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It irritates me how Microsoft can sit on their ass for years doing nothing to improve IE, and then one update later, they are doing great again.

They cheat with windows update :) The big news isn't the installations -- that's forced by IE. The big news is that the leading edge of the *usage* curve is all firefox while MS's share of the pie is in free-fall. The breakdown for my site this week tends to bear this out.

1 12242 Firefox
2 9628 MSIE
3 216 Java
4 200 Opera
5 183 Netscape (compatible)
6 163 Safari
7 113 Mozilla
8 37 W3C_Validator

I really think that IE7 will stop the bleeding though, as sad as that may be.

Microsoft does not track uninstalls, nor do they track usage compared to other browsers on the same system. It's almost like saying your store had a million page views... it doesn't really matter unless someone buys something.

No, I think this time they're right. Many of my friends, IT guys, are using IE7 now. I personally hate it's bloated interface and it's awkward positioning of the refresh buttons, but I have to admit these are just matters of taste. Still, Firefox has it's addictive extensions.

That doesn´t prove they are leading. As mentioned above, that doesn´t count uninstalls nor does it track how many are automatically installed with Windows Update. Getting an unused IE7 is the lesser of two evils, the other being missing patch Tuesday.

I think that as much as us tech people would like to believe that Firefox usage will continue to skyrocket forever, it's just simply not the case.

What IE7 really means is a stop to the bleeding for Microsoft. So many people that I know are using IE7 now, after I'd tried to get them to switch to Firefox for a long time. The vast majority of the world is just used to IE, and they will have little reason to switch once IE7 is automatically installed on their machine.

Yes of course. Most of them are automatics updates from IE6 made by OS. The overal trend is against IEx . FireFox is gaining more and more usage. Thera are countries , esspecialy those who start IT revolution later like Poland or Finland , where usage of Firefox is close to 50% ...