Market adoption

Market adoption

Web-surfers have adopted Firefox rapidly, despite Internet Explorer coming pre-installed with every copy of the Windows OS. Internet Explorer has seen a steady decline of its usage share since Firefox's release. According to Dutch web analytics firm OneStat, by July 2006, Firefox was the second most widely-used browser, with 12.93% of global usage share.[48] By December 2006, according to data made available by U.S. firm NetApplications, Firefox's market share had grown to 14% globally.[49]
Downloads have continued at an increasing rate since Firefox 1.0 was released in November 2004, and as of February 12, 2007 Firefox has been downloaded over 300 million times. This number does not include downloads using software updates or from third-party websites.[50] They do not represent a user count, as one download may be installed on many machines, or one person may download the software multiple times. Mozilla Vice President of Products Christopher Beard estimates that Firefox had 70 million to 80 million users as of October 2006. [51]
With Microsoft releasing version 7 of Internet Explorer ("IE7") that same month, Firefox's share growth might have been expected to slow, but as of January 2007, IE7 has instead gained share mostly at the expense of older versions of IE. [52]