Firefox challenging IE for dominance in US SMBs

Stan Beer
Friday, 09 March 2007 07:22

Your IT - Home IT

A survey of 140,000 small to medium-sized business (SMB) users has revealed that the Mozilla Firefox browser is now almost on equal footing with Microsoft's Internet Explorer in the SMB market sector. What's more, the gap is narrowing dramatically every month.

According to Toronto-based online time tracking and billing services provider, FreshBooks, a survey of its 140,000 plus SMB customer base showed that Firefox's browser market share grew by 1.35% in February 2007 to an astonishing 38.95%. Meanwhile, Internet Explorer's share dropped by 0.73% to 56.95%.

The survey also revealed that Firefox were far more prepared to upgrade  to the latest version, with 10.03% being FF 1.5 and 28.92% being FF 2.0 users in February. By comparison, IE6 users (34.36%) still easily outnumber IE7 users (22.59%), indicating a greater reluctance to upgrade.

Microsoft Windows, however, is still by far the dominant desktop operating system increasing its market share slightly over the month 88.92%, which Freshbooks attributes to the giant marketing push behind the release of Vista. However, Linux did make a gain off a small base from 1.54% to 2.01%. Mac OS dropped slightly from 9.04% in January to 8.55% in February.

The increasing popularity of Firefox in the small business space looks like growing from an annoyance to a serious concern as more SMBs put the open source browser on their desktops, while conversions to IE7 are slower than expected.