Firefox Edges Up Against IE In Small-Medium Businesses

Toronto-based online time tracking and billing provider, FreshBooks, did a survey of 140,000 small to medium-sized businesses on the use of the Firefox browser versus the Internet Explorer.

And this is what they found - Firefox's browser market share increased 1.35 percent in February, 2007 to 38.95 percent. At the same time, IE's share fell by 0.73 percent to 56.95 percent.

The survey also reflected the fact that Firefox users were more willing to upgrade from FF 1.5(10.03 percent) to FF 2.0 (28.92 percent). In contrast, IE6 still outnumber IE7 users by 34.36 percent to 22.59 percent respectively.

Nonetheless, Microsoft Windows is still the operating system of choice; its market share went up modestly in February to 88.92 percent. Freshbooks said that hard sell behind Vista is responsible for the increase.

Linux has also made some gains, its market share went from 1.54 percent to 2.01 percent, while Mac OS fell a little from 9.04 percent in January to 8.55 percent in February.

Analysts speculate SMBs Firefox might just turn out to give IE a run for the money since more SMBs are looking to put the open source browser on their desktops and converting to IE7 might still be a long ways off.