Analysis – February turned out to be the month of the beta browsers, in a more significant way than we have seen in any other month before. While overall market shares remained relatively stable for the top 5 of browser developers, there were major shifts in beta browser market share. Microsoft saw strong gains for Internet Explorer 8 and Apple hit a home run with Safari 4. Mozilla does not promote its Firefox 3.1 and trails its rivals in beta browser adoption, but has the strongest adoption rate of its most current stable browser.

If February is any indication, then Mozilla’s wild ride may be over for now. Market share data released by Net Applications shows that Firefox still gained share in February, albeit at a much slower pace than in recent months. Internet Explorer still lost, but only marginally and Apple took a big hit in average browser share in February. According to the data, Internet Explorer dropped from 68.18% to 68.17%, Firefox gained from 21.75% to 21.96% and Safari dropped from 7.70% to 7.42%.

Google’s Chrome climbed from 1.13% to 1.16% and Opera gained 0.02 points from 0.68% to 0.70%. Eagle-eyed readers may notice that those numbers deviate quite a bit from the actual February average based on Net Applications’ daily numbers (IE: 67.26%; Firefox: 21.82%; Safari: 8.15%; Chrome: 1.15%; Opera: 0.71%), which is due to the correction of errors that may occur in daily reporting, the market research firm said.





Compared to previous months, there are some interesting trends that are revealed especially when we look at the graphs: It is apparent that Microsoft was able to slow the decline of market shares, the reasons of which I will explain a bit further down. Firefox shows a declining trend for the first time in several months. IE holds about 65% on days during the week and about 69% on weekends. Mozilla was able to account for close to 24% of market share on weekends at the end of January and at the beginning of February and is now in the 22-23% range. Firefox market share during the week remains unchanged at about 21.5%.
 
Safari’s market share loss cannot be explained from the daily data provided by Net Applications as the browser showed continued gains over the entire month. In fact, the official beta release of Safari 4 was the second strongest beta release we can recall, lifting Safari’s market share above 10% for the first time. On February 28, Safari is listed with a 10.91% share, which is 1.88 points above Safari’s share on the same day in the previous week (February 21; 9.03%) and a full point above Safari's previous market share record (February 1; 9.90%). This gain is about in line with the trend of Safari share gains and the impact of the Safari 4 beta release.

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