Firefox growth slows again

The Firefox browser continues to rack up incremental market share gains against Microsoft's Internet Explorer, but security concerns may be taking their toll as the growth rate continues to slip.

Web site measurement and marketing company WebSideStory on Tuesday said that as of April 29, IE fell a percentage point in domestic share to make up 88.9 percent of browser usage, while the Mozilla Foundation's open-source Firefox browser rose just over a point to 6.8 percent.

The single-point gain represents a second consecutive slowdown for Firefox. While the browser gained a half point of market share per month in the period after its test launch in June, and a whole point per month in the period after its 1.0 launch in November, it's now gaining just over one-third of a point per month.

"The pace has slowed down again," said WebSideStory analyst Geoff Johnston. "We started to notice that trend in the last release."

The slackening of Firefox's growth could mean that the browser has converted a substantial proportion of its natural constituency, thought to be early adopters and the technically savvy. It could also show that the browser's widely publicized security flaws have begun to undermine the foundation's argument that people should switch from IE to be safer.

The Mozilla Foundation warned against assigning too much importance to falling growth rates, and said the Firefox security profile still bested the competition's.

"We've had a few security updates, but they've been for potential vulnerabilities, for staying ahead of the curve of potential problems that might come down the road for Firefox users," said Chris Hofmann, Mozilla's director of engineering. "You don't have widespread reports that people are being exploited when they use Firefox. I'm not sure there's any evidence that people are migrating away from Firefox because they feel less secure."

On the contrary, Hofmann said, Mozilla has earned kudos from security-minded users for quickly turning around patches before holes are used for actual exploits.

Whatever its cause, the growth slowdown calls into question the viability of one of Mozilla's stated goals for the year: topping 10 percent market share.

Johnston said that Firefox could not allow its growth rate to fall any further if it expected to achieve that goal.

"It's going to take no erosion and maybe a little bit of an uptick to surpass that by the end of the year," said Johnston, hedging a

[katamari]

Their office.

I go by the Mozilla "Foundation"s' office, particularly their front door, twice a day.

I've only seen their lights on *once* in the past 2 weeks. Makes me wonder what's going on over there... and where'd that bizarre wooden Indian statue-thing that they had in their entryway go? Weird thing to have in an office for geeks, you know...

Weird.

[Willy Wonker]

Message has been deleted.

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