Firefox Market Share Declines
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James Joyner | Monday, August 15, 2005 |
Mozilla Firefox, the Internet browser whose meteroic rise over the last several months has surprised many, actually lost a bit of market share in July.
Firefox Browser’s Market Share Slips (Top Tech News)
For the first time since its introduction, Firefox Latest News about Firefox has lost ground in its attempt to woo users from Microsoft’s Latest News about Microsoft Internet Explorer, according to NetApplications.
The Web site monitoring firm noted that in July, Internet Explorer regained some of the market share, growing to 87.2 percent from 86.6 percent. Firefox, meanwhile, went from 8.7 percent to 8.1 percent. NetApplications compiles browser usage data from the more than 40,000 sites it monitors through its HitsLink.com service.
In reporting the Firefox results, NetApplications chief operating officer Dan Shapero expressed surprise in the numbers, according to news reports. It is possible, Shapero noted, that July’s results might be a one-time anomaly rather than an indication of the beginning of a downward trend.
Quite possibly. More likely, though, reports of various security glitches in Firefox in recent months are taking their toll. Most of the rise of Firefox has been because of users frustrated with the poor security performance of the market leader, Microsoft’s IE. To the extent Firefox can no longer claim to be truly safe, it loses.
Perhaps, too, there is a limit to the number of people willing to download their own browser and learn to use it–especially when they must still use IE for many websites and applications. As aggravating as Microsoft’s products can be, they have the huge advantage of being familiar and integrated into the Windows operating system.
About the Author: James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia.
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I wonder how much more Firefox will decline when Microsoft's new browser release - which will contain tabbed windows - hits the market.
IE increases its share by .6881% or 0.006881 and its news? If it was compatible with my office network, I'd be using Firefox at the office, instead of just at home.
What this says to me is that Firefox is kicking butt, since between MS and Firefox they control 95.3% of the market. Where are all the competitors that successfully sued MS over the bundling and inappropriate business tactics? Nowhere, because they don't have JACK!
I think this illustrates the value of networking -- by which I mean networking in the economic sense, not networking in the computer hardware sense. Even as lousy a product line as Microsoft's can gain tremendous value if it is sufficiently networked.
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