Stu Crump alerted me to this news story (thanks Stu) detailing the rise in Firefox’s market share. The study by netapplications.com states that Firefox’s market share has passed the 20% mark, while Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has fallen below 70%.

It’s also worth noting that the article was dated 1st December and refers to the November figures. Two weeks after this article, the big Internet Explorer security scare took place, and I’ll remind you that according to the BBC News Technology page, “security experts urge users of Microsoft’s  Internet Explorer to switch to another browser until a security flaw is fixed”.

Further navigation of the netapplications.com site finds a ‘live’ browser market share chart – and this shows that Firefox’s market share has continued to rise (20.78% in November up to 21.34%) and Internet Explorer’s share has continued to fall (69.77% down to 68.15%). The site also allows you to see the past year’s trend, and it tells the same story. Google’s Chrome has now topped 1%, but ignoring the spikes caused by a débutante browser the biggest success story seems to be Safari. I’m going to assume that this is because the figures include the iPhone’s built-in version.

The stats for dadams.co.uk have shown that Firefox’s share has grown and stabilised over the past two years, but I would have to say they’re skewed. I know that many hits on my site come from friends, family, colleagues and members of the Lotus-centric community who use Firefox – so 32.8% is not representative of the general public. The most-visited page is still the old version of the Family Fortunes answers, which is linked to from other sites and found via Google… so this is probably where the majority of the Internet Explorer hits come from.

It’ll be interesting to see how this particular market share war plays out as Chrome matures, and when Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3.1 are released. Watch this space…