IE captured a 53.83 percent share of the worldwide browser market in March, up from 52.84 percent in February. A minuscule gain, but — importantly — one that was won at its rivals’ expense. During the same period, Firefox’s share of the market slipped to 20.55 percent share from 20.92 percent. Meanwhile, Google Chrome’s market share fell to 18.57 percent from 18.90 percent — the third consecutive month it has declined — and Apple’s Safari dropped to 5.07 percent from 5.2 percent.

“With a gain of .99 percent last month and a net gain of 1.2 percent global usage share over the last five months, Internet Explorer has stabilized and even reversed its usage share declines of the last few years,” Net Applications researchers explained.

For IE, which once held well more than 70 percent of the browser market, this turnabout is a welcome trend. Could its slump finally be over?

Safari accounted for 5.02 percent of global browser usage for September, according to Net Applications. That marks the first time that its share has topped five percent, the firm said.

The Mac itself now accounts for 6.45 percent of Web access worldwide, rising from just over six percent in August (the first time that Apple’s computers had accounted for that level of Web usage). Apple typically gains in September, Net Applications said, pointing out that September marks the start of the back-to-school season.

In the U.S., Apple’s share of the operating system market hit 13.7 percent, the firm said.

Globally, Windows still accounts for 92 percent of the desktop market, while Linux accounted for just over one percent.

On the browser side, Internet Explorer had 54 percent of the market, followed by Firefox with 22 percent and Google’s Chrome with 16 percent. That marks another in a long run of gains for Chrome, while Internet Explorer lost share for the seventh month in a row. Firefox was down just slightly from August.

According to Net Applications’ latest NetMarketShare report,* more than one percent of all global Web browsing occurs on an iPad. And in the U.S., the percentage rises to 2.1 percent.

Small figures, sure. But significant ones. For a single device in a newly created market to capture that kind of Web browsing traffic in just over a year is an impressive achievement by any measure. Note that Net Applications figures that tablets and smartphones together account for five percent of all Web browsing globally and 8.2 percent in the U.S.

*Net Applications compiles its figures from a global network of 40,000 Web sites and 430 “referral sources” like search engines which serve approximately 160 million visitors per month

The near-final version of IE 9 that we’ll see later this morning is said to be orders of magnitude faster than IE 8. It’s more compliant with emerging HTML5, CSS3 and SVG2 standards. It’s also, in the words of Microsoft, the only browser to use “full hardware acceleration,” the first to really tap into a computer’s graphics chip to fully accelerate content display rendering. In other words, it’s the only browser to really use the whole PC to see the Web and make Web pages behave like native applications. That claim’s already been disputed by Firefox developer Mozilla (“we are faster and we were first”), but that’s beside the point. Because what really matters is that true hardware acceleration is finally here, and that can only help push the Web forward and make it more interactive and more immersive.

Not really.

The reasons for this are quite simple. With less than five percent of the desktop browser market, according to Net Applications, Safari simply lacks the critical user mass to do any harm. And while its share of the mobile browser market is significantly larger (58.2 percent in the U.S.), it is not really much of a threat there either because of its design. Unlike browsers running standard ad blockers, Safari displays Web pages as they were originally intended–ads and all.

It doesn’t eliminate ads.

Only by pressing the Reader button in its address field can a page be stripped of its ads. In other words, every time they visit new articles, Safari requires readers to make a choice about whether or not to view the ads.

This seems to be an elegant compromise between readers and publishers. Activating Reader requires additional navigation and a click of the mouse. In other words, it requires motivation. So as a reader encountering a well-designed page with nonintrusive advertisements, I’m inclined not to bother with it. But if publishers plaster their content with “smack the monkey” banner ads, auto-play videos and whatnot, making it difficult to read, I probably will.

In Reader, Apple (AAPL) is presenting a sort of publisher-consumer contract. And this may inspire publishers to think a bit more about the advertisements they run on their sites and their ad-to-content ratios. As software developer Fraser Speirs recently noted, “Most interesting thing about Safari Reader? It shows how little actual content there is on these busy, long Web pages.”

And then there’s this: People who truly loathe online advertising are surely running ad-blocking software already. Those are the folks publishers should worry about, and to them, Reader won’t be any use at all.

