Market adoption of Mozilla Firefox

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Since its initial release in 2004, market adoption of Mozilla Firefox has increased rapidly. Currently Firefox is the second most used browser worldwide.

Contents

[edit] Usage share

Usage share of Mozilla Firefox over time
Usage share of Mozilla Firefox over time
A graph of Firefox 1.x and 2.x cumulative downloads in millions
A graph of Firefox 1.x and 2.x cumulative downloads in millions
A graph of Firefox 1.x and 2.x download rate in thousands per day
A graph of Firefox 1.x and 2.x download rate in thousands per day
See also: Usage share of web browsers

Web-surfers have adopted Firefox rapidly, despite the availability of Internet Explorer on all Microsoft Windows PCs. Internet Explorer has seen a steady decline of its usage share since Firefox's release. According to several sources (as listed in statistics reference), by July 2006, Firefox had around 12% of global usage share, and by mid January 2007, 14%.[1]

Europe, according to a study released by the firm XiTi on 2006-06-16, generally had higher percentages of Firefox use, with an average of 20%.[2] The highest usage is in Germany (about 39% as of July 2006).[3]

[edit] Download count

Downloads have continued at an increasing rate since Firefox 1.0 was released in November 2004. No other Mozilla Foundation product has experienced such growth.[4]

Downloads of Firefox 1.x and 2.x since November 9, 2004
Date Number of days Downloads (millions)
November 10, 2004 1 1[5]
February 16, 2005 99 25[6]
April 29, 2005 171 50[7]
July 26, 2005 259 75[8]
October 19, 2005 344 100[9]
March 3, 2006 479 150[10]
July 31, 2006 629 200[11]
November 11, 2006 732 250[12]
February 12, 2007 825 300[13]

These numbers do not include downloads using software updates or from third-party websites.[14] They do not represent a user count, as one download may be installed on many machines, or one person may download the software multiple times. Mozilla Vice President of Products Christopher Beard estimates that Firefox currently has 70 million to 80 million users as of October 2006.[15]

[edit] Industry adoption

Since the pre-1.0 stages, several well-known websites and web applications, including Gmail, have supported (and in some cases, required) the use of Firefox. Since March 30, 2005, the Google search engine has utilized the link prefetching feature of Firefox for faster searching. Google, Inc. also recommends Firefox as the browser for its Blogger.com weblog service.[16] On May 18, 2005, eBay announced support for Firefox for its eBay Picture Manager.[17] In 2006, Microsoft released a Firefox-compatible Windows Genuine Advantage browser plug-in.[18]

Search engine companies including Google, Yahoo! and A9.com now also offer Firefox extensions for accessing their services, in addition to their original Internet Explorer add-ons. Google has released four Extensions for Firefox,[19] further affirming the company's interest in Firefox.

[edit] Institutional adoption

During the FOSDEM 2005 conference, Tristan Nitot, president of Mozilla Europe, noted that Firefox has had more success in the consumer market than with institutions.[20] He also theorized that pressure from Microsoft caused institutions who had adopted Firefox to remain silent about it.

“ I know companies that are deploying Firefox or Thunderbird, but they aren't talking about it as they don't want to see an increase in their [Microsoft] Office licence price. ”

Some observers, such as Serdar Yegulalp of TechTarget[21] and Jim Rapooza of eWEEK[22] note that Firefox does not provide tools that make institutional deployment easier, such as a client customization kit (which Mozilla has since released[23]) or Microsoft Installer (MSI) packages. Furthermore, they note that Firefox does not support some technologies that are sometimes used in institutional environments, such as ActiveX and Active Directory (though it does support Kerberos and LDAP for certain functions).

While institutions may not be actively deploying Firefox in large numbers, more and more are allowing their employees to install Firefox, according to JupiterResearch. They found that in 2006, 44% of companies with more than 200 employees allowed Firefox on their employees' systems, compared with 26% in 2005.[24]

[edit] References

  1. ^ IE7 being caught by Firefox despite 100 million installations. iTWire (2007-01-18). Retrieved on March 2, 2007.
  2. ^ Firefox surveyPDF (120 KiB)
  3. ^ Global usage share Mozilla Firefox has increased according to OneStat.com. OneStat.com (2006-07-09). Retrieved on October 17, 2006.
  4. ^ Firefox and more: the graphs (part 1). Asa Dotzler's weblog.
  5. ^ 1,000,000+ downloads on day 1
  6. ^ firefox 25,000,000
  7. ^ celebrating 50 million firefox downloads
  8. ^ Firefox Exceeds 75 million Downloads
  9. ^ firefox hits one hundred million downloads
  10. ^ 150 million and counting!
  11. ^ Firefox 200 Million Downloads - what it means
  12. ^ 250000000 downloads!
  13. ^ Firefox: 300 million+ downloads
  14. ^ http://feeds.spreadfirefox.com/downloads/firefox.xml
  15. ^ Final Version of Mozilla Firefox 2 Will Be Released Oct. 24. PC World.
  16. ^ Where can I upgrade my browser? Blogger Help.
  17. ^ eBay Picture Manager Enhancements. eBay.
  18. ^ Genuine Microsoft Software (HTML). Windows Genuine Advantage: Frequently Asked Questions. Microsoft Corporation (2006). Retrieved on November 6, 2006.
  19. ^ http://toolbar.google.com/firefox/extensions/index.html
  20. ^ Firefox sneaks into the enterprise. ZDNet UK.
  21. ^ Serdar Yegulalp. How to switch an enterprise from IE to Firefox. TechTarget. Retrieved on October 8, 2006.
  22. ^ Jim Rapooza. Mozilla Firefox 1.0. eWEEK. Retrieved on October 8, 2006.
  23. ^ Firefox 1.5 CCK (Client Customization Kit) Wizard. Retrieved on September 22, 2006.
  24. ^ J. Nicholas Hoover. IE7 vs. Firefox 2.0: Why This Browser Battle Matters To Businesses. InformationWeek. Retrieved on October 17, 2006.
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