Firefox hunting down Microsoft's market share

Open-source browsers Mozilla and Firefox have won over a significant number of defectors from Microsoft's Internet Explorer in the past nine months, website metrics suggest.

The gains for Firefox, which was released in a version 1.0 preview on Tuesday, and for Mozilla are most noticeable at websites popular with tech-savvy early adopters where almost a fifth of users are on Mozilla.

Among readers of silicon.com sister site News.com, site visitors with the Firefox and Mozilla browsers jumped to 18 per cent for the first two weeks of September - up from eight per cent in January.

The Mozilla Foundation, which develops both the Mozilla and Firefox browsers and their underlying Gecko browsing engine, has noted that downloads of the Firefox browser have doubled from three million for version 0.8 to six million for version 0.9. The group said almost 160,000 people have downloaded the latest version of Firefox, the 1.0 release candidate.

A spokesman for Mozilla said: "Obviously, there was a big spike in interest back in July when there were concerns with Internet Explorer security. You worry that such things are just a blip, but that momentum has seemed to continue for us."

Mainstream users have not shown the same gung-ho enthusiasm for the non-Microsoft browser but have increasingly adopted Firefox, according to web analytics firm WebSideStory.

The percentage of visitors to ecommerce and corporate sites that used Firefox or another Mozilla browser grew to 5.2 per cent in September, from 3.5 per cent in June 2004. Meanwhile, Microsoft's share of the users shrank from 95.5 per cent in June to 93.7 per cent in September, according to the company.

Robert Lemos writes for News.com