You have confirmed it: Mozilla is quickly gaining ground on Internet Explorer. According to my web server logs, 24.9% of the visitors to this site are using Mozilla (including its variants such as FireFox) and only 24.1% are using Internet Explorer. It's also interesting that over fifty percent of my hits are from RSS readers.

I'm positive these statistics don't hold true for the Internet at large, but if techies are choosing Mozilla over IE then there's a good chance they'll be making the same choice in the future when they setup computers for co-workers, family members, and friends.

My choice of browser isn't a religious decision, so I often find that I have multiple instances of both browsers open. They both have their strengths and weaknesses. Internet Explorer seems a bit more polished and is compatible with more web sites -- plus it has the wonderful Google Toolbar. FireFox has wooed me with tabbed browsing, some handy plugins, and a great HTML source viewer. You might think I forgot to mention pop-up blocking, but nearly everyone has a pop-up blocker of some sort installed and XP SP2 will soon eliminate that problem altogether.

Slashdot carried an article today about the possibility of some new feature work on Internet Explorer. This, of course, set off the usual Microsoft bashing and "FireFox rulez" discussion, but amidst the noise there were actually quite a few posters who understood that competition will make both browsers better. As the original Slashdot poster stated, "Go competition!"