Mozilla is moving to revamp its browser in advance of the release of Firefox 4 toward the end of the year, with one of the priorities the transformation of the user interface to be less cluttered and more visually appealing. But Mozilla will need to move fast if it’s going to counter the surprising growth that Internet Explorer racked up in the U.S. market last month.
Mozilla has high hopes for an experimental service called Weaver Sync, which gives users access to their browser data across multiple computing platforms. Renamed Firefox Sync, the technology indexes and encrypts the user’s browser history, passwords, bookmarks, form information, preferences and tabs for remote storage on a server.
The bad news for Mozilla is that Microsoft’s IE gained more than three-quarters of a percent of market share across all operating systems during May in the U.S., according to Net Applications. By contrast, the market shares held by Google’s Chrome and Firefox slipped almost 0.5 percent and 0.25 percent, respectively.
An IE Resurgence
It has been quite a while since IE last made the kind of gains seen in the U.S. for May, noted Net Applications Executive Vice President Vince Vizzaccaro. “As for the reasons why, it appears Microsoft is segmenting the browser market geographically and attacking each segment the best way they see fit,” Vizzaccaro said.
The U.S. is Microsoft’s core market and therefore a top-priority segment, Vizzaccaro said. “I think the market’s acceptance of IE8 along with the knowledge that IE9 is coming soon are providing consumers confidence that Microsoft will continue to devote resources to ongoing improvement of IE,” Vizzaccaro added. “I wouldn’t at all be surprised to see other geographical segments start to show the rebound we’ve seen in the U.S.”
The news isn’t any better for Mozilla on the global front, where…