Last month when we reported that MySpace controls 3/4th of social network traffic one commenter, Jon Gos, wrote, "As Google or Microsoft will tell you, once you're king of the hill in one area, it's incredibly hard to get displaced. Unless of course you make some royal mistakes like Friendster did, whoever's got the momentum usually sets the pace and right now MySpace still controls the game."
Indeed, MySpace's market share was virtually unchanged since January, and has long been over 70%. But there is one battle between dominant incumbent and fiery upstart in which the incumbent looks more vulnerable each day: Internet Explorer vs. Firefox.
In many instances where a single players dominates the landscape, it is hard to see anyone cracking their control any time soon. Google vs. Yahoo! and Live, YouTube vs. every other video site, even with Linux and OS X making gains in the operating system market, Windows' dominance seems safe for years to come. But in the browser world, where Internet Explorer has dominated for almost 10 years, things are looking less concrete.
ComputerWorld is reporting that Firefox is set to hit 20% market share next month according to metrics firm Net Applications. In some communities, Firefox is already well beyond the 20% mark. W3Counter's global web stats, for example, puts Firefox usage at closer to 29% and over 50% of ReadWriteWeb readers use Firefox.
Internet Explorer's popularity peaked in 2003 or 2004, depending on whose data you look at, with a browser share of between 91% and 96%. Now, IE's market share has slipped below 80% by most metrics. Firefox, meanwhile, has grown steadily year-over-year from under 1% in 2004, to around 20% today.
And Firefox isn't resting on their laurels. The Mozilla Foundation is planning a major release push for Firefox 3, which is expected to drop this month. Firefox is gearing up to set a world download record by encouraging all 175 million users of the browser to upgrade in a single day. They're actually encouraging users to host download day parties, with nearly 200 planned already even without a firm release date.
Comments
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People are going to have parties just to download FireFox? That's just weird.
"198 Parties" "680 Party Goers"
It's kind of like an IRC Channel List vs. Users on the network.
Posted by: Anrkist | June 3, 2008 10:43 AM
You're crowing about a less-than-20% market share? And how many years has it taken to get there?
Puh-lease.
Yeah, it's a gain, to be sure. But don't expect Msoft's dominance to go away anytime soon, when IE continues to be bundled into Windows.
And RWW's readers (tried and true geeks, of which I'm one) are far from a cross-section of the general Internet population at large.
As we say at my shop: if it doesn't work in IE, it doesn't work. And how many of your web-browsing moms and dads use Firefox (unless you've personally installed it for them)?
Posted by: JoeS | June 3, 2008 10:57 AM
Firefox continues to succeed because of two things: (a) openness and extensibility and (b) a trust built between its developers and its users -- trust that customer-focused quality and innovation will take precedent over annoying commercial interests.
Interesting thought re: Facebook vs. MySpace...while Facebook is clearly better on the quality and innovation front than MySpace, I'm not sure the trust level nor openness commitment is to the place it needs to be. If Facebook wants to "pull a Firefox" and seriously challenge MySpace, it needs to show it's willing to forgo the "walled garden" mentality.
Posted by: Jared White | June 3, 2008 10:59 AM
@JoeS
Must suck spending those thousands of man hours witting custom, one of a kind code to bow down to IE's awful-ness, only to do it all over again with each new version ( 5,6,7,8...).
Recommend you abandon IE and just use Prism.
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Prism
Posted by: Todd | June 3, 2008 12:34 PM
It's about time people learned to embrace variety in their applications especially when using the power of the internet.
Posted by: Minneapolis Web Design | June 3, 2008 3:35 PM
To JoeS,
20% market share may not be world domination, and maybe it has taken years to get there, but what was it like 2 years ago. According to the stats of the websites I have build over the years, FF was border line non existent. To go to that from 20% in two years is huge. Now imagine it on a graph with an expected trend for a year from now. FF is borderline growing exponentially, and that with big numbers.
Posted by: Rob | June 3, 2008 4:26 PM
hey you fella's left out us Safari users in your stats ;-)
didn't we climb a massive 0.025%?
buildings will crumble.... watch for another incremental 0.015% gain next month.
Posted by: steve davies | June 3, 2008 6:10 PM
I would have to agree with JoeS. IE will, unfortunately for me, continue to grow and have the upperhand since it is packaged with Windows. Maymen use whatever is given to them and right now IE is given on a plate.
I myself use FF coz it seems to be lighter and more effective. FF also gives me a feeling of being free without being spied upon.
..my 2 cents
Posted by: George Koiliaris | June 4, 2008 1:40 AM
I personally have been having a lot of trouble with IE7 on more than one computer. So I now install Firefox on all friends and clients computers as a backup, and I use it in preference to IE7, only reverting to it if something doesn't work in Firefox.
