Firefox Trumps IE: ReportFirefox Trumps IE: Report

A new study from Forrester Research regarding large enterprises' Internet browser preferences should be of interest to SMBs that follow what works for their big brethren.In a nutshell, Internet Explorer lost overall market share among the 50,000 large enterprise employees surveyed by Forrester -- down 10 percent -- while Firefox's share nearly doubled to 18 percent. Interestingly, the majority of those who use the sixth version of Microsoft's browser didn't upgrade up version 7 when it was released in October 2006. With version 8 now in the works, analysts question whether that will fare any better given its default standards mode could break certain applications.

On the other hand, Mozilla's latest version of Firefox, 2.0, which came out the same month at IE 7, pretty much replaced its predecessor, version 1.5.

Forrester indicates that employees, rather than IT managers, are the ones driving Firefox adoption, given Microsoft's attempts to woo IT managers to upgrade to IE 7 haven't panned out, while Mozilla has done little in the way of marketing to them.information