Firefox passes 25% of browser market share. One in four web hits now on Firefox

Seth Weintraub
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November 13, 2009
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As the Firefox browser prepares to celebrate its 5th birthday, NetApplications reveals quite an accomplishment for the Open Source Mozilla foundation.  A few years ago, Microsoft's standards-defiant IE 6 held 95% of the browser market share, having destroyed Netscape by using what was later ruled as monopoly tactics. 

Firefox, however, has been gaining steadily since its introduction in 2005 but faces fierce competition, not only from Internet Explorer but from Webkit browsers like Safari and Google's Chrome which are very popular in the exploding mobile browsing category as well as the desktop.

For the week of Nov. 1 through Nov. 7, Firefox accounted for 25.1% of all browsers, said Vizzaccaro. Internet Explorer (IE), meanwhile, led all rivals with 63.3%, while Apple's Safari, Google's Chrome and Opera Software's Opera followed, in that order, with 4.4%, 3.9% and 2.3%, respectively.

Asa Dotzler, Mozilla's community coordinator said, "When we reached 20%, we became the favored browser for anyone who understood what a browser was."

It is also interesting to note that Internet Explorer continues to tumble to 63%.  Falling below 50% seems like a possibility in the coming years with not only Firefox growing but also Chrome (the fastest growing browser) and Safari exploding, especially in the mobile space which Microsoft has all but ceded.

Comments (6)

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | November 13, 2009 - 2:22pm

Wow, Chrome is picking up a lot of steam. As someone who fears Google, I don't think that's necessarily a good thing. But they are getting some traction and will jump ahead of Safari within a year or less. I love Safari... not sure why more people aren't using it.

grognaard (not verified) | November 13, 2009 - 2:48pm

I agree with the last post  Not sure why more folks aren't using Safari.  I have to admit though, that while Safari is my browser of choice, there are some sites (admittedly work related)  where Safari just won't work. 

Then I fire up Firefox, do what I need to do, and close out when I'm done.  I feel very comfortable with Firefox, but it just doesn't have that mac 'feel'.  

Anyone have any numbers comparing the breakdown of  Safari vs Firefox usage by Mac users?

That would be kind of interesting.

 

 

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | November 13, 2009 - 3:52pm

I'm happy that other browsers are a significant part of the market.

In the early 2000's, IE6 was the market leader.  It was unreliable, but most companies supported only IE6 because it was "the standard".  These software folks didn't understand standards or why they should be adhered to.  It wasn't just mom-and-pop website, but also big software shops like SAP and PeopleSoft.

Out comes FireFox, giving IE6 a huge run for it's money.  Of course, many web sites had a problem with FireFox at first, so FireFox had to give a little bit.  But it was such a better browser that Microsoft reacted with IE7.

Ooops, then the people that developed for IE6 learned that they made a stupid mistake: they developed for IE6, and not for standards, and next thing you know their old code was breaking everywhere.  Suddenly, web standards looked good to them.  And IE looked bad.

Now, the market definitely has IE as its leader, but most software developers use another browser for their own development work - these new browsers have capabilities that IE just doesn't have in terms of software development.  Now, IE support is the exception, and rarely the rule.

Never once in the last 3 years have I heard one of my developers say "Oh, we developed this for IE, but it doesn't work elsewhere".  Now it's always "it works on all browsers, but we had to put in some hacks so that it'd work right on IE6".  That's the big change, and that's good.  Because when the next generation of browsers come out we won't have to retool everything.  Like we did when IE 5.5 was king.

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | November 14, 2009 - 12:20am

you seem to have a fixation with "IE".

dsi r4 (not verified) | November 15, 2009 - 9:53pm

Hi,
i like your article and it's really informative information.i like this type of article..

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | December 03, 2009 - 5:52pm

You really don't know why people are using safari? It's simple: it is really vulnerable to attacks and it doesn't have the features of other browsers like Firefox. It's got 4% market share and 35% of new vulnerabilities.