Not too surprising, but since this blog was linked in Slashdot last week, overall Firefox penetration has jumped almost 10%. Will this hold over the next month? It had been hovering around 17-20% for the last three months, which was up from the quarter before where it was 12-17%, but clearly our new Slashdot readers (welcome and thank you for reading!) prefer Firefox over IE at a much more significant ratio. I wonder if the Slashdot scales tip for their browser market share (less than 50% for IE). Seems like an understatement to date saying that the spreadfirefox campaign has been a huge success in awareness of other browser alternatives.

Internet Explorer still has the majority (62%), but it’s definitely starting to slip and by using the admittedly skewed stats of only this blog, it looks to be about 3-5% of market share per quarter. They better hurry up with Longhorn and the plans for a more integrated IE in the OS. If this trend continues we’ll probably see an update of IE that includes some sorely missed built-in features like RSS (yes, I know there is third party software available) before Longhorn is released, despite Microsoft saying they wouldn’t be developing IE any further. If this doesn’t happen, and at the current rate of browser market share decay for IE, this would mean Microsoft would slip beneath the 50% mark by the beginning of 2006. Since Longhorn isn’t scheduled to be out until late 2006, this means it may be too late to reclaim the browser market at that time. Despite this data, I still wouln’t bet against the camp in Redmond.

• Microsoft Watch bets on Internet Explorer upgrade before Longhorn
• Almost twice the exploits for Firefox as IE from April to September
• Firefox gaining market share vs. IE
• Microsoft: Firefox officially competition
• XP Service Pack 2 includes IE popup blocking by default
• 4 ways Internet Explorer could improve and steal the Firefox thunder