Internet Explorer loses browser market share to young pretender

By Steve Malone

Posted on 2 Nov 2004 at 09:33

Open Source browsers are continuing to eat into the market share of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. According to market analysts WebSideStory, Internet Explorer held 92.9 per cent of the browser market at the end of October.

Although the figures are unlikely to cause panic in Redmond just yet, the trend away from IE and towards Mozilla and Firefox seems to be accelerating. Since IE's share began to slip in June, it has lost 2.6 per cent market share. However 0.8 per cent of that happened in October alone.

The flagship Open Source browser, Firefox now accounts for three per cent of the market. Taken together with other Mozilla based browsers and AOL's Netscape, these browsers accounted for six per cent of the market. The sudden surge in Firefox is due to last month's launch of the 1.0 'Preview Release' as the code came out of beta; the software has been downloaded seven million times since. We might expect another jump this month as the final 1.0 release of Firefox is made available on 9 November.

Apple's Safari browser too made inroads, making up 1.1 per cent of the total browser market.