Over the last 4 years, firefox is becoming more and more popular, and its market share is increasing by 5% each year over the last 4 years. But since one has to actively download and install the program (on Mac and Windows), why do people choose to download and install Firefox? Why not Opera, Safari, Konqueror or any other browser?
This week, several articles I read brought the breaking news that the market share of Microsoft’s internet explorer is shrinking to below 70% for the first time since 1999 (http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=1). Internet Explorer gained a near monopoly, simply by forcing it to the customers by bundling/integrating it with the operating system Windows, and I believe this is the major reason why this browser still holds such a big percentage of market share. Many people simply use the browser they are given, unless there is an alternative that has significant advantages.
On the other hand, apparently, the near-monopoly has made Microsoft extremely lazy, resulting in a browser that does not even meet the open web-standards, it is slow and has to catch up with alternative browsers. The lack of meeting open standards is an increasing frustration with web-designers and alternative producers of web-browsers like Opera (http://www.opera.com/press/releases/2007/12/13/). Having to catch up with other browsers is painfully clear when simply looking at tabbed browsing and extensions. The tabbed browsing was introduced by Opera in 1994 and only after practically all other browsers supported the “tabbing”, Microsoft introduced this feature in Internet Explorer 7, more than ten years after Opera did.
Also speed is in favor of Opera, when compared to the top-4 of the web-browsers, and also in this case, the market-leader (Internet Explorer) does not do a very good job (http://lifehacker.com/396048/speed-testing-the-latest-web-browsers). Firefox is left somewhere in the middle.
The only field where Firefox beats all competitors is when it comes to extensions. Though there an amazing amount of well-designed and useful extensions (or widgets) for Opera, and a few extensions for Internet Explorer, the real master of extensions is Firefox. Its open source code combined with a decent market share apparently is a very attractive combination to developers and resulted in more than 5000 Firefox extensions in just a few years (http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/customize/), and the number of extensions is growing rapidly. There are many types of translators, weather add-ons, but also highly specific add-ons such as “biofox”, “FireMath” and “Water Levels of German Rivers” (if someone finds a more weird add-on please let me know!!!). The most curious extension that is being worked on is one provided by Microsoft and is called the Open XML Document Viewer, which allows you to view OOXML document right in your browser (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKSF6w0EK0s). Also the look of Firefox is highly flexible and you can install many different themes.
When looking at features like speed and innovation, Firefox and Opera are a close match and Internet Explorer is lagging far behind. Looking at the market share trends however, Opera and Internet explorer are no match for Firefox, probably due to the numerous extensions, though there might be several other small advantages that add to the popularity of Firefox.
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