As reported at TechWeb (and other outlets,) WebSideStory is reporting that "Microsoft's Internet Explorer's share of the U.S. browser market is in danger of dipping below 90 pecent," and "the Mozilla-made open-source browser had captured 5 percent of the U.S. market by Jan. 14, 2005, an increase of almost a full percentage point since early December."
I believe that's a 1 point gain in November and then again in December. Our Firefox 1.0 downloads trendline is pretty darned linear (I'll post some graphs for you all early next week) so I'll bet we can gain another percentage point in January. That might be the magic point that pushes IE under 90%. Exciting times. Very exciting times.
Posted by asa at January 20, 2005 03:06 PMdont get me wrong... just why are you so excited about IE falling of 90%? 89% is still a big big chunk of change that firefox can never aspire about.. it might just be the tatical ploy that might rake Firefox.. And what are we going to do when longhorn comes out.. Are we preparing for it?
Posted by: z on January 20, 2005 07:30 PMI much prefer OneStat.com's statistics, which had IE falling below 90% in November.
Posted by: Alex Bishop on January 20, 2005 08:41 PMI agree with Alex there. OneStat's figures seem to be much more representative of the world, which is the arena for this fight.
Posted by: David Naylor on January 21, 2005 01:23 AMI can't actually see the report at WSS. Anyone else found it?
Posted by: David Naylor on January 21, 2005 01:24 AMI think the WSS URL is
http://www.websidestory.com/pressroom/pressreleases.html?id=238&ctl=x08x087h29xg
z: 90% is a 'magic number'. a monopoly-breaker, if u will.
Posted by: db on January 21, 2005 06:01 AMz wrote: "And what are we going to do when longhorn comes out.. Are we preparing for it?"
On the technical front, given that Microsoft says that Longhorn won't be out until 2006, that gives the mozilla team all of this year to get version 2.0 out :)
On the 'political' front, by then the market share of FF should have increased dramatically, hopefully to the point that computer manufacturers might be inclined to ship Longhorn computers with FF already installed...
Posted by: Limulus on January 21, 2005 07:42 AMMost firefox users aren't going to switch back to IE anytime soon. The brand has already been tarnished. In addition, Longhorn adoption will be slow, perhaps slower than XP even. Firefox is not just going to go away as soon as IE 7 is out with tabbed browsing and mouse gestures.
Posted by: Rico on January 21, 2005 10:09 AMGids: that press release is last month's. They don't seem to have done one with this month's figures.
Posted by: Alex Bishop on January 21, 2005 06:22 PMSurely 90% is a psychologial threshold. For the first time in last years, "that other thing(tm)"s usage drops down, to a point where the usage of its rivals can't be ignored anymore. In engineering, for example, in many cases you can neglect 2-3% of errors, targetgroup, measurements, etc. if they're not mission-critical. But 10% is big enough not to be neglected.
OTOH, being both a European and an Asian, I'm sorry to express it this way, but whoever says the statistics in US are representative for whole world, is as dumb as a stone! ...if it were really so, Kerry would have won the election 99% to 1%...