BoomTown started off at what has become a magically bottomless trough of posts. Kara reported on yet another exec, this time Angela Courtin, SVP of Marketing, Entertainment and Content, scurrying down the gangway of the SS MySpace. Kara mused that while posts on executive departures from My Space and Yahoo have been plentiful lately, they can’t keep coming forever. Midweek, she got on a plane to Beantown and caught up with Walt Mossberg at MIT’s new Media Lab facility. The video she came back with features foldable cars, cities of the future, awesome electro-opera gloves and the weirdest glowing-eyed owl-thing Weekend Update has ever laid eyes on. Seriously: Worth a watch. Toward the end of the week, Kara got deep in a piece she wrote for the Washington Post, where she worked back when newspapers were king. She wrote about what she thought the world would benefit from being rid of, namely physical keyboards and computer mice. Full disclosure: She wrote the post on her Apple (AAPL) iPad.

Digital Daily was a posting machine this week, starting early with some bad news for Steve Ballmer and the Internet Explorer fanboys out there (theoretically there should be some right?). It looks like IE’s dominating market share dropped seven percent, down to 59 percent since this time last year, under pressure from other browsers, according to a Net Applications study. Midweek, John moved on to a post about recent speculation that low AT&T (T) data plan prices for the iPad 3G may indicate an extension of the exclusive deal between AT&T and Apple. John finished things off with a nice post that brings some perspective to all the Apple ogling by the press. The comScore (SCOR) report names Samsung as the top mobile device maker in the U.S. market, even if an analysis of media coverage volume might suggest otherwise.

Over at MediaMemo, Peter brought us a post early in the week on Google’s investment in Invidi, a start-up working on “addressable ads” in the TV space. We aren’t sure if Google (GOOG) is looking more Appley or if Apple is looking more Googley these days. From the light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel files, Peter posted that Time Inc. saw gains in both ad and subscription dollars last quarter. The question remains: Will it be a V- or a W-shaped recovery? At least it’s not just a backslash. Delivering a much anticipated piece of news, Peter posted that it appears Facebook will finally start rolling out location services sometime in the next several weeks. Advertising Age reported that McDonald’s (MCD), the international corporate face of individualized services, will be a partner for the launch. It makes a lot of sense if you think about it. At Mickey D’s, you can have it any way you want, as long as it’s the McDonalds way.

Personal Technology this week was a little more of a conceptual piece than a gadget review, but Walt always mixes it up at the right time. He devoted his entire column to demystifying some of the concepts around cloud computing and explains what it may mean for Joe and Jane user. Walt seems keen on the change with allows flexibility and interoperation among devices, and his explanation brings it down to ground level. Katie rounded us out with a hands-on review of Microsoft’s new Kin One, a roundish little smartphone designed to be a social platform as much as a phone. She liked the design and execution in most areas, though felt that the polish on this first Microsoft smartphone reincarnation was a little lacking. Best of all? Seems like Kin’s constant wireless upload of all content to the cloud might be the feature to beat.

Thanks for tuning in, logging on and tweeting out with our new Meebo bar. We’re in the final countdown to the D8 conference now, and we’re ready to level up to full-tilt awesome. Stay tuned!

This is the first time IE’s share has ever fallen below 60 percent.

Meanwhile, Mozilla’s Firefox, Apple’s (AAPL) Safari and Google’s (GOOG) Chrome all made small gains, apparently at IE’s expense. Chrome posted the largest of the bunch, rising 0.6 points to 6.73 percent. Firefox’s market share rose 0.07 points to 24.59 percent. And Safari’s increased just 0.06 points to 4.7 percent, a surprisingly underwhelming gain for a browser that ships not just on the Mac, but on the iPhone, iPod touch and now the iPad as well. (Click chart below to enlarge.)

Yes, IE’s month-over-month drop is piddling. But the year-over-year decrease is worth noting because the rate of decline in IE’s market share is clearly accelerating. The browser has lost nearly eight percent market share since April 2009. And it has lost nearly 20 percent since April 2008, when its market share was over 77 percent. Clearly, IE 8, while largely well-received, hasn’t done much to reverse the overall decline of Microsoft’s (MSFT) browser.

Hard to believe that IE held an estimated 95 percent of the browser market in 2003.

