molly.com

Friday 17 September 2004

slip slidin’ away

SLIP SLIDING AWAY – Microsoft Internet Explorer loses market share for the first time in over seven years.

BusinessWeek online reports that the Web analytics company, WebSideStory, has determined that Microsoft’s share of the browser market slipped from 95.6% in June to 93.7% this month.

In the meantime, Mozilla browser share grew from 3.5% to 5.2%.

These numbers might not look like a lot at first glance, but considering this is the most significant change in the browser market we’ve seen since IE grabbed the top spot seven years ago, there’s some reason to party.

In related news, Mozilla is promoting a 1,000,000 downloads in 10 days event via its spreadFirefox.com web site. With eight days to go, they’re already over half the way there! Of course, The Web Standards Project (WaSP) Browse Happy campaign provides information on why you should consider leaving the little blue “e” behind, and offers a number of alternatives to Firefox, as well.

Filed under:   general
Posted by:   Molly | 01:38 | Comments (11)

Comments (11)

  1. Anne says Friday 17 September 2004 at 03:57

    Finally! Eventually Firefox will rule the world! (Of browsers, that is.)

  2. -dean says Friday 17 September 2004 at 04:38

    I knew it was all over for Microsoft when my mum downloaded Firefox…

  3. Geof says Friday 17 September 2004 at 04:46

    Now we need a legion of college sysadmins to deploy it in labs. Form the association in college of “MSIE bad”, and then you’ve got a good working group once they get away from it.

  4. Rob Mientjes says Friday 17 September 2004 at 07:39

    IE sucks, so it’s a Good Thing anyway :p

    It’s important that people can actually choose, and if then they decide to choose IE, I say let them be so stupid.

  5. rebron says Friday 17 September 2004 at 08:49

    Thanks for the mention Molly. I see you’ve joined spreadfirefox too. You’re very cool. I’ve got you “live bookmarked” too (sounds sexy doesn’t it?)

  6. Kim Siever says Friday 17 September 2004 at 10:42

    Ditto on that, Dean. I converted my mum earlier this week. 🙂

  8. Rod says Friday 17 September 2004 at 21:19

    That’s the best news I’ve heard in a week

  9. phil says Monday 20 September 2004 at 20:11

    I’m happy to see Moz/FF eroding the dominance of the crufty blue blot.

    But I’ve gotta tell ya, I used FF for six months and then went back to Opera, lock stock and trackball. Feature sets on both browsers are very comparable, but Opera’s rendering engine and caching behavior are light years beyond Gecko in the speed department.

    If you read several newspaper-type sites and have broadband, you will see what I mean: hitting the “back” button in Opera takes you to the referring page and the whole thing displays *right now* whereas FF reloads all the elements and reflows the page, sometimes taking five or more seconds. Simply put, if you’re a fast reader and want to skim a lot of pages in one cup of coffee, Gecko-based browsers start to cost you.

  10. Bill Gates says Tuesday 21 September 2004 at 07:10

    I am laquetis of Borg, Your life as it has been is over. From this time forward you will service us. And Ie of course

  11. Bill Gates says Tuesday 21 September 2004 at 07:11

    I’m also a Bush Supporter

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