CYBERSPACE – Citing statistics from website development tool vendor Net Applications, multiple technology news sources report that browser market share for Microsoft Internet Explorer has fallen to its lowest level in years.Reporting on browser usage statistics is never without controversy, due in large part to the lack of a comprehensive method for gathering the data and the varying methods of projecting sample data across the massive total number of web users. This week’s browser market reporting is no exception, as Dutch firm OneStat has issued a report contradicting that of Net Applications, asserting that it was Mozilla’s Firefox browser that lost share over the summer, not IE.

Net Applications puts the current IE market share at 82.10-percent, down from 84.04-percent in June, and 86.87-percent in September, 2005. According to the same data, Firefox’s current share is 12.46-percent, up from 10.77-percent in June and 7.55-percent at this point last year.

OneStat, by contrast, puts IE’s share of the market as of this month at 85.9-percent, with Firefox at 11.5-percent.

The largest source of the discrepancy in the projections appears to stem from very different ideas about how many users in the overall market use yet another form of browser, Apple’s “Safari” browser.

Neither company puts Safari use at a very high level, but the difference is significant; OneStat lists the Safari share at 1.6-percent, less than half of Net Applications’ reported Safari share of 3.53-percent.

The “Security” Effect:

Security vulnerability, both perceived and otherwise, has a lot to do with browser market gain and loss and some analysts argue that Firefox’s “openness” has hurt the browser in the court of public perception.

Window Snyder, security chief for Mozilla, told SCMagazine.com last week that “on the Mozilla side, you see everything because we’re totally transparent.”

What many in the media and the public don’t acknowledge, Snyder argues, is that Mozilla’s open-door bug reporting is a good thing and should be perceived as a point in Firefox’s favor.

“People don’t realize that when people find vulnerabilities, it’s helping you (the user) because when we see them, we fix them,” said Snyder.

Proponents of Firefox also note that even with a more “closed” reporting system, there’s no shortage of Microsoft software bugs making it into the light of day, including a critical vulnerability in its handling of Vector Markup Language that was patched in September.

Last week, Microsoft released patches for 26 security holes, including 16 vulnerabilities in Office and its components, leading to another round of scrutiny for Microsoft’s security and reporting practices.

The mass fix, said by some analysts to be the largest ever number of patches to be released simultaneously by Microsoft (with the exception of new “Service Pack” releases), included fixes for older Windows components that, while still in common use, cannot be obtained through the same channels that serve more recent versions of those components.

Users running Microsoft Office 2000 or standalone versions of programs like PowerPoint, for example, cannot get updates for those programs through Microsoft Update, MS Automatic Updates, or Windows Update. Such users must patch their older products by visiting the Office homepage and performing an Office Update scan from there.

The MS Office Update page can be found at the following URL:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/officeupdate