Firefox gains more marketshare

Web traffic analyser NetApplications reports that Firefox continues to gain marketshare over Microsoft's Internet Explorer. According to the data from NetApplications, Firefox accounted for 8 percent of the web browser market in May, up from 7.38 percent in April. The data was collected from more than 40,000 global websites.

FireFox reached 8% during the month of May up from 7.38% in April. FireFox's gain is Microsoft's loss whose base dipped to 87.23% in May down 0.77% from April of 2005. Safari also gained a modest tenth of a percentage posting 1.91% in May 2005. Most other browsers experienced little change during the same time period.

"While 87-percent market share may seem like market dominance, the numbers are revealing an average of .5 to 1% loss of users each month," noted Dan Shapero, Chief Operating Officer of NetApplications. "FireFox is gaining traction with early adopters and its popularity and adoption rate are starting to tap into mass-market acceptance as buzz continues to build."

May 2005 Browser/Market Share:

• Microsoft Internet Explorer - 87.23%
• FireFox - 8.06%
• Netscape - 1.64%
• Safari - 1.91%
• Mozilla - 0.58%
• Opera - 0.51%
• Other - 0.07%

On DV Hardware we also notice Firefox is becoming more popular each month. While 26.1 percent of our visitors used Firefox in April, this increased to 27.6 percent in May. Internet Explorer accounted for 60.9 percent in May, down from 62.2 percent in April.

Since last year Microsoft Internet Explorer lost almost 20 percent, about 80 percent of our visitors used IE in May 2004. Nowadays Microsoft's browser seems to lose marketshare each and every month.

Yesterday Microsoft launched a new MSN Toolbar which adds tabbed browsing functionality to Internet Explorer 6.