Earlier this week, a blog post on ReadWriteWeb said that Google’s speedy and nimble Chrome browser was eating into the market share of Mozilla’s Firefox browser and other browser competitors, especially amongst the early adopters. Their post was inspired by data from NetMarketShare, a service that tracks the browser market share, and set off a chain reaction of other blog posts that glommed onto the Chrome-versus-Firefox story line.
There is no denying that Chrome has won the recent battle for mindshare amongst the early adopters. There is no denying that Mozilla has problems that go beyond the pending loss of their chief executive, John Lilly to a venture capital firm. And no one can deny that so far Mozilla has blown the opportunity to have an impact on the mobile platforms. And if my sources are correct, then it is plenty evident that Mozilla has been overcome with a sense of ennui, something which prompted wunderkid and Firefox’s co-reinventor Blake Ross to say, “I think the Mozilla Organization has gradually reverted back to its old ways of being too timid, passive and consensus-driven to release breakthrough products quickly.” Ouch!
How bad are things at Mozilla? Not as bad as one would think. In a recent blog post, Mozilla’s Aza Dotzler pointed out that for every Chrome downloader, there are 2.5 folks who download Firefox. “Firefox gained just over 100 million users in the same period that Chrome gained just over 40 million users,” he wrote.
One of my sources shared with me some internal Mozilla data and now I share that with you these metrics to give you a better understanding of how Firefox is doing on a day-to-day basis. While longer term data has been plotted in the accompanying charts, I have carved out the numbers for the most recent two weeks (May 12-to-May 25). Here is what they say about Firefox’s daily active users, where they are from and daily Firefox downloads:
- Firefox’s daily downloads fluctuated between 1.39 million to 1.81 million — averaging out at about 1.5 million downloads a day.
- As expected, majority of the daily downloads are for Firefox 3.6 though a small fraction still download the older versions of the software.
- Firefox saw between 98 million to 132 million daily active “installations.” Installations equals daily active users.
- During the two-week period North America had between 26 million to 33 million daily active “installations” indicating that Firefox is more popular outside of the U.S. and Canada.
- There were between 36 million to 54 million daily active installations from European Union, making it the largest Firefox market.
- Asia saw between 20 million to 25.4 million daily active users.
- On Mac OS X, there are roughly between 6 million to 9.5 daily active “installations.”
When I reached out to Mozilla, a spokesperson responded in an email: “Because our user base of roughly 400 million represents both early adopters and mainstream consumers, we see significant daily variations on week day vs. weekend. We also see this when there are local holidays and seasonal effects, and especially during the summer months when people are on holiday/vacation.”
Given that holiday season has started in many parts of the world, with schools and universities shutting down, we might be seeing a slump in Firefox usage and downloads. Firefox according to NetMarketShare is still showing growth on a month to month basis – from June 2009 (22.43 percent) to April 2010 (24.59 percent), Firefox has increased its marke share by 2.16 percent.
That along with the 100 million+ daily active installations (Mozilla claims it has 400 million users), shows that Firefox is far from having a real moment of crisis. Not only does it have time to course-correct and respond to all its critics, it also has time to regain momentum.
It could do so with the Firefox 3.6.4, which is going to release next week and will have built-in plugin isolation, allowing the browser to overcome the bloat and problems caused by plugins such as Adobe’s Flash (especially on the Mac version of Firefox.)
What is more important: Firefox needs to bring in fresh thinking of the organization and it is doing so by bringing on board Tantek Celik, a champion of open/web standards who in his past life created Internet Explorer for the Mac.
Related content from GigaOM Pro: (sub req’d):
What Does the Future Hold for Browsers?
