This month Firefox turned five. The popular open source web browser also hit a new landmark in its popularity. According to web analyst Net Applications, which measures web browser usage by monitoring more than 40 000 websites, one-in-four web users is now using Firefox to surf the web.<\/p>\n
Reaching 25% market share is not completely surprising – Firefox has been climbing steadily over the past couple of years – but it has achieved this in just the five years since it was released in November 2004 in a highly competitive market.<\/p>\n
At the start of the year Firefox had a 22% market share, well behind Internet Explorer’s 70% market share. By October Internet Explorer’s market share was down by almost 5% at 64.6%. Firefox has picked up almost 3% of that drop while Google’s Chrome has gained almost 2%. Apple’s Safari also ticked up another percent, to hover around 4.5%.<\/p>\n
Most of Internet Explorer’s losses are at the hands of its Internet Explorer 6 browser which held just 23% share at the end of October. In January Internet Explorer 6 held a 32.7% share of the market.<\/p>\n
Interestingly, despite widespread calls for Internet Explorer 6 to be scrapped because of its problematic rendering habits, IE6 remains resolutely stable. Although it lost close on 10% share over the nine months from January to October this year, this is nothing in comparison with Internet Explorer 7’s fleeting popularity. In January IE7 had a 35.9% share of the market, slightly more than IE6. By October, however, it had lost half of that and was right down to just 18%. Most of that loss was presumably picked up by Internet Explorer 8 which climbed from just under 1% market share in January to 18% by October.<\/p>\n
Asa Dotzler, Mozilla’s director of community development, said in an interview [http:\/\/www.computerworld.com\/s\/article\/9140819\/1_in_4_now_use_Firefox_to_surf_the_Web?taxonomyId=18] earlier this week that before they “launched Firefox 1.0, the people on the team … said that if we could get to 5%, we would stay alive and stay meaningful. If you don’t get to 5%, you don’t have a seat at the table.” With that target reached fairly quickly the Firefox developers set their sights on bigger things.<\/p>\n
Earlier this month, in an article [http:\/\/blog.lizardwrangler.com\/2009\/11\/09\/firefox-turns-5\/] celebrating the fifth birthday of Firefox, Mitchell Baker, chairman of the Mozilla Foundation, said that the fact that Firefox had hit the 25% mark was significant. “The idea that a non-profit, public benefit organization like Mozilla can have such an impact on keeping the Internet open, participatory, and innovative still surprises people, but it’s no longer seen as naive and impossible.”<\/p>\n