[Firefox] took a 38.1pc market share across [Europe] in December, surpassing Internet Explorer’s 37.5pc – the first time Microsoft has lost the top spot in a leading market.
[Firefox] took a 38.1pc market share across [Europe] in December, surpassing Internet Explorer’s 37.5pc – the first time Microsoft has lost the top spot in a leading market.
… except IE lost the top spot because Chrome raises, while Firefox stagnates.
It depends what you mean by “stagnates”.
First of all, the market size is always increasing. So if a browser holds still in percentage terms, numerically it’s still growing at a fairly quick rate.
Secondly, it’s not like people are switching directly from IE to Chrome. It seems that people are more commonly switching from IE to Firefox, but that people are switching from Firefox to Chrome at about a similar rate (at least in Europe). So there is activity even if figures don’t change.
Chrome is new and shiny, and Google has a massive advertising budget – you certainly can’t avoid their ads on the Tube in London. And they have a reasonable product. It’s not surprising they are successful.
Not just the London underground, also Paris metro is full of advertising.
On the whole, gaining that first spot because Chrome raises is a *good* thing.
Becoming the caliph instead of the caliph is not really Firefox’s aim. Three, or four, browsers at about the same percentage is the best thing that can happen to this market.
OTOH Firefox needs to make the best to stay competitive against Chrome because a market dominated by Chrome would not be a lot better than if it’s dominated by IE (but still a bit better because IE was the dominant browser only by default instead of by it’s qualities which wouldn’t be the case of Chrome).
As jmdesp said, I would think (and hope) that Mozilla’s aim is to have a competitive browser market, not to take over and have the dominant browser in the market.
> It seems that people are more commonly switching from IE to
> Firefox, but that people are switching from Firefox to Chrome
To Chrome and to other alternative browsers, yeah.
My stats (from work — a small-town public library in the US Midwest) support approximately the same conclusion. My numbers are different (e.g., IE is still very much in the top slot, and for some reason we have an unusually high number of Safari users for a site that is not in any way Apple-related), but the direction of movement correlates. I think we are seeing approximately the same trends, albeit to different extents. Firefox has basically plateaued (it fluctuates a little, but it hasn’t had a net gain of more than 1% for at least three years now), but people are still moving away from IE, and one *presumes* that some of them are moving to Firefox. The logical conclusion is that people are also moving off of Firefox to the browsers that are now gaining share (including Chrome).
This kind of movement (some users doing A->B and other users doing B->C at the same time) becomes even more evident if you track each IE version separately. At one point when IE8 was new and IE7 was still the latest thing on automatic updates, IE7 and IE8 were collectively gaining more users than IE6 was losing. That lasted for I think a couple of months, and then IE8 hit Automatic Update and IE7 started bleeding share like a stuck pig and within a couple more months IE overall was back on the decline. The fact that this (net IE gain) happened for a couple of months shows that not all IE8 users were coming from earlier versions of IE; while the fact that the reverse is happening now shows that not all users leaving IE6 or 7 are moving to IE8. In other words, some users were leaving other browsers (including, presumably, Firefox) to check out IE8, at least when it was new, but other users are still leaving IE and moving to other browsers. Movement is not all in the same direction. Different users are doing different things. This is good, IMO, because it bespeaks real competition.
Incidentally, on a semi-related note, IE7 lost share (initially) MUCH faster than IE6 did. My conclusion there is that a much higher percentage of IE7 users had XP SP2 or higher and had Automatic Updates turned on. When IE7 first hit AU, a lot more people didn’t have AU turned on yet, probably due to the very gradual uptake of SP2.
Chrome is now doing what FF was a few years ago – offering a good alternative that is faster. if things continue as they are i expect it to eventually dominate.
FF is rapidly becoming the sort of buggy bloatware that led to its existence in the first place.
>FF is rapidly becoming the sort of buggy bloatware that led to its existence in the first place.
So true. Mozilla also began using lies in marketing – claiming it’s “fast” and “secure”, when Chromium easily beats Fx on it.