When Internet Explorer 7 was released, there was speculation that it would end up taking some of the market share away from Firefox who had been experiencing growth at the time. Well, 100 million installations of IE7 have occurred and Firefox hasn’t lost any of their market share. In fact, they have continued to grow over the last three months. Firefox currently has 14% of the market!
So, with 100 million installations of IE7, were they all originally Internet Explorer users? Well, yes, most of them come at the expense of IE6. The new browser is just being exchanged for the older version. Tony Chor, an Internet Explorer group program manager says “As of January 8th, we had the 100 millionth IE7 installation. We expect these numbers to continue to rise as we complete our final localized versions, scale up Automatic Updates distribution, and with the consumer availability of Winnows Vista on January 30, 2007.”
It will be interesting to see what will happen with the Windows Vista launch and if previous ‘basic’ Firefox users will just stick to IE7. There are many Firefox users who don’t realize the capability that it has, or who choose just to use it for its’ basic features liked the tabbed browsing. Now that IE7 has the tabbed browsing, some of those basic users may decide that they don’t need to download Firefox.
While there may be some people who, through Automatic Updates , or with an upgrade to Windows Vista will stick with Internet Explorer 7, I believe there will be that many more new people that discover Firefox for the first time which will at least keep the market share at 14% or will help it continue to grow.
New Source: Information Week
It’s kinda of funny, my wife had no interest in using Firefox because of tabbed browsing. It was too different and unfamiliar. Since her system was automatically upgrade to IE 7 a few weeks ago, she has had a chance to get familiar with tabbed browsing. A week ago I installed Firefox 2.0 and a few of my favorite extension on her system. She is now a Firefox fan.
My advice is this: Use the new version of IE to introduce
Firefox to the uninitiated. Show them what’s similar in IE 7 (tabbed browsing, integrated search bar, etc). Next, show them how Firefox excels! Show them themes and extension and how useful they can be.
A couple of years ago, it took some convincing for Ryan to get me to make the switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox. I’m not a huge fan of change.. but he promised it was worth it.
Now two years later, I can’t imagine not using Firefox. I’m by no means a “power” user. In fact, I have two extensions installed. But, I love the tabbed browsing, and the fact that there are a lot of extensions available should I want it to do something more. And, now I rely quite a bit on the built-in spell check. Couldn’t ever go back
And, I definitely agree. Using the new version of IE to introduce Firefox to the average Joe is a great way to do it. IE7 is much improved, but not near what Firefox is. Great way to get someone started…
By the way Cory… thanks for all of your comments and your contribution here!
Even the fact that FF 2.0 wasn’t much of an upgrade…FF still kills IE in my opinion, just for the extensions and feature-set you can potentially have.
It’s a great piece of software.
Installation numbers mean nothing. I’ve installed IE7 mainly for security purposes on my system, but I haven’t used it, not even once. Back at the 1.0 release of Firefox (yes I’ve been with it that long), people quoted the number of downloads and predicted that FF would have half the browser market share within the year. Obviously, this didn’t happen. Just because people download something or even install it doesn’t mean they use it.
Someone on one of the forums I was reading regarding this said something along the lines that 4 of those 100 million were from him because that’s how many tries it took to get it to work
I wonder how many others had the same issue.
Firefox’s potential is both its strength and weakness. I have heard several people say that they don’t use Firefox because there isn’t anything special to it…and as it turns out it’s because they don’t realize how much you can configure it or even that you can install extensions. Mozilla needs to find out some way that they can spread the word about Firefox and maybe it would involve them dipping into their millions of dollars that are sitting in the bank from the Google Search Box. They played around with advertising on TV in California a little bit, but they need to do it on a much larger scale now.
Most of the users getting IE7 is through the automatic update features anyway; logically this means most will be existing IE6 users. I’m sure a large portion of the more enthusiastic users (ones who downloaded it manually before) are just tech enthusiasts or web developers that like playing around with everything.
The strength of Firefox is that it is designed for USERS, not so developers can feel happy about their crazy features. Because of this, Firefox is a basic browser with great extensibility – this plays into the hands of every type of user.
I agree that Firefox’s extensibility is a big plus, but they need to make people more aware of the extensions and themes that are available for them to pick from. Maybe they should come up with a wizard that walks people through installing add-ons and even offers to install a few add-ons that maybe Mozilla would create themselves. If people would see how easy it is to install these things they might become more aware that they are available.
Everyone says that they have heard at one time or another that they should download Firefox. That’s great, but the people telling them to do that are probably people who have extensions, yet they fail to tell the people how easy it is to install the extensions and to find them. So if the people ever get around to using Firefox this is one thing that they would probably never experiment with.
I believe one of Firefox target audience is web developers. Putting the focus on web stands makes the job of developing web sites easier. I believe that one day all (major) browses will be 100% WC3 compliant. This will be in part because of Mozilla’s strong stance on stands. Just think how easy it will be to create a web site that works the say way any all major browsers without having to tweaking the CSS and JavaScript for the various browsers.
I don’t think of Firefox as a basic browser. I think it is more complete than IE in part because of how more complete it support web standards. In my opinion, that what matters most. Not to mention features like inline spell checking, integrated search bar, etc.
I think Firefox appears to be a “basic browser” because of how clean it appears and nimble it performs.
See what Blake Ross has to say about showing extensions:
[operawatch.com]
Mozilla made extensions? See [labs.mozilla.com]
What I meant by ‘basic browser’, is a browser that only includes useful features for a lot of people – rather than anything that can be thought up.
I use Firefox more than IE, but our school won’t install FF2 or IE7; they want to still use IE6, as tabbed browsing would mean less work done.
Our university finally took the plunge last year and installed Firefox on nearly all of the machines. I have to admit that it has been quite a hit with people who were unfamiliar with Firefox.