IE7 being caught by Firefox despite 100 million installations

Stan Beer
Thursday, 18 January 2007 03:09

Your IT - Home IT

Microsoft is crowing on its own blog that IE7 has just passed its 100 millionth download. What the blog doesn't say, according to an Information Week article, is that most of the downloads are upgrades from IE6 and that the Mozilla Firefox browser continues to gain ground.

Tony Chor, IE7 program manager at Microsoft, reported in the company blog that Microsoft passed its milestone on January 8.

"I’m pleased to report that on January 8th, we had the 100 millionth IE7 installation. However, even more important than installations is usage. According to WebSideStory (the company we use to measure browser usage), as of this week, over 25% of all visitors to websites in the  US were using IE7, making IE7 the second most used browser after IE6. We expect these numbers to continue to rise as we complete our final localized versions, scale up AU distribution, and with the consumer availability of Windows Vista on January 30, 2007," said Chor.

According to analysts surveyed by Information Week, however, the Microsoft blog didn't paint the entire picture. An analyst at WebSideStory, the firm whose numbers were used by Microsoft, confirmed that IE7 was actually taking market share exclusively from IE6.

Another analyst at web metrics firm Net Applications said that according to the firm's numbers the combined share in the US of the two Microsoft browsers in December 2006 had dropped 1% from November to 79.6%. Meanwhile, over the same period, Firefox browser share, comprising versions 1.5 and 2.0 had risen from 13.5% to 14%.

What's more, the US has been relatively conservative in its adoption of Firefox compared to some European countries and Australia. In Germany, Firefox market share actually rivals that of Internet Explorer. In a world where Web 2.0 applications are becoming increasingly important to the detriment of the desktop, that spells bad news for Microsoft.