BeerFiles is a sometimes irreverent blog concerning all things to do with IT, technology, people and the media from the point of view of a hard boiled technology journalist and commentator. Stan has been in the IT game for about a quarter of a century. He has seen and written about the rise and fall of more than a few IT players and made many friends, some of whom he has even crossed swords with on occasions. Everything in this blog is purely Stan’s opinion so if you agree, wish to expand upon, correct a post or tell Stan he’s a clueless know nothing, please feel free.

Firefox 2.0 good enough to keep winning with help

by Stan Beer

Tuesday, 24 October 2006

The achievement of not for profit Mozilla Foundation in winning a large chunk of market share from Microsoft with its open source browser Firefox cannot be understated. The question is, in the face of IE7, is Firefox 2.0 a good enough upgrade to keep its upward trend going? Firefox currently has about 12% market share, while IE6 still has more than 80%. The achievement of Firefox in putting a dent in Microsoft's dominance of the browser market was gained while it had a clearly superior product, years ahead of its rival. It was faster, more fully featured and much more secure than IE6. While Firefox 2.0 is still better than IE7, the browsers are no longer a generation apart. Devoted Firefox fans will say, "So what?" The answer is that most users are lazy. They're not lazy in a bad way; they just don't want to be bothered with the details of computing. If there's a browser on their desktop, users would prefer to use that browser rather than download something else that's similar. And Firefox 2.0 is not that much better for the average user that they will feel a need to change. Having said all of that, there is still hope for Firefox to keep on with its with upward climb. There are now some significant market players, led by Google, going in to bat for Mozilla. Most website designers are now taking Firefox into account when developing websites. The growing open source and Linux movement is firmly behind Firefox. In some countries, such as Germany, the market share of Firefox actually rivals Internet Explorer. Finally, there is always Firefox 3.0 which is likely to be months away and years ahead of IE8.{moscomment} Tags See All Tags Internet  Powered By Joomla Tags Please enable JavaScript in your browser to post your comment!

 

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