With just seven months on the market, Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) has
already gained significant market share, stealing the fire from
rival browser Netscape, according to a report by Internet
researcher WebSideStory.
IE6's global market share has ballooned from just 2.4% shortly
after its launch to 30.5%, the researcher said. Meanwhile,
Netscape, which had been holding steady with 12% of the worldwide
market for more than a year, dropped to slightly over 7% after the
release of IE6.
While IE6 stands strong at number-two in terms of global market
share, trailing only IE5, Netscape is not dead in the water yet,
according to WebSideStory.
AOL Time Warner (AOLTW), which owns the Netscape browser, recently
revealed that it is considering dropping Internet Explorer from its
America Online Inc. Internet service in favour of a browser powered
by the "Gecko" engine, which is software used by Netscape to
display Web pages in a browser. With AOL's powerful presence in the
market, and its already 34 million registered users, the researcher
predicted that Netscape could launch a comeback if AOL decides to
give IE the boot.
Additionally, the newly released Netscape 6.2 appears to be a
stronger product than some earlier versions, which might bolster
the browser's popularity, Geoff Johnston, vice-president of product
marketing for WebSideStory's StatMarket service said.
WebSideStory said that it rates global browser usage share as the
percent of daily Internet users that access the Net using a
particular browser. The user statistics were gathered by the
company's StatMarket Web site design and Web software developer
service, which publishes information gathered from more than 50
million daily Internet users visiting 125,000 sites worldwide, the
company said.
The researcher did not disclose whether the study was conducted
independently or paid for by a company.