More SMBs Installing Firefox

By Greg McNevin

March 12, 2007: According to a recent survey of American SMBs, Firefox is gaining significant ground on Microsoft’s market-dominating Internet Explorer.

Conducted by the Toronto-based FreshBooks, and online time tracking and billing provider, the survey canvassed 140,000 American SMBs and found that Firefox’s market share hit 39.95 percent in February this year, a jump of 1.35 percent.

Internet Explorer on the other hand, slipped 0.73 percent to 56.95 percent. Still a significant portion, but no where near its share in the overall world market.

While Firefox is being increasingly installed by SMBs, the same cannot be said about other open source alternatives. When it comes to desktop operating systems the survey found that Windows actually increased its share from 80.0 percent to 84.3 percent. A jump that FreshBooks says is likely to be explained by Microsoft’s heavy Vista push.

Overall, the increased support of Firefox is a boon for the open source community. As open source applications become more commonplace, migration to a full open source software suite becomes less daunting for SMBs wanting to cut costs, sustain productivity and retain security.

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