Not much of a surprise, really, since Microsoft (MSFT) said during last week’s earnings report that it shipped a record number of copies of Windows during the December quarter. The company has sold some 60 million Windows 7 licenses since launching the operating system on Oct. 22, with returning consumer demand driving a healthy 35 percent year-to-year increase in Windows licensing revenue for the quarter.

Clearly, Windows 7 is on a nice hot streak right now–something, I think it’s safe to say, that never happened with Vista. But is this streak driven by the broader PC market rebound that began prior to the operating system’s launch or by Windows 7 itself?

A Google spokesman said Monday that Chrome will be pre-installed on some Sony laptops. He declined to comment on financial terms of the deal and the geographic scope of the partnership, which he called a test. Sony didn’t return requests for comment.

Google will need a lot more than Sony’s relatively small computer market share to make a dent. As of July, Chrome accounted for 2.6 percent of the global Web browser market, according to Net Applications.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

As CEO and chairman of Mozilla, respectively, John Lilly and Mitchell Baker steward the development of Firefox, the open-source browser that challenged and then broke Microsoft’s choke hold on the browser market. As of April 2009, Firefox claimed 22.48 percent of Web browser market, according to Net Applications. That makes it the second most popular browser world-wide, after Internet Explorer, which holds 66.1 percent. An impressive feat. And an important one. Because by dislodging Internet Explorer from its dominant market position, Firefox has proven not only that open-source projects often provide better software–something to which any Linux geek will attest–but that it’s possible for a particularly well done one to become an everyday consumer application.

Session Highlights

Live Blog

• “How many people here have heard of Firefox?” Walt asks. Applause. And with that, Mitchell Baker and John Lilly join him onstage.
• When I test a Windows computer, says Walt, the very first thing I do is download Firefox to see if it works. Because if it doesn’t, there are obviously problems. How many people use Firefox? 300 million says Lilly. But that’s just about 20 percent. Which is shocking. Because that means most folks end up using the browser that comes with their computers. And we spend more time with our browsers than with our families.
• Walt asks about the Firefox growth curve. Baker says the curve has been relatively linear after an initial spike. “Why don’t people use Firefox?” Walt asks. Lilly says people just aren’t aware. “Most people think of the browser as a pane of glass; they don’t realize that it really effects the way they see the Web. Baker adds that many people fear their computers, and that might make them reticent to experiment with a new browser.

• Firefox’s initial browser improvements in speed and extensibility have been matched. Mozilla is a far smaller outfit than Microsoft (MSFT), Apple (AAPL) and now Google GOOG). Sure, you’re nimble. But how are you going to keep up with these guys? Lilly acknowledges that rival browsers are formidable. But Firefox is still making advances in speed and performance. It’s a “modern” browser, he says contrasting it to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Walt presses further. Notes that Google Chrome has what the company claims is the fastest Javascript engine around. Apple makes similar claims with Safari. Again, how do you compete? Baker: “If you were a business picking a space in which to compete, you wouldn’t pick one with Microsoft, Apple and Google.” But remember, she says, that wasn’t the case a few years ago. It was really just IE. We’ve been around for a while and we’ve had great success. Mozilla is undaunted by Microsoft et al., apparently.
• Walt: 71 of the foreign-language versions of Firefox are written by volunteers. Why should I use a product like that? Lilly says Mozilla has a system for verifying the quality of these other versions and vets them prior to release. Beyond that, users will alert the company to any problems.
• Walt: Why wouldn’t it just be better for the consumer to go with the company that’s hired experts to do its translations? Baker: How much software do you really think is great? Walt: Not very much. Lilly: But it’s all written by experts. Walt nods, point taken.
• Walt presses on, noting that many open-source products are rough. Baker concedes. Circling back, Walt takes issue with Lilly’s characterization of IE as not a “modern” browser.” Explain that. Fast, Supports new graphics standards. Runs apps well. Lilly says IE doesn’t. Walt asks for an example. Lilly says Zimbra.
• How does it feel to be competing with Chrome, Walt asks, noting that Mozilla has long had a relationship with Google. “You’re now where Google’s “don’t-be-evil bulldozer is heading. How does that feel?” Baker says relations between the two companies are still good. They are still cooperating on geolocation, for example. The next version of Firefox will ship with that and it’s a Google service. It doesn’t have to be a Google service, but Google provides it for free and as such, is the obvious source. Lilly jumps in: As long as we build a good browser, we’re OK. We’re not without assets. “We’re not simply going to shut down because Google is entering our market.” Our point of view is that the browser can do more for you. That’s not really Google’s vision. We think of the browser as a “user agent.”
• Lilly says he likes Chrome. “Really?” asks Walt. Lilly says yes. He notes that rival browsers like Chrome and Safari have made Firefox better. A nice change from competing against, IE, apparently.
• Walt asks why Mozilla doesn’t making non-Web browser software. “What we’re actually trying to do,” says Baker, “is improve the Web itself….Our main goal is to make more capabilities available, and right now, the browser is the main delivery mechanism….We’re trying to be the delivery mechanism upon which others build innovations.”
• Lilly mentions Thunderbird, Mozilla’s email app. Walt dismisses it as a geek app. He notes the difference between it and Firefox, which is a polished, mainstream app. Lilly says Thunderbird is not a niche app. It’s got a sizable user base.
• On to the issue of mobile… Why am I not using Firefox on my iPhone or BlackBerry? Lilly notes that prior to Apple’s App store, people were not that accustomed to installing apps on their phone. “We needed that to change….That moved the power away from the carriers and manufacturers to the consumers. And we didn’t want to do ‘Firefox Mobile’; we wanted to do Firefox–the fullblown app.”
• Something about Windows mobile, presumably negative [I missed it].

