Marketshare data shows that browser share of Internet explorer is shrinking where as Firefox and Safari are gradual winners in the browser wars. Firefox 3.0 increased its share to almost 20% where as Safari is at 6.5%. Internet explorer lacks innovation as Firefox which has so many add-ins that made life easy in browsing internet. The performance is much better on Firefox though at the cost of consuming more CPU time. We have to wait and see how Microsoft takes up these challenges in their IE 8.0 release.

Here is the data from December 2007 to October 2008 :

Market share for browsers, operating systems and search engines via kwout

Increase in Safari browser share is an interesting risk taken by Apple. The versions are released as Apple’s Software Update service on Windows. The update has been pushed to millions of Windows users of Apple’s other software products, like iTunes. This is first time that Apple’s Software Update service is used to delivery of new products. In the process Apple probably annoyed some users. But the tactics of Apple worked by gaining browser market share.