Firefox is five years old. Five years ago, Microsoft seemed to have an absolute lock on the browser market with Internet Explorer, having long ago crushed Netscape. The browser wars were over. Or so it seemed.
According to Net Applications’ Market Share, 64.6 percent of Web users run Internet Explorer, compared to 24 percent running Mozilla’s Firefox. Other browsers like Apple’s Safari, Google’s Chrome, and Opera have another 10 percent of the market. Two years ago, IE controlled almost 80 percent of the browser market and Firefox had only 15 percent.
On a blog celebrating the fifth anniversary of the browser, Mozilla took stock of Firefox’s accomplishments. Firefox 1.0 was the forerunner of today’s modern browsers — Safari, Chrome, Opera and Firefox 3.5, Christopher Blizzard writes on the blog.
Modern browsers
“The modern browser is built for the future of web applications — super-fast JavaScript, modern CSS, HTML 5, support for the various web-apps standards, downloadable font support, offline application support, raw graphics through canvas and WebGL, native video, advanced XHR capabilities mixed with new security tools, and network capabilities,” Blizzard said.
Firefox has been a major positive for consumers, Tim Bajarin, principal analyst with Creative Strategies, said in an e-mail. “Creating an open-source competitor allows for more flexibility in browser design and also speeds up the development of new features and functions so that it can evolve faster than a corporate browser like IE,” he said.
“Consumers like this pace of innovation and Firefox has used this to help them gain serious market share in the browser wars,” he added.
The Next Five Years
There’s still much work to be done, Blizzard said, but the technology is in place — thanks to Firefox — to advance the web over the next five years. “We’re helping to standardize and implement some new CSS capabilities that are being developed…