Windows Drops Below 90% Market Share--Firefox Above 20%

by Sam Dean - Dec. 02, 2008Comments (4)

NetApplications is out with a couple of new metrics of market share for operating systems and browsers, and the news is good for open source. Topping their findings, Microsoft Windows' market share has dropped below 90 percent for the first time in its measurements. The share erosion is largely attributed to increased interest in the Mac platform, but Linux is cited as on the rise as well. In addition, for the first time since it launched its metrics, NetApplications' data shows Firefox's market share topping 20 percent.

On the browser front, NetApplications finds Firefox to have achieved 20.78% market share for the month of November, and the complete breakdown for browser market share is seen in their graphic below.

"Reaching 20 percent worldwide market share is a significant milestone for Firefox and Mozilla," said Mozilla CEO John Lilly.  "It's a huge achievement by the global Mozilla community, one that just a few years ago most would have considered impossible."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For November, NetApplications also found that Microsoft Windows had 89.6% market share, the first time share has been under 90% since the early days of Windows. Meanwhile, Apple's operating system market share climbed in November to 8.9% and Linux's share grew from 0.71% to 0.83%.

Firefox's achievement, in particular, is very notable. I clearly remember when Netscape had more than 80 percent browser market share, and when Internet Explorer had 95 percent share. Primarily through its universe of useful extensions, contributed by the community, Firefox proved to be the upstart browser that could. Now, given the fact that extensions are going to come out for Google Chrome, I expect we'll see even more challenges to Internet Explorer from open source browsers. 

 


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4 Comments
 

Interesting but nothing anyone didn't expect...


Hasn't firefox been above 20% for a while now? Chrome will probably take some additional marketshare away from IE but is probably going to die a slow death like GOOG's virtual world. The question to be begged here is do we need another browser?


The interesting stat in this article is AAPL's market share at almost 9%. This IMO is huge - you're seeing a mass exodus of US computer users moving to the Mac for obvious reasons. I now see an equal # of macs and pcs being used at my local starbucks and this number is significantly skewed in Apple's favor when you visit coffee shops closer to college campuses - a great sign for Apple because they are "catchin em young and watchin em grow"...


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Bill Gates realized early on that all you needed to do as a competitor in the browser wars was get to 25%+ of market share. At that point, developers would have to account for the browser. Once IE got there, they started inserting proprietary hooks that were not standards compliant, and they then reverted to old-fashioned bundling to really rip Netscape a new one. So, Firefox getting to about 20% is very encouraging, given that they are open source, and will not go down the same path MSIE did.


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Why everyone cites NetApps as the golden standard is beyond me, the counted userbase for redhat and ubuntu alone is larger then 1% of the market, meaning NetApps has it wrong.

I've seen a couple of sites listing linux as 2-3%.


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I still don't get Chrome...


0 Votes
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