London: Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE)is facing some stiff competition from Firefox as web analysts have revealed that the proportion of surfers using Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) has dropped to below 90 per cent.

Net traffic monitor, OneStat.com, has reported that the open-source browser Firefox 1.0, released on 9 November by Mozilla which was also responsible for Netscape, seems to be drawing users away from IE.

"It seems that people are switching from Microsoft's Internet Explorer to Mozilla's new Firefox browser," Niels Brinkman, co-founder of Amsterdam-based OneStat.com, was quoted by the BBC, as saying.

While IE's market share has dropped 5 per cent since May to 88.9 per cent, Mozilla browsers, including Firefox have grown by 5 per cent.

The figures suggest that Mozilla browsers,including Firefox 1.0 now have 7.4 per cent of the market share as more than five million users have downloaded the free software since its official release.

The main reason behind Firefox's increasing popularity is that it is a open-source, which means that people are free to adapt the software's core code to create other innovative features, like add-ons or extensions to the program.

Also, it has fewer security holes have also been discovered so far in Firefox than in IE.