Are Firefox’s glory days behind it?
Firefox has, for a long time, been gaining ground in the Web browser wars, eating in to Internet Explorer’s still-sizable lead all the while. But no longer. Though Microsoft’s IE continues its inexorable decline, Firefox has joined it, with Google Chrome now building momentum. So are Firefox’s glory days behind it?
The latest Web browser market share stats were revealed yesterday, and Chrome was the only mainstream browser to show any sign of increasing its market share. In February, IE dropped 0.60 percent, with Firefox slipping 0.18 percent. Chrome, on the other hand, gained 0.41 percent. Good for Google, bad for Microsoft and Mozilla.
As Ars Technica explores, Firefox has been steadily rising towards hitting the 25 percent browser share milestone for months, ever since it experienced a slight dip last May. Worryingly for Mozilla, this is the first time Firefox has dropped for three months in a row for a long time.
Unlike Internet Explorer, I don’t think Firefox’s decline is necessarily permanent. But it definitely faces touch competition in Chrome, which is improving all the time, and consequently gaining fans. What is clear is that Mozilla needs to up its game if it intends to stop the rot that seems to have set in.
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March 2nd, 2010
Unbranded Debian’s Firefox –Iceweasel– counts as Firefox or as Iceweasel or maybe unknown browser?
March 2nd, 2010
I have tried Chrome many times but still come back to Firefox. I just can’t gel to Chrome.
March 3rd, 2010
Firefox is the king of browsers. I don’t understand how people can let their pc’s be infected with anything Microsoft.
March 3rd, 2010
I don’t know man, seems like the glory days of Mozilla was with the 1.0 release.
I still remember just getting comfortable with Mozilla and having Firebird pop up out of nowhere.
Besides being a decent browser it becomes a powerful tool for many people with the add-on system.
Web developers love it. Social media junkies love it. Recreational web browsers know of it, may like it, but might not see the advantages first hand in spite of reading the reports of security flaws etc found in internet explorer.
Chrome is simple and plain. For some of us that is a blessing right off. A simple system without memory leak problems (on Mac anyways, from experience).
I just wish there was some kind of general global summit to carry out a brainstorm of what constitutes a “feature” today, then make them all modular to a base vanilla system. Almost a Slackware approach to to applications. Start skinny and bloat it all you want.
Firefox is indeed a great application that hopefully will never die. Competition is healthy. I’m sure Mozilla and Google are learning a hell of a lot from each other these days and enjoying every minute of it.
March 3rd, 2010
The current slum in the percentage of firefox users is just a temporary phase. Firefox is a revolutionising browser and I bet the people at Mozilla will surely come up with something that will put firefox back in front.
March 3rd, 2010
Firefox is still good despite the fact that you have “minimialistic” browsers like Chrome trying to vie for market share.
@factotum218: No offense, but every time someone says “Firefox memory leak” the first question I ask them would be:
Are you aware that both Chrome and IE and a few other browsers run each and every tab as a separate process? Firefox does not do so and therefore it looks like it’s consuming way too much memory.
As a small experiment, I tried opening a number number of tabs in Firefox (some of them include flash rich sites), calculated the memory consumed, then shut down Firefox, opened the same tabs in Chrome. It was pretty much the same!I use Windows XP SP3 user with a gig of ram.
The only big “issue” would be the startup time, but on further comparison, I noticed that Chrome startsup 3 second earlier than Firefox and I can wait for 3 extra seconds:)
March 3rd, 2010
opera is still the most inventive browser, even better than firefox
March 5th, 2010
Opera is the worst browser out there, its even worse then IE8.
March 6th, 2010
… reporting in.
March 7th, 2010
On its path to browser dominance, Google Chrome may still stumble quite badly. The Google Buzz debacle shows just how cavalier Google can potentially treat our privacy. This will provoke a huge backlash at some point, from users and governments, and when that day comes Chrome will suffer alongside every other Google creation. Meanwhile Firefox just has to keep on trucking with gradual improvements, word of mouth and a commitment to its extensions and its most avid fanbase.
March 8th, 2010
Firefox is the last to bring multi process, all others already have it. And it is paying for it. Better late than never.
March 11th, 2010
It’s difficult to say where Firefox’s market share will go from here. Sure its gone down for three consecutive months, but the overall decrease is only .49 percent. From April-May 2009, there was a 1.09 percentage drop, and Firefox came back from that.
@Ment
IE and Chrome are the only major browsers at the moment that have multi-process. Also, if multi-process is the reason for the decline, then Firefox should have been losing market share for much longer than three consecutive months.