RETAIL STORES STILL ALIVE DESPITE E-SHOPPING

Retail stores still alivedespite e-shopping
NEW YORK -- Don't call brick-and-mortar retail stores irrelevant in this age of e-commerce: In a survey, 69 percent of U.S. online shoppers admit to browsing in traditional stores before buying over the Internet.
That's an increase from 53 percent in a similar study in 2000.
Two-thirds of online shoppers say they now buy over the Internet some of the things they used to get in store visits. Yet the percentage getting information or shopping online before visiting a regular store remains steady at 75 percent.
"We do see more and more displacement from retail stores ... , but it's absolutely not the death of the retail store," said Jeff Cole, who directed the study at the USC Annenberg Center for the Digital Future.
Americans remain concerned about the privacy of personal information when they shop online, but the intensity of such concerns has decreased. Those "very" or "extremely" concerned decreased, while the "somewhat" concerned group jumped.
The study, the fourth in an annual series conducted until this year at UCLA, was based on random telephone interviews with 2,009 households from July to September 2003. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Rivals benefit from woesin Microsoft's browser
NEW YORK -- This summer's security troubles with Microsoft Corp.'s Web browser has benefited rivals, namely Netscape, Firefox and other browsers based on Mozilla.
Microsoft's Internet Explorer saw only a dent in its market share -- to 93.7 percent as of Sept. 17, from 95.5 percent on June 4, according to WebSideStory, a Web analytics firm.
But because the share of other browsers was low to begin with, their increase was more significant.
The share for Mozilla browsers jumped to 5.28 percent, compared with 3.54 percent in June. Mozilla says downloads doubled in late June and early July at the height of the security troubles.
A pair of virus attacks exploiting vulnerabilities with Microsoft software led some security experts to recommend that Web surfers consider such alternatives as Mozilla and Opera.
Microsoft says many of the problems have been addressed in its "Service Pack 2" security update for Windows XP last month.
Associated Press
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