Firefox, Safari back on browser attack

Computerworld - Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox and Apple Inc.'s Safari Web browsers both continued to snare market share from Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer (IE) last month, a Web metrics company said today.

According to Net Applications' February data, both Firefox and Safari accounted for slightly larger slices of the browser pie than the month before. IE, on the other hand, slipped by nearly the same amount.

Firefox, which sports versions for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, climbed to 14.2% from January's 13.7%. Safari, which is bundled with Mac OS X, rose as well, to 4.9% from 4.7%. Internet Explorer's share dropped to 79.1% from last month's 79.8%.

"After a minor hiccup in January, Firefox seems to be back on the offensive in February," Vincent Vizzaccaro, Net Applications' executive vice president of marketing and strategic relationships, said in an e-mailed newsletter. "January showed a brief halt to Firefox's assault on Microsoft Internet Explorer's market share. Could that have come from new Vista machines? Possibly, but it appears that browser users have gone back to switching to Firefox, Safari and Opera."

Opera, a browser from a Norwegian company by the same name, increased its market share slightly, from 0.73% to 0.79%.

The newest versions of both Firefox and IE, meanwhile, also boosted their share during February. Firefox 2.0, released last November, climbed to 7.8%, a 1.5% one-month gain. IE7, which runs on both Windows XP and Vista, increased to 29.1%.

The take-up of IE7, however, has slowed substantially over the past four months. Released to XP users in late October 2006, IE7 has been pushed by Microsoft as a high-priority update through Windows' built-in Automatic Updates, one reason why IE7 use leaped nearly 10% from November to December and by more than 7% from December to January. IE7 adoption has slowed since then; it rose by only 4% from January to February.

Charts that show Net Applications' most recent data are available online.