According to a story on ComputerWorld, market share of Apple’s Safari web browser as well as usage of Mozilla Firefox both dropped in the last month. Internet Explorer market share actually gained.

Market share for Safari dropped from 5.8% to 5.5%. Firefox usage went from 17.8% to 17%. Internet Explorer usage went from 74.8% to 76%.

I’m not exactly sure what would explain the shift, although that shift isn’t very large.

Apple did make news not long ago for using Apple Update to promote Safari to Windows users who were not running it. This made some people angry, including John Lily, CEO of Mozilla. He lambasted Apple in a blog post where he compared the practice to malware and said it “undermines the Internet”.

My guess is that IE usage increased slightly because of a new wave of people using Windows Update because they are looking for service packs for XP and Vista. Windows XP SP3 is rolling out currently whereas Vista SP1 hasn’t yet officially made its way to Windows Update. But, I have little doubt that people checking Windows Update is leading to the increase in usage of Internet Explorer.

While Safari market share dropped overall, their update strategy certainly was effective when it comes specifically to Windows users. A story on Gizmodo shows that Safari usage on Windows tripled.

Yes I understand that XP SP3 has been available as a release candidate download for some time now, but.. I’ve been wondering when Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3 will be appearing as an auto-download in Windows Update.

After conducting some research, here are the dates everything should happen:

April 21, 2008: OEM, Volume License, Connect, and MSDN and TechNet subscribers. (Yes, that’s today.)

April 29, 2008: Manual Update via windowsupdate.microsoft.com (and Microsoft Download Center).

June 10, 2008: Automatic Update (Windows Update)

The June 10 2008 auto-update is the one I’m most concerned with.

Typically speaking, Microsoft’s download servers get absolutely slammed the day anything major is released like a service pack. However I’ve noticed over the years their deployment systems have “smartened” up enough where the auto-updates are sent out in “waves” rather than all at once.

If you’re like me you’ll probably wait until the auto-update release (because honestly speaking there’s really no rush to get this). It will be a big honkin’ download and it will take time.

Also, this is the last service pack for XP. After the end of June ‘08, that’s it for this OS. Granted, you’ll still be able to use it for a few years but this is the “last hurrah” so to speak.