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Firefox Gains on IE Again in June
kurtz_tan writes "Infoworld reported that Firefox increased its market share to 8.71 percent, up from 8 percent in May, while IE's share shrank to 86.56 percent from 87.23 percent. This is according to NetApplications.com. Since the beginning of the year, Firefox has increased its market share every month between 0.5 percent and 1 percent, mostly at the expense of IE. This means Firefox would cross the 10% market share by October."
"What prevents OEMS from installing Firefox much like Sony and others did with NS? Granted MS would love to charge those companies more, but wouldn't those companies save in support costs?"
There would probably be no savings in support costs. For every exploited secuirty problem with IE, there would be at least 1 complaint about firefox not working because the site doesn't support it.
Vote for Pedro
"As soon as MS decides to show up to this party, Firefox will follow the likes of Mosaic."
/. other than to troll.
Excepting you gloss over what really happened back then. Mosaic was never a widely used browser and Microsoft didn't crush it. It was only really used by the early adopter geeks who used the Internet and the WWW before anyone else had heard about it.
Netscape was the browser that Microsoft crushed. The way they crushed it was easy.
A. Netscape tried to pressure people in to paying them for their browser. When Microsoft came along IE was free. They were leveraging their monopoly income from Windows to fund its development and crush a competitor that didn't have a monoply to fund their browser development Netscape simply couldn't compete with free because they needed revenue from their browser.
B. Microsoft bundled IE with the OS while people had to download Netscape unless the company that built their computer preinstalled it. Give people the choice between bundled with the OS and a long download over a slow modem people took bundled. Also Microsoft made IE the default browser that launched from all their other apps and it was hard to impossible for most people to switch to Netscape. People being lazy they just gave up.
Firefox has one obvious advantage over Netscape, its already free so Microsoft can't undercut the price.
8% and climbing is pretty amazing considering Firefox still has the bundling disadvantage, its not on the computer when people buy it, they have to download it and install it, and for people still on modems, which is a lot of people, its still a pain to download. Its a tribute to how bad IE is by comparison that people are going out of their way to get Firefox at the rate they are.
One other interesting aspect of this contest, Netscape and IE are both closed source and Netscape didn't have the manpower and money to go head to head with Microsoft in closed source R&D. It will be interesting if open source developers and Firefox can compete against vast sums of monopoly money Microsoft can throw at something when it feels like it.
P.S.
Once again Threeep backs big and obnoxious over small and lovable. He is a huge fanboy for NASA and trashes Scale Composites every chance he gets too. He is also big on America can do no wrong and everyone else can do no right. He was an easy pick for my Foes list and probably should be on the foes list of everyone who prefers small and lovable geekdom over big business, big bureaucracy and American empire. Not sure why he posts on
@de_machina