The latest browser figures which have just been released are showing that the dominance of IE has been eroded further with Firefox the main opponent and Safari and Chrome the bubbling away in the background. Mozilla is hoping that their market-share will increase further with the release of Firefox 3.5 which, since its debut, has been downloaded nearly 14 million times.
The main browser continues to be Internet Explorer with version 7.0 at the top of the leader-board with a 29% market-share. Next comes Firefox 3 which at times in the last 30 days was actually more popular that IE 7. But on average it has around 27% market-share. When you combine all the versions of IE together including IE 6, IE 7 and the newer IE 8, Microsoft have a huge chunk of the pie with over 60% of Internet browsing done using their product.
Taking a longer term look at the browser market in the USA, Internet Explorer has lost 11.4% market share since March. Half has gone to Firefox 3, and the rest has gone to other smaller browsers like Chrome and Safari.
This is quite different to Europe where the last 30 days show that Firefox has nearly 40% of the market compared to only 30% for IE 7, but, as in the rest of the world, the combined numbers for all IE versions in Europe is still marginally better than Firefox (but not by much). Interestingly Opera has quite a big market share in Europe (between 6% and 9% depending on which way the wind is blowing).
The problems for Microsoft in Europe will be compounded when Windows 7 is released in October as Microsoft are being forced to release a special version of Windows 7 called Windows 7 E (E for Europe) which doesn’t contain Internet Explorer. Users of Windows 7 E will need to download the browser of their choice and put it onto a CD or USB flash drive and install it on their new Windows 7 machine.
One other interesting point about Windows 7 is the OEM’s (people like Dell etc) are allowed to pre-install IE 8 on their PCs. This means that effectively new PCs bought with Windows 7 pre-installed will come with a web browser which will probably be IE.
