Firefox Continues to Make Gains

Firefox continues to make slow gains globally, with the market share of Internet Explorer beginning to stabilize, Web analytics firm OneStat.com reported on Friday.

Worldwide, market share of Internet Explorer fell slightly to 85.17 percent from 85.82 percent in January, while usage of Firefox rose slightly from 11.23 percent to 11.79 percent in May. Apple's Safari browser also made modest gains, at 2.02 percent from 1.88 percent in January.

"It is interesting to see that global usage share of Mozilla is higher in the USA and Canada as in other countries in the world and that the global usage share of Apple's Safari is still growing," said Niels Brinkman, co-founder of OneStat.com.

In the US, Firefox has a 12.81 percent share, and in Canada, 16 percent. However, in both cases Internet Explorer registered about a 2 percent gain, and in the case of Canada, at Firefox's expense.

In all cases, Safari was the third most popular browser, followed by Opera and Netscape. Except for Canada, where Opera has a 2.15 percent share, both browsers accounted for less than one percent each of used browsers in the surveyed countries.

The browser race is expected to heat up again later this year. Both Mozilla and Microsoft hope to have new versions of their browsers released to the public by the end of 2006. In the past, Mozilla has been able to successfully use its new browser releases as opportunities to expand market share.