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A fierce competition exists among the different web browsers for market share and right now Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome are in the top three.
According to a report published by Net Applications, Microsoft Internet Explorer still maintains the lead with a significant 52.84 percent of the market but it is in the fight for second place that things get interesting. [Read more…]
Fans of the popular open source browser Firefox will be happy to hear that the Mozilla team has started development of their mobile browser, Fennec, specifically for Android based tablets.
The aim of the team is to release Fennec, together with Firefox 8, and provide a TabletUI, working with Android tablets using Honeycomb (or higher). The work page already includes links to UI mockups, which we added below.
Work is on-going and the crew hopes to be able to release the final UI early in the development cycle of Firefox 8, which is scheduled for this year.
Enjoy more mockup images after the jump. [Read more…]
Microsoft’s days of dominance are quickly coming to a close as StatCounter has announced that the software giant has lost the gold to an old nemesis.
However what’s surprising about StatCounter’s report is not who inherited the gold, but rather who is really killing off IE in the EU.
The firm’s research arm StatCounter Global Stats reports that in December, Firefox took 38.11% of European market share, compared to IE’s 37.52%.
“This is the first time that IE has been dethroned from the number one spot in a major territory,” commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. “This appears to be happening because Google’s Chrome is stealing share from Internet Explorer while Firefox is mainly maintaining its existing share.”
Google Chrome in third place is gaining market share in Europe and has grown to 14.58% compared to 5.06% in December last year. (StatCounter Global Stats)
Despite unveiling Internet Explorer 9 to the masses, Microsoft has been unable to slow the bleeding as more and more users are defecting towards Google Chrome which is considered not only faster than its rivals, but safer as well.
While Mozilla (the organization behind Firefox) is probably thrilled at inheriting the gold away from IE, the company needs to figure out a way to increase the popularity of their browser lest they suffer the same fate as Microsoft in a few years.
Unless you live outside of the geek-o-sphere, you probably did not realize that Mozilla recently added Bing! as a search option to Firefox.
Today Bing and Firefox announced that Bing will be included as one of the search engine choices within Firefox on both the Mac and PC.
We’re very excited to be included in the search engine choices in the upcoming version of Firefox. Having Bing in the “out of the box†list makes it easier than ever for the Firefox community to experience the benefits of Bing.
We expect the Bing option to show up in an upcoming build of Firefox 4. (Bing! Community Blog) [Read more…]
Although it’s only for February, still we could not discount the fact that Google is slowly gaining grounds in the web browser market with the continously improving Chrome browser. Want proof? The latest data collected by Net Applications, a web metrics company is showing that for Google Chrome is the only browser that made some gains in February.
Google Chrome registered an increase of 5.61% in market share from January’s 5.22%, up by 0.39%. Although it’s market share is still not big enough at 0.96% share, still this quite an achievement for Google Chrome, considering that it came late into the web browser party.
Even more interesting is the fact that all of its rival showed a slight decrease in market share during February. Internet Explorer, the top no. 1 browser to date got a decrease in market share of 0.54% from January with 61.58% share in February. Firefox, Safari and Opera also have their market share falling down to 0.20%, 0.08% and 0.03% respectively. Firefox market share is now at 24.23%, Safari at 4.45% and Opera at 2.35%.
Again, it’s a minimal increase and Google has a long way to go to make Chrome browser overtakes or even be at par with both IE and Firefox, but given Google’s marketing strategy plus its continuing effort to enhance Chrome browser, it will just be a matter of time before it becomes a powerful contender in the web browser wars.
