Update (July 4, 2005):

In an ever unfolding slow-motion water-shed moment, it is the opinion of most everyone on the design team that we are witnesses to the second act of the Browser Wars. Internet Explorer continues shedding current surfers (now down to 66.2%) and Firefox (and other NS products) have risen to a 24.9% share.

This is unprecedented in recent surfer usage. These statistics are based on the June 2005 statistics from the Pacoima Ranch site, but they are very clearly paralleled at hundreds of thousands of other sites.

Another clear winner in this new engagement is Opera, the little browser that could. Long the favorite of legitimate hackers, it has roared into third place with a 5.5% surfer share. Opera is the only current pay-for-play browser. Truly strange and wonderful times to live in.

All bets are off about the soon-to-be released Internet Explorer 7. Will it reverse this trend, or hit the floor like a dropped cake? Microsoft is famous for pulling things out of the fire with new releases. Unfortunately, IE7 is part of the first Microsoft project to be semi abandoned, the Longhorn mess. Longhorn was originally planned for a late 2003, early 2004 release as a replacement for Windows XP.

Update (May 2, 2005):

The mighty penguin stood and roared - and those in the castle of Microsoft heard, feared and trembled.

It's a rare thing for the Pacoima Ranch design team to be in a situation where they get into collective jaw-dropping, but they found themselves in this position last month. Regular checking of statistics tells them if new code, areas and subsites are working as planned or need more help. Part of this checking involves skimming over the browser and OS (operating system) statistics. Browser and OS statistics haven't changed much since 2000 - Windows and Internet Explorer run on about 90% of the machines out there (Windows, 97 to 98% and Internet Explorer [IE], 95 to 98%).

That is why the April 2005 statistics were such total jaw-droppers. The March 2005 stats showed that something MIGHT be going to happen (IE, 80.7%, Firefox [and other Netscape {NS} products], 14.6%; Windows, 93.3%, Linux, 3.5%, Macintosh [Apple], 2.6%), but such oddities had been seen before. Then the April 2005 statistics came in. Windows had dropped to 78.3%, Linux had climbed to 18.0%; IE had fallen to 60.5%, Firefox (and NS products) had risen to 21.8%. A nonbrowser "grabber" used on 'Nix systems had even managed to capture the #3 spot, wget, a special ftp-like application used a lot by Linux systems to quickly download and manipulate files.

Incomplete stats for the first two days of May 2005 show Windows at 81.1%, Linux at 18.9%; Internet Explorer at 45.2% and Firefox (and other NS Products) at 41.1% - the avalanche continues.

Update (February 20, 2005):

Microsoft has announced that they will be issuing a new, more secure browser by mid year. Initial plans appear to only call for this new browser to work with Windows XP, though the probable public outrage this will cause will most likely cause Microsoft to add in other operating systems.

In related news, many webmasters are now reporting a 17.4% FireFox penetration. As other browsers run around 5%, this may be the first time in recent 'Net history that Internet Explorer has fallen below an 80% market share.

Update (December 29, 2004):

Dutch company OneStat.COM is reporting even more ingress, with Internet Explorer plummeting to an 89% market share. An additional 4 million downloads of FireFox have occurred.

Original story (December 1, 2004):

For the second time in recent years, a major Microsoft product has had an Open Source project make major inroads into its market share. The first was when OpenOffice.ORG became the preferred office software for most of Europe's national governments as well as about a third of US State governments. Now Microsoft's Internet Explorer has gone from 97% to 95% by Microsoft figures (about 9 million surfers switched), though WebMetrick maintains the actual figures are 95% down to 90% (about 22.5 million surfers). Either way, this is a significant number of people who have ditched IE, usually in favor of FireFox. The reasons for this switch are multiple.

Dissatisfaction with Microsoft and its monopolistic business practices fueled much of the switch in Europe. American reasons were more straight forward - IE is an unnecessary security risk. Frequent patches and a constant barrage of virii tailored to IE's weaknesses combined with the new FireFox release of a killer browser that does more  than IE made it easy to justify the switch, even if minor retraining was needed. FireFox is naturally immune to IE virii.

Apple, Adobe, Macromedia, the Mozilla Foundation, Opera and Sun have recently formed an alliance to explore exactly how to safely  reintegrate Microsoft's nonstandard ActiveX plugin structure into their browsers and browser projects. This represents a surfers', coders' and plugin builders' dream. Surfers would need to only download a single plugin. Currently, most surfers need to download one plugin for FireFox (and other Netscape-like browsers) and another (ActiveX) for Internet Explorer. Coders currently need to use very heavy code to accommodate the current situation as the plugin coding needs to allow either plugin. Plugin builders need to make two separate plugins.

A single plugin architecture would be wonderful for all concerned.