Internet Explorer Loses 8.17% Market Share in One Year: Study

WebKnowHow
Monday, August 14, 2006; 02:33 AM

Janco Associates, Inc. released its mid year 2006 Browser Market Share White Paper. The major findings for the last 12 months include that Microsoft continues to lose browser market share while Firefox has maintained its number 2 browser position and has added 2.82% to its market share.

The white paper also reports that Netscape version 8 has not taken off as well as expected and has only 4.98% of the browser market. Currently over 97.52% of the browser activity is limited to four browsers: Microsoft Internet Explorer, Firefox, Netscape, and AOL.

The top four browser market share rankings are: 1 - Microsoft’s IE – 75.88; 2 - Firefox – 13.71%; 3 – Netscape - 4.98%; and 4 - AOL – 2.95%. The CEO of Janco Associates, Inc., M. Victor Janulaitis said: “Firefox took off quickly in early 2005 but slowed with the identification of a number of security issues. In the last few quarters Firefox has not found any new traction.” He added, “Netscape’s release of version 8 seems to have landed like a lead balloon. The marketing of that product has been ineffective. In our opinion it is not clear that Netscape will be a player in the browser market next year at this time. This is especially true with the turmoil at AOL - Netscape's parent.”

Janco has collected consistent data on browser activity since September 1997. The data is collected from commercial sits which a focus on business to business activity. Janco has over 350,000 data points for each month of the study as it continues to expand it client base. Janco anticipates that it will issue an update to it market share data at the end of the second quarter of this year.

The full study is distributed electronically and can be purchased for $249.00 at http://www.e-janco.com/browser.htm.