A Firefox in IE's Henhouse

By Steve Hamm, Business Week Online, 17 Sep 2004.

Though the Mozilla Web browser's share is still small, it's winning converts wary of security holes in Microsoft's dominant product

When was the last time you heard about the browser wars? Well, they're back. The reason: For the first time in more than seven years, Microsoft is losing Web browser market share. And it's not just a blip. According to Web analytics company WebSideStory, Microsoft's share of browser users who visited top e-commerce and corporate sites shrank from 95.6% in June to 93.7% in September. And people using browsers made by the Mozilla open-source software group grew from 3.5% to 5.2%.

Programmers at the Mozilla Foundation hope to increase that momentum with the release this fall of their new browser's consumer-ready version, called Firefox 1.0. It's superfast and suffers few of the security problems that have plagued Microsoft's Internet Explorer in recent months. "There's a window of opportunity for Mozilla to gain significant market share," says Stacey Quandt, analyst with tech consultant Robert Frances Group in Stamford, Conn.


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