The power of market dominance – browsers

Firefox, and to a lesser extent Safari and Chrome continue to gain market share at the expense of Internet Explorer – see the charts below, (which comes courtesy of Asa Dotzler).  What is surprising (to me at least) is that despite the decline in market share IE has still gained 100m users in the last 56 months.  I (and Asa) would argue that this is because it is the default browser on new PCs rather and shows the power of their market position.

The other interesting thing about these graphs is that trends in market share are all linear – there is no sign of Firefox’s growth accelerating.  Personally I’m a fan of Chrome and I wonder if the power of Google’s distribution might be enough to get their trend line curving upwards, particularly once the full range of browser extensions and plugins are available on this platform (which is starting to happen).  I’ve noticed recently that Google seems to be pushing Chrome harder through it’s search home page.