And unfortunately there are a lot of web designers who only appear to check there pages work in IE6/7, which is a sad state of affairs.
Posted by: chexxer | June 4, 2008 3:47 AM
I wonder if that has to do with an increase in Apple iMac growing market share. I'm sure that Vista does not help either.
Keren
Posted by: Keren Dagan | June 4, 2008 7:30 AM
There is nothing wrong with using IE7+, what webdesigners care about, is that their websites work.
IE6 and ealier are broken, and a lot of webdesigners are actually ditching support on ealier browser versions, for obvious reasons.
There are no longer any valid reason to support older browsers such as IE6, the disadvantages are simply to many. A lot of mistakes was made early on, and its now time to move on, to the more standard compliant browsers.
IE7 is very standard compliant, and actually allows webdesigners to create cross-browser/platform friendly CSS based websites, without the use of browser specific hacks.
I only hope that Microsoft realize the importance of regular browser updates, for all versions of windows, (not just xp or vista). Otherwhise people simply move on to other alternatives, when they experiance the result of using an old browser.
Posted by: BlueBoden | June 4, 2008 7:38 AM
One problem I hit with FF that may have cost me some sales is that, even though my page where a customer enters his purchase quantities, etc. validates as good HTML 4.01 strict, if the page includes the proper (and valid) DOCTYPE as the first line, the page does not work in FF. Works fine in IE6/7. Remove the DOCTYPE and, with no other changes, it will work in FF.
Couple of comments on comments:
chexxer said:
And unfortunately there are a lot of web designers who only appear to check there pages work in IE6/7, which is a sad state of affairs.
This may be a sad state of affairs, but a lot of web designers don't have the time to install and check their pages in a lot of different browsers.
BlueBoden said:
There are no longer any valid reason to support older browsers such as IE6...
Sorry BlueBoden, there is a very valid reason to support at least IE6 since many people are still using Windows versions for which no IE7 is available. For example, my wife is using Win2000 - she doesn't need anything later and, in any case, her machine would not support XP, so the latest version if IE available to her is IE6. Same for my backup machine and for millions of other users out there.
Posted by: Tom Aman | June 4, 2008 9:10 AM
The most interesting thing with firefox is that it lifts out of the concept of the OS, and the OS we know as "Windows" will soon fall out for reason of pure impractibility.
And soon many people's first experience with the browser will Not be on something You folks sit in front of now, the PC.
It will be the "Mobile device", and in that arena, the War has just begun. But I dont think the chinese user will beg on his knee to have IE installed on her/his mobile device, because that suits some company or group of webdeveloper.
Posted by: tbl | June 4, 2008 1:19 PM
I´ve tested the FireFox in other boxes diferent of windows and I do not have that all compatibility as everybody said... my web sites are 100% OK for IE 6, 7, FF all version, Mozilla and other small... but the Firefox for Linux have lot´s of errors...
About Firefox... to me, both FF and IE are very good... and now, I do no care with one I´m working... both works fine to me...
Security... I´m using most of time the IE 7... and most of my friends prefer FF... all of then got a virus in near time... but I did not... why? FF has a very big hole that accept to install and virus... so... who is the best?
Posted by: Ruben Zevallos Jr. | June 4, 2008 2:24 PM
" FF has a very big hole that accept to install and virus... so... who is the best?"
One thing is that Your friend perhaps surf to places differrent to You, or don't have their atnivirus software uptodate. Perhaps they don't even have antivirus software installed?
One thing to make everything a bit more safe is to run firefox in a zone, using zfs snapshot's functionality (http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zones) or use virtualbox (http://virtualbox.org/).
That way even I can run IE on Opensolaris when i need. Also virtualbox has a snapshot functionality, so if you are running Firefox in Linux under windows, or IE in Windows under Linux using Virtualbox its easy to revert back to the virusfree state.
For me, Firefox have more practical functionality with all the additional addons.
Posted by: tbl | June 4, 2008 10:22 PM
Firefox is doing OK to get to 20% in 4 years or so. But there's a long way to go before the 50% mark - maybe another 5 or 6 years?
And you gotta laugh at some of these people - where do they come from? "No point in supporting IE6 any more". So the 50% of Net users running on IE6 aren't important? Well, it's an interesting point of view I suppose.
Posted by: blimp | June 5, 2008 10:58 AM
True microsoft will have the upperhand for some time to come, but more and more, both consumers and manufacturers are seeing the advantages of using opensource software such as firefox.
Just look at Acer, they're a major manufacturer of computer systems and they have said themselves they will be making a major push to promote linux and have it installed on most of their systems.
In the end, opensource will win. The software features match or better that of microsofts software and most importantly it's FREE.
Posted by: Hull Web Design | June 9, 2008 9:03 AM