Firefox’s Market Share Surpasses 20 Percent

Firefox surpassed 20 percent market share worldwide for a full month for the first time in November according to Net Applications data. Firefox’s November share was 20.78 percent, up from 19.97 percent in the previous month and 16.01 percent in November of 2007. According to Net Applications the increase was due to continued growth of Firefox of use and increased residential browsing during the month, of which Firefox has a higher share than in corporate browsing. During the month both Safari and Chrome increased their share, while Internet Explorer and Opera share decreased.

Internet Explorer 8 Delayed

The release of Internet Explorer 8, which was previously scheduled for later this year, will not occur until next year according to a post on the IEBlog. A final public pre-release version will be made available in the first quarter of 2009 and the finalized version will release at some after that. According to the post the final pre-release should behave in the same way that the finalized version will, and any changes that do occur will be clearly explained ahead of time.

Google Releasing Web Browser

In a post on the Official Google Blog, Google has announced that they will be releasing their own web browser. The browser, called Google Chrome, is built on the WebKit rendering engine used in Apple’s Safari. The browser uses a V8, a JavaScript engine developed by Google, that Google says is designed to “power the next generation of web applications that aren’t even possible in today’s browsers”. A beta version for Windows will be released shortly, with Mac and Linux versions in the works.