New Study Pinpoints Firefox Market Share at 10%

The Market Share Study by Net Applications Shows Firefox Slowly Gaining Ground

JavaScriptSearch
Tuesday, April 4, 2006; 05:12 AM

A study by internet company Net Applications shows that Microsoft's Internet Explorer continues to be the most wide-spread browser, with impressive 84.7% market share.  Second in row, and rising in popularity, is the open source browser Firefox.  Apple's Safari ranks third with 3.19%.

The methodology, used in Net Application's study, employs collecting data from the browsers of site visitors to their on-demand network of small to medium enterprise customers.  The sample size for these sites is more than 40,000 urls and growing.  The information published is an aggregate of the data from this network of hosted website statistics. The websites in the study population represent dozens of countries in regions including North America, South America, Western Europe, Australia / Pacific Rim and Parts of Asia. 

Net Application's research seems to be out of par with a study by internet developers portal W3Schools, which shows Firefox share to be 24%.  However, there may be a valid explanation for that: according to W3Schools, "[we are] a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user. The average user tends to use Internet Explorer, since it comes preinstalled with Windows. Most do not seek out other browsers."

The trend is towards slow growth of the Firefox browser, which has gained a bit less than 3% in one year. Both Firefox and IE will release new versions in the coming months.