Safari loses, Firefox gains market share
Although Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer (IE) continued to bleed market share last month, Apple Inc.'s Safari was an even bigger loser during February, an Internet metrics company said Monday. — Microsoft's browser lost .04 of a percentage point …
Context & Ripple Effects
February's numbers extend a slide that has been running for years: even after Microsoft pushed out 100 million IE 7 installs, its browser kept ceding ground, and by late 2008 IE had fallen below 70% of the browser market.
The twist this month is who bleeds most. Safari — riding a Mac installed base that had been growing fast since 2007 — actually lost more share than IE, while Firefox absorbed both incumbents' losses. That foreshadows the squeeze documented later when Chrome passed Safari to become the No. 3 browser.
First-order effects
- Firefox is the immediate beneficiary, picking up users abandoning both Internet Explorer and Safari in February; Apple's browser, not just Microsoft's, is now visibly leaking share.
- IE's continued erosion — another fraction of a point gone last month on top of the sub-70% milestone — keeps pressure on Microsoft's web platform strategy.
Second-order effects
- With two proprietary browsers shrinking simultaneously, the open-source Firefox becomes the default alternative for defectors, forcing Apple and Microsoft to compete on release cadence and standards compliance rather than OS bundling.
- Web developers gain leverage: as IE's dominant-share assumption weakens, cross-browser compatibility work shifts toward Gecko-first testing, raising the cost of ignoring non-Microsoft engines.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the browser market structurally moves from an IE monopoly with niche alternatives to a genuine multi-engine contest — a trajectory the corpus confirms as Chrome's rise soon displaces Safari from third place.
- Sustained share loss at both Apple and Microsoft points toward browsers decoupling from operating systems as the strategic battleground, with engine quality and developer reach mattering more than default placement.
The trend: This is one data point in the long unbundling of the browser from the operating system — a slow redistribution of share from bundled defaults toward independent engines that reshapes how web platforms compete.