Mountain View (ip-192.com): Mozilla’s Firefox is losing market share for the third month running, according to a report published by NetApplications. The winner is Google’s Chrome, which continued to climb for the 16th straight month. Firefox lost about 0.2 percentage points last month to end with a market share of 24.2%. Meanwhile, Chrome ended February with a 5.6% share, up 0.4 of a percentage points. Google’s browser has doubled its share over the last six months.
All of this is bad news for Microsoft: Internet Explorer (IE) lost a half percentage point last month to finish with a market share of 61.2 percent. In the last three months alone, IE’s market share dropped 2 percentage points.
This news comes on the heels of new vulnerability in Internet Explorer which could allow remote code execution. "An issue was posted publicly that could allow an attacker to host a maliciously crafted web page and run arbitrary code if they could convince a user to visit the web page and then get them to press the F1 key in response to a pop-up dialogue box," said Jerry Bryant, senior security communications manager at Microsoft in a blog post. "We are not aware of any attacks seeking to exploit this issue at this time, and in the current state of our investigation we have determined that users running Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista are not affected."
While Microsoft may find some comfort in the latest statistics since the drop in market share slowed from a 3.4 percent drop in the September to November 2009 quarter, continued security issues with the browser certainly don’t put users at ease. They move to alternatives such as Chrome and Firefox. Meanwhile, Apple's Safari posted a slight decline to 4.4 percent for February, while Opera Software's desktop browser essentially remained flat at 2.4 percent.
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