With time open source software have emerged as potential contenders to proprietary software. Unlike the traditional understanding, open source software have proven to be as capable (or even more capable) than counterpart proprietary software and have been successful in claiming substantial market share. While we occasionally analyze the browser market share, this time we decide to compare the open source and proprietary browser market share and investigate how trends are shaping up in browser market.
The browsers we have selected to analyze are:
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Apple’s Safari being the prominent browsers in proprietary group while Google’s Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox in open source camp. Other Browsers (notably Opera) have been excluded from the analysis as claiming only a very small market share that is persistently constant.
A look at the current market share for each browser (as for September 2012)
We shall analyse the browser trends prevalent from January 2011 to September 2012. Now lets first have a look at the the browser market share for proprietary market share.
Having seen the market share for proprietary browsers, lets see individual and accumulative market share for each browser in Open source camp.
Combining the above tables into a clearer table:
The investigations yields the following graph:
Comparing the two browser growth relatively:
The graphs clearly show the trends favoring open source browsers currently. This trend is expected to continue as more and more developers continue to contribute their creativity to open source browser projects making open source browser richer in features ,faster and efficient.
