The numbers from the latest round of the browser wars are coming in. The Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox 4 has had nearly 5.5 million downloads in the 24 hours since its release on Tuesday. When it was released a few weeks ago, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 had about half that number in the first day.
Although the download count is impressive for Firefox, the number in the first day is less than the eight million who downloaded Firefox 3 in the first 24 hours in 2008. Some observers are attributing this to the fact that prerelease versions of Firefox 4 have been available for months, as well as the apparent loss of some market share to Google’s Chrome browser.
Market Share
As of February, IE had a worldwide market share of about 57 percent, according to tracking firm Netmarketshare. This was down from about 62 percent in the previous year. Firefox is at about 22 percent, slightly down from 24 percent in 2010. Chrome has nearly doubled its position to about 11 percent, Safari has slightly increased to about 6.5 percent, and Opera has remained about the same at slightly over two percent.
While both of the leading browsers support new technologies, such as HTML5, and both support hardware acceleration in newer operating systems, Firefox 4 is still supporting Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system, while, ironically, IE9 is not.
Like IE, Firefox 4, originally scheduled for release last November, offers support for hardware acceleration in Vista and Windows 7 machines by utilizing Direct2D and Direct3D APIs. XP doesn’t support Direct2D, but Firefox uses Direct3D on XP to provide partial acceleration. A Microsoft executive has said that supporting XP would have meant “optimizing for the lowest common denominator.”
According to web-statistics firm Net Applications, XP represents 55 percent of operating systems connected to…
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