My, how times have changed. A decade ago, nearly 96% of all Web surfers used Microsoft’s Internet Explorer to navigate the Web and display pages. But these days Internet Explorer has some serious competition, and Mozilla’s Firefox continues to gain ground against Microsoft with its open source browser.
Computerworld.com is reporting that Firefox now has more then 17% of the worldwide market, when it comes to browsing the web. February was the fourth consecutive month that Firefox’s market share increased, and if it continues to grow at this rate, analysts predict Mozilla will have nearly 50% of the Web browser market by 2011.
Obviously, this would be a serious setback for Microsoft, whose Internet Explorer Web browser has dominated the market since the mid-90s, when Netscape began to falter. Despite the loss of market share for their Internet Explorer browser, and disappointing sales of the new Vista operating system, Microsoft stock has continued to do well on Wall Street, showing substantial gains in the last quarter.
Meanwhile Apple’s Safari browser is also on the increase. The Mac browser represented 5.7% of the marketplace in February, a rise of nearly 1 percentage point from February 2007. Even the small Opera Web browser is gaining ground, though not nearly as quickly as either Safari or Firefox.
The success of these “alternative Web browsers” has certainly had a negative effect on Microsoft. Their Explorer has lost market share for eight months in a row now, and analysts predict this trend will continue through 2008. And although the latest version of Internet Explorer has added many new useful features, and increased security, it could be a case of too little too late.
The company is currently testing the latest version of Explorer (Internet Explorer 8 ), though few details have been revealed so far about the browser. Insiders say that Internet Explorer 8 will “borrow heavily” from the success of Firefox, by including many optional plug-ins to enhance the user’s Web surfing experience. As an open-source program, Firefox has benefited from having many third-party web application designers develop free plug-ins for the browser, many of which had become extremely popular.
The idea of customizing a Web browser, by adding a series of integrated plug-ins is certainly not new, but it has really taken off with the Mozilla Firefox application. Microsoft is said to be looking at ways to include the same level of user customization, but with one noticeable exception: Internet Explorer 8 will not be open source; therefore we are likely to see significantly less third-party applications developed for the browser when it finally does arrive.
Related Business Directory Categories:
