IE suffers dramatic market share loss to Firefox and Safari

Stan Beer
Thursday, 05 March 2009 15:20

Opinion and Analysis

The latest figures from Internet market watcher Net Applications show that Microsoft's once totally dominant browser Internet Explorer continues to have its market dominance eroded by Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari. In the past year IE has lost more than 7% share to its two rivals.

According to the Net Applications February 2008 figures, IE held a commanding 74.88% market share compared with 17.27% for Firefox and 5.70 for Safari.

Twelve months later, the February 2009 figures show that IE had slipped to 67.44%, while Firefox had grown to 21.77% and Safari was up to 8.02%.

The downward browser trend follows a similar worrying drop in desktop operating system market share for Microsoft over the past year, measured by net access, with Windows dropping from 91.52% share in February 2008 to 88.41% in February 2009.

In operating systems, the Windows plunge came mostly at the hands of Mac OS X which rose from 7.46% in February 2008 to 9.61% in February 2009. Linux share also rose from 0.65% to 0.88% over the same period.

Of note, was the huge jump in net access by iPhone, which rose from 0.15% in February 2008 to 0.48% in February 2009.

Net access share from the iPhone alone now rivals the combined net access from Linux computers and is an order of magnitude greater than the share of any other mobile device, according to Net Applications figures.