To print: Click here or Select File and then Print from your browser's menu

This story was printed from silicon.com, located at http://www.silicon.com/

Story URL: http://software.silicon.com/applications/0,39024653,39125255,00.htm

Firefox hunts for 10 per cent of the browser market
Are these the opening shots of a new browser war?

By Ingrid Marson

Published: Monday 25 October 2004

Maybe the browser wars really are back.

A Mozilla Foundation spokesman told silicon.com sister site ZDNet UK that he expects the browser's market share to reach 10 percent by the end of 2005. "I think we'll get to 10 percent over the next year. We don't have 10 percent of the web at the moment, but we have the momentum," he said.

The Mozilla Foundation is confident of hitting this goal as interest in the browser has been accelerating over the last few months. The spokesman said the browser's momentum can be seen in the increasing number of downloads for each version of Firefox: version 0.8 was downloaded 3.3 million times in four months; 0.9 was downloaded 6.5 million times in three months; and the pre-release version of 1.0 was downloaded five million times in just one month.

Silicon.com sister site ZDNet UK's figures show that since the beginning of this year there has been an increase in the percentage of site visitors using a Mozilla browser. In February around nine per cent of site visitors were using a Mozilla-based browser; this increased to 19 per cent in October. Over the same period, IE use decreased from 88 per cent to 79 per cent.

Silicon.com sister site CNET News.com and W3Schools.com, a web development tutorial site, have found similar trends. The move from IE to Firefox is also shown by the fact that half of Firefox downloads are from IE users, according to the Foundation.

Mozilla is also attracting increasing interest from non-technical users, who see the perceived speed of their internet connection rise after switching to Firefox, according the spokesman.

He added: "We get user emails saying: 'You're 10 times faster than IE.' Benchmark tests show we're about the same speed but home users who have been accessing the internet for five years may have 15 or 20 pieces of spyware, which means that every time they access a web page, the malware could be making an additional 15 connections to the internet, to log the information it has gathered."

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for security firm Sophos, said that spyware and virus writers tend to write malware specifically for IE. This can noticeably slow down internet access for home users who access the internet via dial-up, although broadband users are unlikely to notice any difference.

"Some spyware hooks specifically into IE," said Cluley. "But other spyware, such as those which log key presses and pass them onto an internet site, are likely to work on any browser."

The Foundation said the recent interest in Firefox validates Netscape's decision to open the source code of its Communicator software in 1998.

"Netscape open-sourced the source code to 'harness the power' of the open-source community. Now, six years later, this vision is finally coming into fruition. To get over the finish line we needed a non-profit organisation, which allows us to build new partnerships and do innovative marketing," the Mozilla Foundation spokesman said.

He believes that other open-source projects would get more interest from non-technical users if they took a tougher approach to jettisoning unnecessary functionality.

"At Firefox we are disciplined about getting rid of features. It is hard to do that in an open-source development model. You need to take the open-source energy and overlay a product management discipline."

You can download it Firefox here.