Firefox beats IE in Europe: A duopoly to come?
Mozilla's Firefox 3 is now Europe's dominant Web browser with 35.05 percent market share, beating out Internet Explorer 7's 34.54 percent share, according to data released by StatCounter and reported by Reuters.
Is this a sign of good things to come for open source? Or is it an indication that we're rapidly nearing an industry-wide duopoly: Microsoft and open source, with everything and everyone else an afterthought?
We still have a ways to go before open-source competitors in ERP, CRM, ECM, middleware, databases, operating systems, and other product segments attain Firefox's dominant share, but progress toward that goal is being made. It's not inconceivable, for example, that the server operating system race will soon be between open-source Red Hat and Microsoft, or that Sun will help to turn MySQL into a mainstream enterprise competitor against Oracle and IBM's DB2, rather than "just" the market leader in Web databases.
Today, Microsoft's like/hate relationship with open source is stuttering to a halt as Microsoft prioritizes competition with Linux over partnership with the wider open-source community. I would assume that as Microsoft comes to compete with an increasing array of open-source products in its primary markets, we'll see fewer attempts to make Windows a welcome place for open-source software, and more attempts to squelch out the rising open-source threat.
In short, maybe Firefox's growing European market share really is a sign of things to come: a sign that only government intervention, like the European Commission's recent rebuke of Microsoft's business practices, can stop Microsoft from desperate, potentially illegal competition to win against open source.
Back to the future?
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
EU regulators, WAKE UP!!! The browser market is highly competitive.
I don't plan to celebrate until Firefox market share is higher then the combined market share of ie6, ie7, and ie8. Splitting IE by version number, but grouping all Firefox versions together shows skewed statistics.
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
The fact is, the Firefox browser is used more in the US than IE6, IE7 and IE8 put together. Which is a gift from the gods for us web designer and developers who have had to gnash teeth and pull hair whenever we deal with ANY application from Microsoft that involves HTML... including Outlook 7 which set back the rendering of HTML in emails by a good 5-7 years. Thank god people are finally realizing just how poorly made so many microsoft products are.
This version only view reaks of bias.
Will you be announcing how IE8 is taking the lead on FF3 in a few months?
When FF 3.5 is still leading the European Market over IE 8, will you still be commenting that the results are skewed?
Pretty sure you will.
Sorry but how is this relevant to the overall numbers? In the same way that IE6 is still widely used despite being 2-versions behind there is no reason to think that those using IE7 definitely will transition to IE8. Further, this does not change the fact that usage of IE in general continues to decline; users are not transitioning to Firefox or other browsers only to come back to IE.
The likelihood that IE8 usage is going to outstrip Firefox is, let's be honest, pretty much zero.
* It's not fair to compare versions of browsers; they should be looking at the aggregate usage across versions. IE 6 still has strong market share.
* Sun is currently in the process of being bought by IBM; we'll never see that MySQL/DB2 competition the article is referring to.
* On that note, you'd think OpenOffice.org would have been brought up as well.
* Novell somehow fell off the face of the earth in this article; OpenSUSE gets more hits than Fedora according to distro watch and yet Red Hat is the ordained Microsoft competitor.
Just my thoughts on a few huge points I would have made.
Oh, and don't forget the TomTom case. A company that targets the European automotive industry with US trivial patents deserves no remorse. The grace period is over.
- by theopensourcerer April 3, 2009 4:41 PM PDT
- MS is a dinosaur. A BIG dinosaur yes, but they are nearing the end of their relevance if they can't change their business model.
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- by StevieD377 April 5, 2009 8:21 PM PDT
- I disagree...from what I've heard about Ballmer's performance since Bill has left it's that he's done a fantastic job and has increased a lot of their profit. IE 8 may not be the greatest browser, but compare it to IE 7 or 6. It's come quite a long way. You have to remember, Microsoft had pretty much no competition in the browser market for a while, leaving little incentive to improve. With the introduction of Firefox, Safari, and now Chrome (sorry I really don't see Opera as a competitor) Microsoft is focusing on their browser as well.
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(17 Comments)The World is moving on - MS isn't
On top of that add the surprisingly positive reviews of Windows 7 and I think your theory of Microsoft not moving on is pretty much false.