As for Firefox share probably realistically more like 90% of people use the browser their machine came with. But then early adopters and market influencers (Basically us) have a great deal of effect on what people use. And don’t forget that Dell is planning on shipping Firefox preinstalled on its machines next year.

Don’t underestimate the Mozilla foundations community backing and financial support. They don’t have to turn a profit for Firefox to continue existing unlike Netscape which makes them more dangerous then Microsoft could ever imagine.

The other advantage Firefox has is that the justice department is still breathing down Microsoft’s neck over the whole monopolistic business practice lawsuit they got slapped with back in the day. It makes Microsoft more cautiuous of looking to much like a “giant evil corporation” and stomping on competition in market they completely control like internet browsers. I think it’s very possible that Firefox may sneak up on Microsoft when they’re distracted with Apple coming up behind them over the next 3 years.

If I was Microsoft I’d be happy to le t Firefox sit at 10% market saturation. I’d figure that the less saavy internet users probably will never switch anyways. That was always true with Netscape and the internet sadly had more saavy users back in the day then it does now (quite a bit more, I can’t even tell you how much of the internet was hardcore nerds but its apparent to me that things have changed since then).

But the most basic thing that occurs to me when I use IE7 beta is that it isn’t as stable as Firefox on any of the machines I’ve tried it on. It still picks up spyware like a pro and it still lacks many of the useful features and lack of bloatware that firefox has.