Monday, November 07, 2005

Internet: Firefox Share Rises Again

The No. 2 Internet browser rides on the news of an upgrade and of reaching a key benchmark of 100 million downloads.
By Priya Ganapati
November 7, 2005

After three months of stalled growth, Mozilla's Firefox, the No. 2 Internet browser after Microsoft’s dominant Internet Explorer, is increasing its market share, thanks to recent news it had logged 100 million downloads and the release of a trial version of its upgraded browser, a report said Monday.

In October, Firefox captured 8.65 percent of the browser market share, up from 7.55 percent in September, according to a report released by NetApplications, which offers applications that measure web sites for small and medium enterprises.

Other reports have pegged Firefox’s market share to be even higher, with web traffic analytics firm OneStat saying 11.5 percent of Internet surfers globally use Firefox.

Despite the improvement, Firefox is still a long way from seriously rivaling IE’s 86.52 percent.

Nevertheless, Firefox has come a long way fast. It launched in November 2004 and now has more than 45 million users, said the Mozilla Foundation, the nonprofit group that oversees the browser’s development. The browser started at 2.69 percent market share in January and peaked at 8.71 percent in June.

More at Red Herring Online

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