Firefox reasserts popularity over Internet Explorer

Firefox taking over 10% of the market from IE5

5 November 2005 9:10 GMT / By Stuart Miles

According to a recent survey on the Internet by web monitoring company OneStat.com, Firefox has cornered 11.5% of the browser market share.

Internet Explorer still dominates the landscape with a recorded global usage of 85.45%. In contrast to Microsoft's browser, however, which saw a 1.18% decline since the end of April, the open source browser saw its usage share increase, up 2.82%.

However this is only a fraction of the story for high tech readers. Pocket-lint is tracking these numbers to be more like 70% for Microsoft's Internet Explorer to 20% for Mozilla's Firefox browser, suggesting that Firefox's meteoric rise in popularity still has a long way to go with the general public.

In the report third, fourth and fifth place are Apple's Safari (1.75%), Netscape (0.26%) and Opera (0.77%).

The company has also broken down its figures on a UK basis. Here, IE records 93.37%, Firefox 4.94%, Safari 0.99%, Netscape 0.23% and Opera 0.39%.

OneStat monitors, on a browser basis, the Internet users that arrive at sites using one of its services. The research, it states, is based on a sample of 2 million visitors divided into 20,000 visitors of 100 countries each day.