Mozilla has reported a sharp rise in Firefox 4 downloads since offering an update to all users of older versions. As a result, Firefox 4’s global market share rose more than 3.5 percentage points, Mozilla’s Firefox Community Coordinator Asa Dotzler says.
By contrast, Microsoft’s new Internet Explorer 9 browser, which rolled out ahead of Firefox 4, held just more than a four percent market share, according to the latest figures cited by Mozilla. What’s more, Dotzler doesn’t expect IE9 to catch up with Firefox 4 anytime soon — despite Microsoft’s rollout of IE9 as part of its Windows Update service.
“It will be a year or two before they can move the bulk of their IE7 and IE8 users forward,” Dotzler wrote in a blog. “So today — and for the foreseeable future — Microsoft will be number three in terms of usage among the modern browsers.”
Leaving XP Users Behind
IE9’s inability to keep pace with Firefox 4 — at least in the short run — is due in large part to Microsoft’s decision to limit the new browser’s compatibility to PCs running Windows Vista and Windows 7. By contrast, Firefox 4 is compatible with PCs equipped with Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7, as well as Apple’s Mac OS and Linux.
Given that more than half of all PCs worldwide are still running Windows XP, Dotzler said abandoning the software giant’s largest group of users was a poor decision. “It’s a shame for the hundreds of millions of users they’ve left behind who could get huge benefits from HTML5 and the modern web — even without hardware acceleration, [which is] something all the other browser vendors are going to provide,” Dotzler wrote.
StatCounter’s latest data indicates Firefox 4 held a global market share of 11.41 percent during the first nine days of…
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