Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Web browser is continuing to lose market share, according to Web analysts WebSideStory, who say smaller competitors have been chipping its position steadily according to readings of new Website visitor data.
WebSideStory first reported an IE share drop between June and July, when Microsoft and its flagship browser incurred a few rounds of widely-publicized security issues, and it was WebSideStory’s first known recording of an IE drop.
And the benefactors? According to WebSideStory, they’re the smaller open source browsers from Mozilla and Opera, not to mention what Mozilla believes to be a record number of downloads for the preview version of Firefox 1.0, released September 14 – 300,000 downloads in the first 24 hours after the preview version was released. That, Mozilla Foundation spokesman Bart Decrem told reporters, was ten percent of the total Firefox 0.8 downloads in its first four months of availability to the Net public.
Mozilla/Netscape browsers rose to 5.2 percent and the catch-all category for other browsers, in which WebSideStory included Opera, rose to 1.1 percent.
Perhaps characteristically, Microsoft isn’t exactly worried about it all. An unnamed spokesman said in a formal statement that, while they “certainly encourage” Netizens to look into all browser options, the company has seen no significant shift away from IE by either businesses or consumers.
