Mozilla's Firefox browser is slowly eroding into Microsoft's (MSFT) Internet Explorer. Market share has grown to 12.93 percent in July according to a report by OneStat.com.
While Microsoft still enjoys a phenomenal 83.05 market share for IE, its usage has dropped by 2.12 percent while Firefox's usage increased by 1.14 percent. It wouldn't take too many more months like that to cause some serious damage.
Currently Apple (AAPL) has its Safari in third place with 1.84 percent, with Opera coming in next with 1 percent.
Niels Brinkman, co-founder of OneStat.com said "It seems that the global usage share of Mozilla Firefox [started] to grow rapidly again after a period of no growth." The opinion of the street is that Firefox should enjoy a slow, steady rate of growth for a while.
In certain countries Firefox has a large market share. For example, in Germany they have a 39.02 share, In Italy it is 20.41 and in Australia it is 24.23 percent. In these countries and in Europe in General the reasons are political as well as financial. They are looking at ways to get around the licensing fees.
The major internal problem cited concerning IE is the security issues. Carol Baroudi, partner at Hurwitz and Associates and author of Internet for Dummies said, "There are people making active choices to go away from IE, people are clobbered with [crippling] security issues."
This is one thing that dogs Microsoft. It's hard to believe that they are having so much trouble with correcting this with the people they have to work on it. If they don't deal with these issues they will continue losing their market share.
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