Firefox growth slows, IE holds steady

Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox fell short of breaking the 20% market share bar in July, a Web metrics firm said Tuesday, as the open-source browser's growth slowed dramatically.

Rival Internet Explorer (IE), however, held its share for just the third time in the past year, while Apple's Safari posted its largest market share dropoff since June 2007.

According to Net Applications Inc., Firefox accounted for 19.2% of the browsers used to access the 40,000 sites the company monitors for its clients, an increase of just 0.2 percentage points over June. The gain was substantially lower than the 0.7- and 0.6-point increases that Firefox posted in May and June, respectively; it was also less than half the average increase during the last 12 months.

"I thought Firefox would hit 20% by July," said Vince Vizzaccaro, Net Applications' executive vice president of marketing, referring to a prediction he made two months ago when Firefox's trend line was steeper. "Now it looks like that could be still be another couple of months off."

Use of Firefox 3.0, the major upgrade that debuted in mid-June, however, continued to grow; the new version's share climbed from 2.3% at the end of June to 5.7% at the end of July. Most of July's gains, however, appeared to come at the expense of its predecessor, Firefox 2.0, which lost 3.1 percentage points last month.

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