Someone's Web Browser Is Losing Market Share
The fluctuations may not seem like much, with IE still dominating the Web browser market. But the numbers are interesting to look at on a monthly basis because they point to overall trends and browsing habits. And the biggest trend right now is that IE is losing some of its market.
In November 2007, Microsoft's Web browser owned the vast majority of the market, with 77.35 percent of Web surfers using Internet Explorer. Since then, however, IE has been steadily declining, losing more than 6 percentage points in less than a year.
Firefox, on the other hand, has steadily climbed and flirted with 20 percent of the Web browser market since it cracked 19 percent in June 2008. Some of that growth can likely be attributed to Mozilla's successful marketing campaign surrounding the release of Firefox 3 in June.
But even that bump in visibility and market share isn't enough for the Mozilla crew, who earlier this week announced an open-source marketing competition. Called Impact Mozilla, the creators of Firefox are offering $3,000 to anyone who can create a retention marketing campaign. While there are dedicated Firefox users on the Web, Mozilla still feels the need to find a better way to keep them on the platform.
The numbers from Market Share seem to reflect the need for Web browser companies to always be in front of their users. Internet Explorer can certainly relate.
As the numbers continue to fluctuate —and there is no indication that they'll level off—the more visible browsers need to continue to fight to hang onto what they've already established.
For Internet Explorer it was Firefox, Opera and Safari. Now that Google's Chrome is in the mix, it will be interesting to see if and how the numbers continue to shift.
