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Recent surveys suggest that Mozilla's Firefox could exceed Internet Explorer's market share by the middle of 2009 (WebMonkey 2008).

The figures quoted indicated that IE enjoys a 52% market share against Firefox at 43%.  I was surprised at the depth of market share for Firefox so looked into it further.  I found that figures vary considerably across types of users.  "Non-technical" users report 62% vs. 26% in favour if IE.  Other figures showed 'techies' having a significant preference for Firefox.  It seems that most of these figures are based on web logs which can detect the browser application that is used.  However, it then depends on the type of Website as clearly analysis of a website offering technical information will have a high user base of Firefox.  Equally it could be argued that websites accessed from home system may tend to reflect higher Firefox users as users may have more freedom and flexibility on the software that they use.

So what makes people choose between the various browsers on offer?

I suspect there are two strong motivators.  

1. Many will choose Firefox because it's not Microsoft. 
2. Many will choose IE because they don't have a choice.

Data Discoveries' software - Fastrac, and View both run on either browser so are not affected by the users' choice.  Please contact us to setup an account.

According to our website stats the browser split of users on dd.com is 80% vs. 20% in favour of IE. 

Watch this space.
 
For further information read The market share of Firefox vs. Internet Explorer (cnet news.com).