Browser
Market Share and Operating System White Paper
April 2008
Microsoft Loses Some Market Share But
Maintains Dominance
The Browser Market Share and Operating System Market
Share White Paper data is by month starting in September 1997 through
the March 2008
Microsoft has lost 8.63% of the
browser market in the last 12 months. Looking at the last 12 months,
you can easily draw the conclusion that Firefox and Google Desktop are
edging away at the Microsoft browser monopoly. As Vista is
rolled out to more users it will be interesting to see what that will do
to the browser market. So far user acceptance of Vista has been slowed
by the lack if user acceptance for the new OS.
Live update did not help in accelerating the acceptance
of IE 7, plus with the slow acceptance of Vista individuals and
enterprises are not moving to the new version as rapidly as Microsoft
would like. An added kicker is those who move to Vista can more readily
have multiple browsers on their systems or switch from one to the other
quickly and with little pain. The cost of doing that is minimal.
Google Desktop will be the next challenge for Microsoft
to face.
On December 28, 2007 AOL announced that
they will no longer support Netscape after February 1, 2008
Netscape has launched version 8 and no one
noticed. From interviews with many users there was a common so
what. In our opinion Netscape built it but they did not come.
As we said in our earlier study, we feel that Netscape is almost
invisible with its market share. The small gain that they had
in market share is starting to erode.
In interviews with selected users, we found
that many of them were turned off by the installation process.
We often heard the comments that the process was ad and pop-up
window laden. In addition several of the individuals we
interviewed felt that the “overhead” associated with the ads in
Netscape made it a much less effective tool to use. However
they did say they liked many of the new features, including
tabbed browsing.
Internet Explorer market share history
The full
study was produced in January 2006 with data through January 2008.
See a full copy of the
press release here.
Trends in Browser OS Market Share
12 Months - March 2008 - March 2007
| |
Mar-08 |
Mar-07 |
Change |
|
Browser |
Rank |
Percent |
Rank |
Percent |
Rank |
Percent |
|
Internet Explorer |
1 |
60.00% |
1 |
68.63% |
0 |
-8.63% |
|
Firefox |
2 |
19.95% |
2 |
15.11% |
0 |
4.83% |
|
Netscape |
3 |
9.68% |
3 |
11.02% |
0 |
-1.34% |
|
Google Desktop |
4 |
4.01% |
6 |
1.51% |
2 |
2.49% |
|
Safari |
5 |
1.65% |
4 |
0.87% |
-1 |
0.78% |
|
Opera |
6 |
1.17% |
7 |
1.29% |
1 |
-0.12% |
|
Mozilla |
7 |
1.32% |
5 |
0.90% |
-2 |
0.41% |
|
|
|
97.77% |
|
99.34% |
|
|
The full report contains
charts in jpg format and data by month and quarter for each browser.
