14 DAY TRIAL // The outcome does not look promising for Internet Explorer if the current trend keeps up. Microsoft's browser has been slowly but constantly losing its grip on the market, while Mozilla has picked up every crumb down to the last one.
March has marked yet another drop in browser market share for Internet Explorer, according to data made available by Market Share by Net Applications. IE has lost no less than 0.52% in March 2007, and has dropped under the 79% share milestone to 78.57%. IE's performances in March are conclusive with Microsoft's browser trend since 2006.
In fact, between November and December 2006, Internet Explorer sunk below 80%. Although the browser picked up a little momentum in January 2007, this proved to be nothing more than a fluke followed by a drop of over 0.6% in February. The data delivered by Market Share by Net Applications is even more concerning since Microsoft is not only pushing IE7 via Automatic Updates since late 2006, but the browser is also shipping with Windows Vista.
Firefox however has been constantly increasing its market share at the expense of IE. Just in March 2007, Mozilla's open source browser has jumped from 14.18% to 15.10%. This is almost a 1% growth in a single month. Furthermore, Mozilla has already debuted development of the upcoming edition of Firefox, while Microsoft is only dogfooding Internet Explorer 8.0.
The past month, Safari has had a market share dropping from 4.85% to just 4.51%. Opera, the browser currently in third position only jumped 0.01$ in March to a share of 0.80%.