Firefox gains (more) ground on Internet Explorer
There was a time that Internet Explorer has 90% of the browser market share but no more. Firefox now enjoys a 15% market share with other browsers such as Safari and Opera picking up the leftovers. Firefox was officially launched way back in 2004 when the then head of Microsoft Australia, Steve Vamos said “the ability to view multiple web pages within “tabs” in a single browser window, are not necessarily what consumers want.†He went on to say that it would not make a dent in IE market share.
Steve Vamos is now vice-president of Microsoft’s international online services group and how he managed to make it that far while being so wrong is beyond me. Who doesn’t like tabbed browsing, who doesn’t like a more secure browser, who doesn’t like tons of plugins… my guess is he doesn’t. The Age reports on his statements.
Microsoft had to eat crow with the release of IE7 for XP as an optional download and was included with Vista. Among security enhancements IE7 brought tabbed browsing to the ever aging and behind the times browser.
Firefox on the other hand is on a roll having released two whole versions of the browser already and late 2007 will see the release of Firefox 3.0. Being opensource and one of the few opensource applications I like the Firefox team is able to concentrate more on the user experience than Microsoft and that certainly is working out for the team.
Most Firefox users are at home; most businesses are not yet using Firefox and instead are sticking with what they know, IE6 or IE7. Among businesses still using IE which is a majority, most are still using IE6 having not yet upgraded to IE7. I don’t see what the purpose in waiting is, are they afraid that the IT departments won’t be able to handle three browsers all with potentially different problems, who knows, but I do know that if my job REQUIRED me to use IE on their network, I’d consider quitting. I hate IE6, IE7 is usable but my favorite browsers are Firefox and Opera.
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