Chicago (IL) – It has been six weeks since Firefox 3 has been released and if we believe market share numbers provided by an ongoing survey of NetApplications, then it appears that Mozilla has had a successful launch with market share gains, especially at the expense of Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
Examining NetApplications' numbers, it is almost certain that this data is highly dependent on daily user behavior and that any results have to be taken with a grain of salt. But if the numbers are any indication then it is clear that Microsoft's Internet Explorer market share is trending down, while Mozilla is playing with the 20% range and is successfully jumping over this mark more often in recent days.
The average market share for Firefox was 19.27% in June, up from 18.41% in May. The Internet Explorer dropped from 73.75% to 72.95% in the same time frame.
According to the most recent data made available by the market research firm today, the Internet Explorer stands at 69.88% today, while Firefox 2 and 3 account for a combined market share of 20.68% (Firefox 2: 13.75%, Firefox 3: 6.92%.) Since the launch of Firefox 3 on June 17, IE's share was as high as 74.30% and played at least 12 time with numbers below the 71% mark, while today's estimate is a new low for the browser in NetApplications' chart.
On the other side, Firefox was estimated to have accounted for a market share of 17.81% on June 17 (Firefox 2: 16.19%, Firefox 3: 1.62%) and was able to jump over the 20% barrier eight times since then. Firefox 3 has been continuously gaining market share since launch and Firefox appears to be making a slight comeback in recent days, after falling as low as 12.37% on July 23. July 26 and July 27 have been the first two consecutive days on which Firefox was able to maintain a market share above 20%.
Since the day of the introduction of Firefox 3, Firefox was able to add 2.85 percentage points to its market share, while IE lost 4.20 points in the same time frame.
