IE weakened by Open Source browsers

Bangalore: Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) market share has dropped more than five percent to 64 percent since January of 2009. Its share was roughly 70 percent at the start of the year, and it was at 75 percent in mid 2008. Microsoft's has been losing its share mostly to the open source browsers, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, according to Net Applications' statistics.

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Google's Chrome has increased to four percent market share from 1.5 percent at the start of 2009. It is expected that Chrome's market share will increase further after the full fledged launch of Google's own operating system next year. Also, market share of the leading open source browser, Mozilla Firefox, climbed to roughly 25 percent over the past year, also up three percentage points to 24.72 percent in November. Its share was 22 percent at the beginning of this year, reports ZDNet. Meanwhile, Opera (not Open Source) stayed roughly the same with two percent market share, according to Net Applications.

IE is installed by default on all Microsoft Windows operating system (OS). Not many users are interested in taking the extra effort of downloading Mozilla or Chrome. This might be one of the reason why IE is still dominating with such a large margin. But times are changing and with Google's OS just around the corner, Microsoft market share in browser might fall tremendously. Unless, Microsoft makes some radical changes to make IE much better than what it is right now.

As Microsoft's grip on the browser market loosens, opportunities for open source rivals are blossoming. It will be interesting to see which of the two top open source browsers benefits most next year.