Nevertheless, there are signs that a browser war is imminent. 'People have been raised on IE, so it's tough to replace.' 'IE has been the defacto standard for a lot of years, and that's tough to get around,' Lerner said. Many websites today have been fine-tuned for IE. The challenge for Mozilla, as well as other organizations developing browsers, is to lure website developers into designing their applications for IE alternatives. Microsoft plans to begin beta testing IE 7.0 in early summer, rather than ship the upgrade with the next version of Windows, scheduled for release next year. (Firefox) is gathering steam and gaining traction,' Lerner said.Įarlier this week, at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates announced that the company would update IE sooner than originally planned to improve security. 'That's not going to happen, but, over time, there may be pressure placed on Microsoft. Nevertheless, the open-source browser is not expected to overtake Microsoft in the foreseeable future. 'Overall, they're gaining lots of attention,' Robert Lerner, analyst for Current Analysis, said of Firefox. Other browsers, such as Netscape and Opera, accounted for the rest. As of January, IE's market share had fallen to 92.7 percent, while Firefox's share had risen to 4.8 percent, according to JupiterResearch, a division of Jupitermedia Corp. Security concerns have been a major impetus for consumers to switch from IE to alternative browsers, with Firefox benefiting the most. A preview release of Firefox 1.1 is scheduled for April. The number of downloads of Firefox has topped 25 million, indicating that the open-source browser continues to make gains in the market dominated by Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer.ĭownloads of Firefox 1.0 had reached 25.24 million as of Friday, just over 100 days since its release, according to the Mozilla Foundation, developers of the browser.

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