Firefox: The problems ahead

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Mozilla itself is now looking to become increasing aggressive in the way it pushes Firefox, particularly with the incoming third iteration of the software. Referring back to the declaration earlier that around half of those who download it never use it, Mozilla has earmarked this as a major opportunity, based presumably on the assumption that if someone is interested enough to download the program, it just needs one more push to get them to execute it.

On its wiki, Mozilla has thus published what it believes to be the challenges it faces, and each of them point at a strategy that's very heavily focused on mass market conversion. For instance, under the broad heading 'What's a browser?', cited challenges include 'Isn't the Internet the blue e icon on my desktop', and 'what makes a browser different from another'. You can find the full posting yourself at http://wiki.mozilla.org/Retention

This focus on broader appeal though isn't likely to sit easily with some early adopters, and a minority of them are now calling for a splinter project to go back to the roots of Firefox. This should, in theory, be possible, and perhaps the option exists for a lighter version of the software.

Yet it's still unlikely to be the link that most people click on. Because irrespective of the problems Mozilla has faced with Firefox of late, the truth remains that it's a more 'socially' popular piece of software than Internet Explorer, and that people continue to migrate from the latter to the former.

The future

Where the next few years go, however, is more interesting. Lessons surely have to be learned from the current decline in popularity of Internet Explorer, and arguably those lessons are broader than simply the web market. Because just over three years ago, the thought that an open source contender could find itself well on the way to eating up a third of market share from a standing start was as unthinkable as, well, Netscape losing ground so quickly in the 1990s.

But the speed and vibrancy of the web market is keeping more and more companies and products on their toes, which is why - in spite of a perceived lack of action - those heavily involved in the Firefox project are unlikely to have let the criticisms pass them by. The likelihood remains that, for the next year or two at least, Firefox will continue to grow, and continue to erode Internet Explorer's market share.

The trick then is to do what it once did best: be reactive to the demands of its users, avoid the temptation to add features for the sake of it, and crucially, to perform better than its competition. If it doesn't, this is a market that's proven many times that it's willing to put another name up in lights instead. While that's a fate that's likely to escape Firefox, especially in the short to medium term, it's a hell of a long way down...

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