14 DAY TRIAL // June 2008 will go down in history as the month of Firefox 3.0, this despite the fact that Opera 9.5 was also dropped the past month. But while the presence of Opera 9.5 was felt only superficially, and with the Internet Explorer giant lying dormant, Firefox 3.0 reaped the browser market to shades leaving rivals in the dust. The successor of Firefox 2.0 exploded to over 8 million downloads in just the first 24 hours after launch and climbed over the 20 million downloads milestone at the end of the first week of availability. These performances are unmatched at this point in time, and not even the ubiquitous Internet Explorer manages to come close to Firefox 3.0.
"The release of Firefox 3.0 on June 17th was followed by rapid usage share gains, topping 4% worldwide. In the first hour after the effective release of the product, Firefox 3.0 gained 1% of worldwide share. Firefox 3.0 share gains came mostly from users upgrading from Firefox 2.0, while its overall usage share grew by about 4%, primarily at the expense of Internet Explorer," explained market analysis company Net Applications.
On June 17, 2008, the day when it went live, Firefox 3.0 had, through the Release Candidate builds a market share of 1.60%. By the end of June 2008, the latest iteration of the open source browser from Mozilla grew to an estimated 4.84% of the market. Combined with Firefox 2.0, version 3.0 accounted for no less than 19.94%, this while Internet Explorer's total share (through the combination of IE6 and IE7) only amounted to 70.30%.
Overall, at the end of the past month, IE dropped to 73.01%, and is lingering ever closer to the 70% market share, dropping from 73.75% in May. At the same time, Firefox jumped from 18.41% to 19.03% in the past couple of months. This while version 9.5 took Opera just from 0.71% in May to 0.73% at the end of June.
Firefox 3.0 has eroded mainly the market share of its predecessor Firefox 2.0. At the end of the month, version 2.0 of the open source browser was at an average market share of 16.13%. Internet Explorer 6 suffered a great loss in audience, falling to just 26.38% from 27.52%, while IE7 climbed to 46.45% from 46.03%.
Firefox 3.0 is available for download here. Opera 9.5 is available for download here. Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 is available for download here. Internet Explorer 7 is available for download here.