  Walt: I wish Ballmer was still here.

  Lilly: Who doesn’t? [laughter]

• Baker: “What we really want to do is make Firefox a mediation layer for developers.” Rather than building 15 different versions of the browser, Mozilla wants to build a single application layer for all of them.
• Q&A: The first question is about whether the company worries about a shift from a nonprofit to for-profit business. Baker says Mozilla can’t be successful with a for-profit model. “We are only successful because of our current status.”
• Is Firefox responsible for Google’s market dominance? Short answer: Obviously not.
• What’s the value proposition for Firefox now that Chrome exists? Questioner has switched to Chrome because it runs Google Apps better (which is the way Google designed it). So why use Firefox? People like the interface, says Lilly. They can modify it. They can skin it, etc. Lots of legitimate reasons.

A note about our coverage: This liveblog is not an official transcript of the conversation that occurred onstage. Rather, it is a compilation of quotes, paraphrased statements and ad-lib observations written and posted to the Web as quickly as we were able. It was not intended as a transcript and should not be interpreted as one.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090528/d7-interview-mitchell-baker-and-john-lilly/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20090102/ie-market-share-down-nearly-12-percent-in-two-years/ http://allthingsd.com/20090102/ie-market-share-down-nearly-12-percent-in-two-years/#comments Fri, 02 Jan 2009 16:30:12 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=10483 The stock market’s performance this past year isn’t the only thing that’s charting historic lows. According to preliminary metrics from Net Applications, the share of the browser market held by Microsoft’s (MSFT) Internet Explorer has slipped below 70 percent (click on chart above). IE’s market share topped out at 68.15 percent in December, down from 69.77 percent in November and 71.27 percent in October. Astonishing, given that it began the year at around 75 percent. Meanwhile, Firefox, Apple’s (AAPL) Safari, Google’s (GOOG) Chrome and even Netscape rose in share, with Firefox exceeding 20 percent for a full month, a trend that Net Applications expects will continue through December and beyond.

Now, Net Applications cautions that the December holiday season strongly favored residential over business usage, which increases the relative usage share of Mac, Firefox, Safari and Chrome. So perhaps the IE’s lower usage during the month was a bit more pronounced than it might otherwise have been. But that doesn’t change the fact that its reign is clearly in decline. In January of 2007, IE held nearly 80 percent market share; now it holds 68.15. Still, the lion’s share of the market, but a share that has slipped nearly 15 percent in just two years, (click on chart below) and given recent news, seems certain to slip further in the months ahead.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090102/ie-market-share-down-nearly-12-percent-in-two-years/feed/ 5 http://allthingsd.com/20081230/insert-bad-surfin-safari-pun-here/ http://allthingsd.com/20081230/insert-bad-surfin-safari-pun-here/#comments Tue, 30 Dec 2008 08:00:16 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=10261 The holidays were particularly kind to Apple’s (AAPL) Mobile Safari Web browser. According to Net Applications, the number of Americans using Safari to browse the Web via the iPhone and iPod Touch rose dramatically last week–presumably as people tested out their new Christmas gifts.

