Ready, Aim, FireFox

Mozilla FireFox, the Open Source browser, was "officially" released at the beginning of November. Unusually for an Open Source product there was also an advertising campaign which included – believe it or not – a two page advert in The New York Times. In theory FireFox is a 1.0 release, and tradition insists that 1.0 releases of PC products are buggy, but I can confirm that it isn't. I was an early adopter of the product and I have now been running it under Windows XP for about 6 months. This is the penalty (or reward) of being an industry analyst – you sometimes become an early adopter. However, I volunteered with enthusiasm because I had been experiencing "pop-up" hell with Internet Explorer and had become mouse click sick.

Remarkably, after a month of its official release, there have been over 10 million downloads. Thus FireFox has already notched up an estimated 5 percent share of the browser market. The estimate is probably accurate, because Internet Explorer's market share has dropped a corresponding 5 percent since May. Official market share figures from OneStat give 7.35 percent and from WebSideStory, 6.89 percent, but both figures apply to all Mozilla-based browsers including old versions of Netscape. So, given its ecstatic reception (10 million downloads qualifies as ecstatic in my view) does this mean that the browser wars are back on? The answer is almost certainly yes – in a way.

Ready, Aim, FireFox