Is Firefox’s position vulnerable in 2010?

For the last few years, Firefox has been the alternative browser of choice. But could it be running out of steam, wonders Simon Brew…

By Simon Brew, 8 Jan 2010 at 14:30

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In the mainstream market, the first sign of chinks in Microsoft’s proverbial armour were arguably exposed by the Firefox web browser. Up until its release, the Redmond giant had looked impenetrable in the operating system, office and browser marketplaces, with its respective Windows, Office and Internet Explorer products dominant in their respective markets.

What Firefox demonstrated, however, is that the mass market was willing to embrace some kind of change. It’s easy to overstate the impact of it, to be fair, as over five years since it was launched, Firefox is still – in spite of plenty of media attention – sitting at under a quarter of the market. But it’s a quarter of a massive market, and one that was always going to take a long time to overhaul. And Firefox has succeeded where many others have failed (Netscape being the biggest and most obvious casualty) in slicing off a sizeable chunk of Microsoft’s market share.

In the operating system market, for example, for all the hype surrounding Chrome OS, Linux and MacOS X, Microsoft still looks unstoppable.

12 months

2009 proved to be another good year for Firefox, too. According to figures released by Net Applications, the open source web browser grew its market share 2.92 per cent over the course of the year, while Microsoft’s Internet Explorer saw its decline by nearly eight per cent. The running totals are 24.61 per cent of the market for Firefox, and 62.69 per cent for Internet Explorer.

But in much the same way that Microsoft had things all its own way for some time with the dominance of Internet Explorer, Firefox has benefited from being seen as the only alternative of choice (even though that couldn’t be further from the truth). It almost seemed as if you had to opt for one browser or the other when choosing how to trawl through the internet. Granted, in the more enthusiast parts of the market that wasn’t the case. But in terms of the mainstream, it has seemed like one or the other. The threat to Firefox now, however, is that other alternatives are gaining ground.

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3 comments

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Only time will tell

I doubt we’ll see any real decline in Firefix over the coming months. I currently run three websites for clients, two of which are art related and Firefox users represents about 70% of hits. IE comes in second at around 25% with the remaining 5% shared between the various other browsers and cell phone uses. Surprising to me, are the number of people out there still using IE5. I do however, have all current browsers loaded for testing purposes, but, my personal favourite is still Opera. I’ve used it since 98 or 99 in its earliest pay-for incantation. Firefox is my second choice with Chrome coming in third. I don’t like the feel of recent versions of Internet Explorer, and I don’t like Safari at all. Safari I feel should be put to rest. Its not the most stable browser on my PC but its dreadful on my Mac. I only tolerate it now for testing purposes. Chrome I feel is the real wild card. Although right now I think it has an almost child-like feel. Though, It is backed by Google’s might, and unlike Microsoft who have years of bad IE press to contend with, Chrome doesn’t, thus portrays a degree of competence. But only time will tell.

By dogsoldier on Tuesday Jan 12

RE:

We forget that at one time, Netscape enjoyed the dominance IE once did - and it was actually only round the mid-90s that Windows became dominant (IBM's OS/2 looked a good candidate to replace MS/DOS on PCs). What strikes me is that in creating Chrome Google are starting to do the things Microsoft habitually did - eating it's business partners. They obviously looked at the revenue they were paying out to Firefox and Safari for making Google the default search engine - and then deciding they wanted that revenue for themselves. As regards which browser - in contrast to dogsoldier, my preference is for Safari and Chrome - but that's a personal prefer for speed and simplicity over power features. Opera seems at the opposite end of the scale to me (adding a Bittorrent clients, web serving features - it's the 'browser as the only program you need' mentality).

By JulesLt on Friday Jan 15

Firefox's one major flaw

Firefox struggles to be accepted in large managed networks such as in corporations and schools. Systemadmins favour IE because it can be easily installed throughout the network from a central location, and the settings can be managed and locked down easily with Group Policies. I'm astonished that Mozilla don't at least release an MSI package for Firefox along with the necessary ADM files to manage Firefox's features. I know it would be possible to create these manually, but why go to all that effort when IE's already installed and has all that jazz? If you discounted all the monolithic corporate networks locked into running IE6, Firefox's market share would be a lot larger...

By TheLoz on Saturday Jan 23