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Microsoft invented the concept of launching a beta product in order to build up traction for the final 
product. Yet the introduction of Internet Explorer 8 shapes up to be a complete train wreck as far as customer adoption is concerned.
Last week IE8 launched and topped out at a market share of 1.86% by Friday afternoon. For a company with the reach of Microsoft, this was a bit of a disappointment. But browsers like Internet Explorer 7, Firefox or Safari hit their market share highs on weekends, while Internet Explorer 6, still a browser that has a fairly high market share during the week, declines.
It is too early to say which browser had to give up market share to enable IE8’s gain, but as far as we can see it does not appear that IE7’s and Firefox 3’s market share numbers have suffered. It will take some time until we can see whether IE7 users are upgrading or Firefox users are returning to IE.
But the heart of the matter is that, in a best case scenario, IE8 has gained less than 1% of market share over the weekend and may have seen somewhere between 5 and 7 million downloads between Friday evening and Sunday night. Since launch day, the market share has increased by less than 1.3%.
Let’s look at what Mozilla accomplished with Firefox. Firefox 3 gained 2.76 percentage points over its first four days of availability – and we are talking about a browser that had less than 20% overall market share at the time of its release. Microsoft’s IE is still well above the 65% mark. You do the math on the performance discrepancy – and it is now even more impressive how Mozilla handled the launch of Firefox 3.
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