Mozilla's Firefox 3.5 Looks to Pass IE 7.0 in Browser Marketshare

From DailyTech: Its no secret that Firefox 3.5 was an enormous success for Mozilla, with millions of copies downloaded within days of the release at the end of June. Indeed, the browser helped grow Mozilla's marketshare to over 30 percent worldwide for the first time, according to some reports.

Now, new market research is indicating that the browser may be about to do something that no third-party browser since Netscape Navigator in the late 1990s has done -- claim the title of the world's most used browser. According to StatCounter, a web tracking service that covers over 3 million pages and approximately 5 billion page views per month, Mozilla 3.5 is on the verge of usurping Internet Explorer 7.0's throne as top browser.

According to the firm's research, Mozilla 3.5's strong growth has fueled it to a marketshare of 21.45 percent last month, while Internet Explorer 7.0 was clinging to a 21.47 percent marketshare. As Internet Explorer 7.0's share was shrinking and Firefox 3.5 was growing share, it's expected that StatCounter's December usage statistics will hand the crown to Firefox 3.5.

A wild card is Internet Explorer 8.0, which has slowly risen to 20.15 percent. It's possible that it could beat out Firefox 3.5 in December, but its growth in November was slower than Firefox 3.5's.

According to the statistics, Opera 9.6 and Safari 4.0 continue to hold onto a small but significant marketshares (for some reason, the firm has not added Opera 10.0 to the tracking charts). Use of "other browsers" (likely Opera 10.0 and Chrome) has risen to close to 10 percent. Use of Firefox 3.0 has dramatically shrunk in the last few months, as many customers have upgraded to the latest version.

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