Browser share for the iPod Touch averaged 0.17 percent between Dec. 25 and 28. That’s nearly three times the 0.06 percent it averaged for the for the three weeks prior. Browser share for the iPhone saw a similar spike. Since Dec. 25, its share has averaged 0.65 percent, an increase of about 50 percent over the 0.42 percent share it averaged from Dec. 1 to 24. And those averages appear to be holding steady–for the time being, anyway. An impressive showing for Safari, which may well be defining our expectations for the mobile Web.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081230/insert-bad-surfin-safari-pun-here/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081230/insert-bad-surfin-safari-pun-here-2/ http://allthingsd.com/20081230/insert-bad-surfin-safari-pun-here-2/#comments Tue, 30 Dec 2008 08:00:16 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=10261 The holidays were particularly kind to Apple’s (AAPL) Mobile Safari Web browser. According to Net Applications, the number of Americans using Safari to browse the Web via the iPhone and iPod Touch rose dramatically last week–presumably as people tested out their new Christmas gifts.

Browser share for the iPod Touch averaged 0.17 percent between Dec. 25 and 28. That’s nearly three times the 0.06 percent it averaged for the for the three weeks prior. Browser share for the iPhone saw a similar spike. Since Dec. 25, its share has averaged 0.65 percent, an increase of about 50 percent over the 0.42 percent share it averaged from Dec. 1 to 24. And those averages appear to be holding steady–for the time being, anyway. An impressive showing for Safari, which may well be defining our expectations for the mobile Web.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081230/insert-bad-surfin-safari-pun-here-2/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081002/windows-cloud-rolling-in/ http://allthingsd.com/20081002/windows-cloud-rolling-in/#comments Thu, 02 Oct 2008 18:00:13 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=6149

[ See post to watch video ]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081002/windows-cloud-rolling-in/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081002/osx_share/ http://allthingsd.com/20081002/osx_share/#comments Thu, 02 Oct 2008 15:50:50 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=6101 Historically, Apple’s September back-to-school promotion has been a great driver of sales and this year was no exception. According to research outfit Net Applications, Apple’s share of the operating system market rose nearly four-tenths of a percentage point in September, its biggest one-month gain since May (click on the chart below for a larger version).

Today, Mac OS X runs on 8.23 percent of the machines accessing the 40,000 sites monitored by Net Applications. Two years ago it was running on a little over 5 percent. That’s a 58 percent gain. Quite an achievement, though at 8.23 percent, Apple’s (AAPL) share of the OS market is still dwarfed by the 90.29 percent held by Microsoft and its Windows OS. That said Windows’s market share does appear to be slipping. It dropped 0.4 percent from August to September.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081002/osx_share/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20080819/apple-pacific-crest-sees-rising-cash-flow-from-iphone/ http://allthingsd.com/20080819/apple-pacific-crest-sees-rising-cash-flow-from-iphone/#comments Tue, 19 Aug 2008 17:54:23 +0000 Tiernan Ray http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=2830 Pacific Crest analyst Andy Hargreaves released a note this morning with a bunch of data points showing the rising importance of Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone in Internet usage. And he implies that the current value of the shares could be closer to $184 than the current $176.15 at which the stock trades.

Hargreaves writes that based on data from privately held Internet measurement firm Net Applications, of Viejo, Calif., the Safari Web browser shipped on the iPhone accounts for .3 percent of all world-wide Web surfing in August so far, double its share in June, prior to the introduction of the iPhone 3G. “iPhone’s rapid share gains in Internet usage suggest potential upside to current estimates,” writes Hargreaves, “and are a strong indicator of what we believe are lasting competitive advantages.” He goes on: “As Web-based software and services become more ingrained in our every-day working and personal lives, Apple’s emerging advantage in the mobile Internet will, in our view, become increasingly valuable.”

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