IE vs. Firefox: a mindshare report

Yesterday marked three months since the Mozilla Foundation released its open source browser, Firefox 1.0. To celebrate the anniversary, ZDNet Research looked at six months of BT Trax data (three months before and after the release) to get a "gods-eye" view of the total consumption of news stories associated with Web browsers and the organizations that create them. We then tallied the number of times they were read by users across CNET Networks and a picture emerged, as the graph below illustrates.

Microsoft and Mozilla dominate the category with the majority of news activity over the last six months. The first in a series ofnews activityspikes occurred in September 2004 when reports starting circulating about the forthcoming release of Firefox. This drove interest in Microsoft's Internet Explorer as well, since you rarely hear a discussion about one of the browsers without a mention ofthe other. Microsoft, already clobbered with heavy criticism over security flaws at the time, saw news activity peak after the major graphics flaw was discovered the same month. The final spike in interest occurred with the release of Firefox in November 2004, where once again, the competing browsers rode a similar interest curve. Ultimately, in this battle ofDavid and Goliath, it's true that both browsers get nearly the same amount of attention, but to the dismay of Microsoft, it's for very different reasons.