Firefox Gains Ground On Microsoft’s IE

Firefox has posted a half a percentage point or more gain in market share for the third month in a row and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer’s dominant lead has slipped slightly.

Firefox accounted for 12.5 percent of September’s global browser market, said Aliso Viejo, Calif.’s Net Applications. That’s an increase from August’s 11.8 percent, which was up from the 11.3 percent in July. Internet Explorer’s share slipped to 82.1 percent in September, down from August’s 83 percent.

Also quietly making gains was Apple Computer’s Safari browser. In fact, Safari had its highest numbers in September since April. By the end of September, Safari was up from 3.2 percent to 3.5 percent.

“Internet Explorer continues to lose market share with Firefox and Safari showing a steady increase over the past 9 months,” said Net Applications in a statement.

Both Mozilla and Microsoft are working hard on the next version of their respective Web browsers. For example, Mozilla released Firefox 2.0 RC1 last week and Microsoft announced Internet Explorer 7 RC1 in August.

Although the bulk of Microsoft’s browser share comes from the older IE 6.0, IE 7 now accounts for 2.1 percent of all browsers used; that’s up from 1.7 percent in August. Firefox 2.0, however, has just 0.1 percent of the market.

Both IE 7 and Firefox 2.0 are expected to go into final release before the end of the year.

You can download Firefox 2.0 RC1 from the Mozilla.org Web site and Microsoft’s IE7 RC1 from Microsoft’s web site.