Firefox 4 Beats Out IE9 in Downloads.

By Jennifer Valentino-DeVries
It looks like Firefox 4 is winning the new-browser wars — at least by one very important statistic.

On Wednesday, a day after its launch, the Web browser made by Mozilla Corp. already was being used by about 2% of the world’s Web surfers, according to website analytics company StatCounter. By the same day, Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer 9, released about a week ago, had 0.87% of the market, StatCounter said.

Microsoft boasted last week that IE9 had been downloaded 2.35 million times in the first 24 hours after its launch, but Firefox 4 easily topped that number, recording 7.1 million downloads in the same span of time.

Microsoft said IE9 is “well on its way to become the fasted adopted browser in IE’s history” and that it is pleased with the “enthusiastic reception.”

One potential reason that IE9 is behind? It doesn’t work with Windows XP, which according to Netmarketshare is still used by more than half of Web surfers. Microsoft has pointed out that even before launch day was over, IE9 had more than 2% share on Windows 7.

Competition in the browser world has been heating up lately. The companies have been vying for user attention by increasing speed, adding new features like privacy controls and simplifying the look of the browser.

Firefox recently eclipsed IE as the most popular browser in Europe, and Google Inc.’s Chrome has been making inroads. Overall, IE is used by 45% of people globally, followed by Firefox with 30% of the market and Chrome with 17%, according to StatCounter.

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