| Kut N Haste Firefox Guide - Market adoption of Mozilla Firefox | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Usage share Web-surfers have adopted Firefox rapidly, despite the dominance of Internet Explorer in the browser market. Internet Explorer has seen a steady decline of its usage share since Firefox's release. According to several sources (as listed in statistics reference), by July 2006, Firefox had around 12% of global usage share. Europe, according to a study released by the firm XiTi on 2006-06-16, generally had higher percentages of Firefox use, with an average of 20%. Download count Cumulative downloads have increased in a near-linear fashion since the time Firefox 1.0 was released in November 2004 until July 2006. In other words, the download rate has remained fairly stable. None of the Mozilla Foundation's previous product releases experienced that kind of growth. Downloads of Firefox 1.x since November 9, 2004
These download counts do not include downloads using software updates and downloads from third-party websites. The download counter is available as an RSS feed, so that the Firefox download can be added on websites to keep track of the number of downloads in near-realtime. It should be noted that a download count is not a user count, as a single download can be installed over many machines, or one person can download the software multiple times. Mozilla Vice President of Products Christopher Beard estimates that Firefox currently has 70 million to 80 million users as of October 2006. Spread Firefox campaigns The rapid adoption of Firefox apparently accelerated in part because of a series of aggressive marketing campaigns since 2004. For example, Blake Ross and Asa Dotzler organized a series of events dubbed "marketing week". On September 14, 2004, a marketing portal dubbed "Spread Firefox" (SFX) debuted along with the Firefox Preview Release, creating a centralized space for the discussion of various marketing techniques. The portal enhanced the "Get Firefox" button program, giving users "referrer points" as an incentive. The site lists the top 250 referrers. From time to time, the SFX team or SFX members launch marketing events organized at the Spread Firefox website. World Firefox Day 2006 The World Firefox Day campaign started on July 15, 2006, which is the anniversary of the founding of the Mozilla Foundation, and ran until September 15, 2006. It involves people registering themselves and a friend on the website for nomination to have their names displayed on the Firefox Friends Wall, a digital wall that will be displayed at the headquarters of the Mozilla Foundation. An e-mail is sent to the nominated friend which provides a hyperlink to download Mozilla Firefox. If the friend accepts to download the program the nomination is accepted. The names will also appear in the source code of the next version of Mozilla Firefox, Firefox 2.0. The offer has ended since September 16, 2006. Currently, the World Firefox Day website contains a placeholder page with instructions how to view the names from Firefox 2.0. The submitted names will be viewable from Firefox 2.0 by: 1. Click the "About Mozilla Firefox" menu item from the Help menu. The "About" dialog appears.
Industry adoption Since the pre-1.0 stages, several well-known websites and web applications, including Gmail, have supported (and in some cases, required) the use of Firefox. Since March 30, 2005, the Google search engine has utilized the link prefetching feature of Firefox for faster searching. Link prefetching involves a standards-compliant optimization technique that utilizes the browser's idle time to download or prefetch documents that the user might visit in the near future. Google, Inc. also recommends Firefox as the browser for its Blogger.com weblog service. On May 18, 2005, eBay announced support for Firefox for its eBay Picture Manager. Search engine companies including Google, Yahoo! and A9.com now also offer Firefox extensions for accessing their services, in addition to their original Internet Explorer add-ons. Google has released four Extensions for Firefox, further affirming the company's interest in Firefox. In December 2005, the Inquirer ran an article claiming that Dell UK would start shipping the Firefox browser pre-installed on their PCs, but neither Dell nor Mozilla have confirmed this. Institutional adoption During the FOSDEM 2005 conference, Tristan Nitot, president of Mozilla Europe, noted that Firefox has had more success in the consumer market than with institutions. He also theorized that pressure from Microsoft caused institutions who had adopted Firefox to remain silent about it. I know companies that are deploying Firefox or Thunderbird, but they aren't talking about it as they don't want to see an increase in their [Microsoft] Office licence price. Some observers, such as Serdar Yegulalp of TechTarget and Jim Rapooza of eWEEK note that Firefox does not provide tools that make institutional deployment easier, such as a client customization kit (which Mozilla has since released), Microsoft Installer (MSI) packages. Furthermore, they note that Firefox does not support some technologies that may be required in an institutional environment, such as ActiveX and Active Directory. While institutions may not be actively deploying Firefox in large numbers, more and more are allowing their employees to install Firefox, according to JupiterResearch. They found that in 2006, 44% of companies with more than 200 employees allowed Firefox on their employees' systems, compared with 26% in 2005. Industry adoption Since the pre-1.0 stages, several well-known websites and web applications, including Gmail, have supported (and in some cases, required) the use of Firefox. Since March 30, 2005, the Google search engine has utilized the link prefetching feature of Firefox for faster searching. Link prefetching involves a standards-compliant optimization technique that utilizes the browser's idle time to download or prefetch documents that the user might visit in the near future. Google, Inc. also recommends Firefox as the browser for its Blogger.com weblog service. On May 18, 2005, eBay announced support for Firefox for its eBay Picture Manager. Search engine companies including Google, Yahoo! and A9.com now also offer Firefox extensions for accessing their services, in addition to their original Internet Explorer add-ons. Google has released four Extensions for Firefox, further affirming the company's interest in Firefox. In December 2005, the Inquirer ran an article claiming that Dell UK would start shipping the Firefox browser pre-installed on their PCs, but neither Dell nor Mozilla have confirmed this. Institutional adoption During the FOSDEM 2005 conference, Tristan Nitot, president of Mozilla Europe, noted that Firefox has had more success in the consumer market than with institutions. He also theorized that pressure from Microsoft caused institutions who had adopted Firefox to remain silent about it. I know companies that are deploying Firefox or Thunderbird, but they aren't talking about it as they don't want to see an increase in their [Microsoft] Office licence price. Some observers, such as Serdar Yegulalp of TechTarget and Jim Rapooza of eWEEK note that Firefox does not provide tools that make institutional deployment easier, such as a client customization kit (which Mozilla has since released), Microsoft Installer (MSI) packages. Furthermore, they note that Firefox does not support some technologies that may be required in an institutional environment, such as ActiveX and Active Directory. While institutions may not be actively deploying Firefox in large numbers, more and more are allowing their employees to install Firefox, according to JupiterResearch. They found that in 2006, 44% of companies with more than 200 employees allowed Firefox on their employees' systems, compared with 26% in 2005. History |
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