Microsoft Gaining on Netscape in Browser Battles, Study Says

July 4th, 2007

Microsoft’s attack on Netscape’s dominance of the World Wide Web browser market continues to meet with success, according to the latest quarterly browser census from Zona Research.

The Redwood City, California market researcher said today that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is rapidly gaining acceptance in corporations as the primary browser: Of the 211 sites participating in the census, 28 percent indicated that Internet Explorer was the primary browser used at their sites, up from 8 percent in Zona’s last survey.

While Netscape still dominates the browser market, with 70 percent of Zona’s respondents listing some version of Navigator as their primary browser, that number is down from 83 percent who said Navigator was their primary browser last quarter.

According to Zona, the number of browsers per capita is 1.98, indicating most users still have access to more than one.

We believe the surge in the use of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is a result of feature and function parity between IE and Navigator and the availability of IE on all Microsoft platforms, said Clay Ryder, director at Zona Research, in a prepared statement. This has been particularly important to corporate accounts that have a mixed base of platforms–Windows 3.x, Windows NT, and Windows 95.

In addition, IE 3.0’s support of ActiveX, Java, and Plug-Ins has made it better able to compete with Navigator, Ryder said.

Another finding of the Zona census is that companies are increasingly standardizing on specific browsers. While last quarter 24 percent of respondents said their companies encouraged or required use of a specific browser, this quarter that figure rose to 52 percent. Navigator was specified more than twice as often as Internet Explorer, however.

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