Net Applications, a web monitoring company released in late March its February figures for web browsers.  The statistics revealed that Firefox, an open source browser, has gained market share (6.17 percent as opposed to 5.59 percent in January).  Microsoft still has the most popular browser (Internet Explorer) with a share of about 89 percent, albeit that is down from its January number of 90.3 percent.

Of course, Technology Futurist uses SiteMeter to track the blog hits from different browsers, and I have posted on those numbers before, back in November 2004.  There is no scientific method behind this - pure number tracking, and certainly the pool of people that visit TF is not random, or representative of the Internet out there (even back then, I made the case the there were probably a bit more Firefox hits than I expected probably because there were more techies coming in to visit, and those techies are more savvy users willing to explore new browsers).  But a quick peek at the numbers show a marked increase of Firefox browsers registering hits here.  Of course, this is just a sample snapshot, and it is bound to change anytime, but typically, over the past 3 months, Firefox has been able to consistently oscillate between 13-15% and 22-25% of the views at TF, which is an amazing result, compared to where those numbers were just five months ago.