Firefox Gains Ground On Microsoft's IE

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October 04, 2006 (11:41 AM EDT)

By Gregg Keizer , TechWeb Technology News

For the third consecutive month, Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox has posted a half a percentage point or more gain in market share, a Web metrics company said Wednesday. Meanwhile, Microsoft's Internet Explorer's still-commanding lead has slipped slightly.

Firefox accounted for 12.5 percent of September's global browser market, said Aliso Viejo, Calif.'s Net Applications. That's an increase from August's 11.8 percent, which was up from the 11.3 percent in July. Internet Explorer's share slipped to 82.1 percent in September, down from August's 83 percent.

Also making gains was Apple Computer's Safari browser, which by the end of September was up from 3.2 percent to 3.5 percent. Safari's September numbers were its highest since April.

"Internet Explorer continues to lose market share with Firefox and Safari showing a steady increase over the past 9 months," said Net Applications in a statement.

Both Mozilla and Microsoft are working on the next version of their Web browsers. Mozilla, for example, released Firefox 2.0 RC1 last week, while Microsoft debuted Internet Explorer 7 RC1 in August.

Although the older IE 6.0 makes up the bulk of Microsoft's browser share, IE 7 now accounts for 2.1 percent of all browsers used; that's up from 1.7 percent in August. Firefox 2.0, however, has just 0.1 percent of the market.

Both IE 7 and Firefox 2.0 will go into final before the end of the year.

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