fluctuated only from 73.01% to 73.02% over the past couple of months. With 46.03% in May, IE7 climbed to 47.10% in July, while IE6 fell from 27.52% to 25.74%. Safari and Opera both lost market share over the past two months and are now at 6.14% and respectively 0.69% of the browser market.

Microsoft is currently preparing to drop the second Beta of Internet Explorer 8 by the end of August, and to have the gold bits of the browser released to web by the end of 2008. Mozilla has also moved past Firefox 3.0, and delivered Firefox 3.1 Alpha 1, working to offer the final version of the open source browser no later than early 2009.