After a long slow fall, Firefox's market-share decline recently got steeper.
Posted on 07/10/2014 4:47:51 AM PDT by ShadowAce
When you take a look at Net Applications' web desktop browser market share reports over the long run two things stand out. One, there's the rise of Google's Chrome to second place, and two, Mozilla's Firefox's steep decline.
How bad is Firefox's fall? In June 2014, Firefox hit a new five-year low of 15.6 percent market share.
Back in October 2009, Firefox was on the rise and had reached 23.75 percent. Life was good. Since July 2012, the browser started trending downward. Indeed, since May 2013, with Firefox at 20.6%, the once popular browser hasn't risen above 20%.
As for the other desktop web browsers, Internet Explorer (IE) retains first place with a new two-year high of 58.4 percent in June 2014. Chrome, which jumped from 17.7 to 19.3 percent between May and June 2014, gained the most from Firefox's decline. Apple's Safari has also not been doing well. At 5.3 percent, Safari hasn't been this unpopular since March 2013.
Why is that happening? That's a good question.
Certainly the improvements and publicity for Chrome and IE hasn't hurt any. Firefox's reputation, on the other hand, has been tarnished by adding ads to the web browser and by Mozilla's continuing CEO problems.
Adding to the problems is the fact that Mozilla's ad deal with Google is coming to its renewal date. This is significant because over 90 percent of Mozilla's revenue comes from Google but Google now has its own browser. It's hard to see Google renewing the deal.
While Mozilla has hopes to become a mobile operating power with Firefox OS, it's made little progress against the two mobile operating system giants: Google with Android and Apple with iOS. Even if Mozilla were to do better than its management's wildest dreams, it's hard to see Firefox OS licensing fees making up for its potential Google revenue losses.
Speaking of mobile, the Firefox browser is a total non-player in this market. As of June 2014, Safari had a 46.1 percent share of the market; this is followed by the native Android browser with 22.8 percent; Chrome with 16.7 percent; Opera Mini at 7.6 percent, Internet Explorer at 2 percent; and, finally, almost lost in the noisem is Firefox at 0.7 percent.
For Firefox to remain a web browser power, it needs to make big improvements and it needs to make them now. Otherwise, Firefox may yet follow its predecessor Netscape into the web's past.
Well, that and Firefox sucks coupled with their constant “major release every Tuesday” cycle breaking plug-ins (the best feature of Firefox in the first place).
It’s been my primary browser for years but for a while now I’ve found it so unstable that I’m having to move to Chrome.
The change in update frequency wasn’t a good move and could not have helped. They are about as bad as Adobe in that department. Looks like we are somewhere in the 30s for version number these days.
The last Mac I had was a model LC475, when AOL kept ‘new versioning’ every two months, until I couldn’t afford to put any more RAM in the machine.
I stopped using IE at version 6.
I’ve been a Firefox user for a long time, and have used ‘adblock’ add-ons, UNTIL, the ‘adblock’ program started blocking my Live365 Internet radio homepage!
I have never liked Google anything, since their inception, years ago.
But, Safari? really?
I found Chrome to be so unstable and constantly hanging (after a year of running very smoothly) that I had to go back to Firefox; now the machine runs great. Weird.
I stopped using it since they fired their CEO for donating money to stop the gay agenda. I normally want more competition, but what’s the point if they are as fascist as Google and the rest of them?
I have been using FF for a good number of years. The CEO fiasco caused me to look at others including Chrome (ugh, Google) but I am using Iceweasel (Debian’s version) on my primary computer.
Me too. Why support anti-Christian thugs at Mozilla?
Please Note the that Apple browser is a tiny fraction of the Native Windows browser. It is so sad that .edu fawns over the lackluster and overpriced Apple product line.
Pale Moon works for me, and they have not fired their CEO for thoughtcrime.
“Waterfox is a high performance browser based on the Mozilla platform. Made specifically for 64-Bit systems, Waterfox has one thing in mind: speed.”
https://www.waterfoxproject.org/
Piss off Conservatives and they pull their support.
Seconded. I switched to Pale Moon after Firefox, that liberal bastion of individual thought and individual ideas, forced their CEO out for actually having individual thought.
It runs all the plugins I use and it doesn’t get updated every other day!
I like Firefox, but when they fired the CEO because of the lavender mafia, I quit using it. I ended up switching to an old favorite, Opera. I will not ever use Google anything, I value whatever illusion of privacy I have left and chrome data mines hard.
I use Opera now, but I always seem to have some problems when I go to Youtube.
Too many freezes, crashes, and security problems caused by buggy plug-ins.
firefox is the ‘big fag’ of the browser game
just ask Brendan Eich
may they go the way of jcpenny
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