The increasingly popular FREE (open-source) Firefox website browser, which is developed by the Mozilla team, has today been hailed as the reason for MS IE's market share dropping below 90% for the first time:

OneStat's statistics, based on the Web surfers' activity in 100 countries, showed that IE's market share slipped to 88.9 percent in the third week of November, down 5 percentage points from its share in May.

Mozilla-based browsers, including Firefox, rose to 7.4 percent, up 5 percentage points from May. The new figures come on the heels of another survey that showed IE on a downward trend. Earlier this month, WebSideStory reported that IE was continuing to slip, claiming 92.9 percent of Web surfers in October versus 95.5 percent in June.

So far Microsoft has continued to be heavily criticised for its inability to recognise the true strength of threat from its rivals. That theme continues in today’s ZDNet item.

Hardly surprising when one MS IE developer has already exclaimed tabbed browsing to be an unimportant feature (doh!). No doubt IE will retain its majority status, but MS could lose its ability to dominate standards setting.

We note that MS's Gary Schare, Microsoft's director of product management for Windows, is quoted as saying: "I still believe in the end that most users will decide that IE is the best choice when they take into account all the factors that led them to choose IE in the first place"

Funny, what choice? Most had no choice what so ever - it's the default browser for Windows.