Anilrgowda

I like to report in on the browser wars--or at least the browser wars as reflected in the browsers used to visit PCWorld.com. And for the first time since I've been doing this, the news is that the percentage of folks using Firefox is down a bit. That's most likely because of the arrival in October of Internet Explorer 7, a browser which, whatever you think of it, is unquestionably a stronger competitor than the dinosaur known as IE6. Has anyone dropped Firefox for IE7? I can't say, since Web statistics can't tell you if the browser someone's using today is different than the one he or she used yesterday. But our statistics show overall usage of IE up a bit, and usage of Firefox down a bit.
Here's how things broke down in the month before the final version of IE7 shipped:
IE (including IE7 beta): 68.8%
Firefox: 24.74%
Opera: 2.55%
And here's the last month:
IE (including IE7, IE6, and previous versions): 71.21%
Firefox: 23.16%
Opera: 2.18%
18.16% of users in the past month were using IE7, making it the third most popular browser after IE6 and Firefox.
Is there a trend here? Tough to say until things have had awhile longer to sort themselves out. (On any given day, usage for any browser may be higher or lower than the numbers I quote above.) But it looks like IE7 may have stopped the slow erosion of Microsoft's browser marketshare--at least for the moment. And even though the drop for Firefox is small, any slip is notable after a couple of years of almost continuous growth for the Little Browser That Could.
Meanwhile, what browser are you using? And why?