While no longer firmly in control of the “IE alternative market”, the second biggest browser on the market, Firefox, finally came out with a much publicized release of its new Firefox 4. So far, the results have been swimming, as reviews have been favorable, and as Dan Ruby discussed earlier, the browser has seen a rapid rate of growth, far surpassing the rate of IE 9.
One major positive for Microsoft, though, is the propensity of Bing usage on IE9. While Google is (unsurprisingly) used overwhelmingly more than other engines on Firefox, Microsoft-powered search seems to be making major inroads among the IE9 crowd:
On other versions of Internet Explorer, Microsoft-powered search (Bing/Yahoo) comprises approximately 31.375% of search engine impressions seen from North America in the Chitika network, with 16.137% of this being Bing. Google, in turn, acquired 65.895% of the traffic.
When looking at just IE9, however, Microsoft-powered search acquired 39.631% of all traffic to our network, 26.936% of it being Bing, while Google drops to just 58.162%. Whether this sample is biased towards Bing users, or if IE9 is successful at driving traffic to bing.com, remains to be seen.
While Bing is making strong inroads among the users of IE9, Google continues to maintain a death-grip stronghold on Firefox with the new release:
While the first 3 major releases of Firefox saw 82.684% of their search traffic to our network come from Google, this number spikes to 90.055% from Firefox 4. Once again, whether this growth is real or a biased sample of early users remains to be seen, but early indicators seem to show that the search engine war and browser war are becoming even more entangled.
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