Mozilla’s Firefox browser is closing in on Internet Explorer’s market leading position in the small-to-medium business (SMB) market, according to a survey of 140,000 SMBs. It seems that the gap between Firefox and Explorer in the SMB market is getting smaller by the month.

Firefox’s browser market share was up by 1.35 percent in February 2007 to 38.95 percent while Internet Explorer’s share dropped by 0.73 percent to 56.95 percent, according to the Toronto-based online time tracking and billing provider, FreshBooks in a survey of its customers.

The survey also revealed that Firefox users were more willing to upgrade to the latest version, with 10.03% being FF 1.5 and 28.92% being FF 2.0 users in February. In contrast, IE6 still outnumber IE7 users by 34.36 percent to 22.59 percent respectively.

Microsoft’s Windows, however, continued to dominate desktop operating system growing from 80.0% to 84.3% in the past year. Freshbooks said that hard sell behind Vista is responsible for the increase.

The increasing popularity of Firefox in the small business sector is getting interesting. Some analysts speculate that Firefox might just turn out to give Internet Explorer a run for the money since there is an increasing preference among SMB users to put the open source browser on their desktops.

Related:

Entry was posted on Saturday, March 10th, 2007 at 11:48 pm under Technology.  Print This Post

Read more entries by Ruben Francia.
Stumble It!