Firefox reaches 18 percent of corporate desktops

Mozilla Firefox's share of the enterprise desktop market has reached 18 percent, according to a new Forrester report noted by ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley.

This number will seem low to those who have seen higher numbers elsewhere (for example, as high as 30 percent in Europe). This simply reflects the bias of the report toward formal enterprise adoption, a route that Mozilla has explicitly not taken. Basically, Firefox is not an alternate universe into which you will be banished.

Forrester's report states:

Mozilla's share of the browser market rose steadily throughout 2007, only slowing for the quarter directly following the release of Internet Explorer 7 (IE 7) in late 2006. Adoption in the enterprise nearly doubled to 18 percent by the end of 2007, but large-scale, companywide deployments are not yet typical. Mozilla continues to expend little energy on wooing IT managers to formally adopt Firefox....

And yet it's getting them, all the same.

Why?

Foley cites Internet Explorer's shortcomings as a primary driver for Firefox's growth, and there's certainly something to this. But in my experience, Firefox grows because it is simply a better browser. Period. People hear about it via word of mouth. Or people like me install it for our grandmothers and parents to save them from the bother imposed by IE.

Once inside Firefox, life gets better. It is massively expandable and customizable. When I first switched to Firefox (from Safari--I've long disliked IE), I hated its chubby icons. No problem: Someone had already created a theme that looked just like Safari.

Firefox continues continued to outpace IE in terms of innovation and in terms of performance. I was playing around on IE7 last night on my new Windows partition on my Mac. It looks better than it used to, but it still reflects the design decisions (both good and bad) of one particular Redmond-based monopoly. Mozilla's Firefox? It was built by the planet in that planet's disparate image(s).

From my big-company days, I know there are still a range of enterprise applications written specifically for IE. Shame on the slothful developers who can't be bothered to design their applications properly for a heterogenous computing world.

As Forrester reports, however, there is an increasing number of applications that are adding Firefox support, and rightly so. Enterprises should never box themselves into any one provider, no matter how benevolent. Costs fall when choice rises.

If you haven't tried out Firefox lately, I'd encourage you to do so. It really is a markedly better browser.

[Striker77s]

Your reasoning for Firefox being a better browser for the average user isn't backed up by anything except your opinion. Your reasoning for choosing Safari was because you liked their buttons better? I have both FF and IE installed and use them both. I don't think either one is vastly superior over the other. FF does allow more customization but most people don't care what the buttons look like (as long as they are easy to understand what they do) and don't add anything to their browser. Almost all websites are compatible with IE and many websites don't bother to make sure Safari and FF displays correctly or works on their website. So why should the basic user switch to FF when he has to worry about which browser to use at which site. Most users simply want it to work and could care less about customization. For those power users who do like control and want to buy add-ins for their browser there is firefox, but I'm guessing that number is only around 18%.

[Paul_Lockett]

The sentence "For those power users who do like control and want to buy add-ins for their browser there is firefox, but I'm guessing that number is only around 18%," betrays a lack of understanding of Firefox.

I'm not aware of a single add-in being available for people to buy; everyone I've seen is available free and gratis, as you would expect with an open source browser. Also most extensions are not aimed at the power user, but the casual browser - extensions such as the webmail notifier, linkification and the facebook toolbar. The facebook toolbar is now available for IE, but given the harder task of developing on a proprietary platform, it took much longer to become available.

Given the easy customisability and better security, Firefox is for the non-technical user as much as the power user.

[john55440]

Firefox 2 has a clunky old fashioned interface, and memory leak problems. In addition, FF2 isn't any more secure than IE7.

I have both IE7 and FF2 installed on my system, but use/prefer IE7.

[James7777777]

I agree, everyone who is running IE should try out Firefox. Although currently more websites work in IE then Firefox, I've noticed the web is much faster in firefox. As developers user hacks and plugins (SVG, Dean Edwards IE7) to support the missing functionality in IE, websites begin to feel slower in that browser. The chances of encountering an IE only website are getting smaller by the day.

Personally though, I think the biggest reason to switch are the extensions. Use adblock plus for a day and you will never want to touch another browser ever again.

[seo2seo]

I have both, but much prefer FF, and only use IE for one mail account, and watching TV on a channel that spits at FF.

However, I would utterly dispute those findings, I simply do not believe that industry has made such a significant move toward FF. The vast majority of companies use Windows, and IE comes as part of the contract unless they scream, stamp their little feet, and demand otherwise. And many companies won't yet do that.

If you read the small print, I'll bet the survey said 'of those companies that responded' - and, of course, the progressive responders are the progressive FF users. (Either that, or they just surveyed a small, unrepresentative market segment).

The future is FF's, as IE gets slower, bigger, clunkier and less co-operative with other programs (mine even sulks when Outlook is open!). But the present isn't. Be patient!

[twolf2919]

It may be true that most people don't care about customization or the shape of buttons. But they do care about not having their machine hijacked or infected by viruses. The fact of the mater is that Firefox IS superior to IE in that regard as it simply doesn't have the feature (ActiveX) that is the greatest security hole in IE - and which, incidentally, is also the greatest reasons why some web sites don't run in anything other than IE.
Someone suggested that IE7 is *just as secure* as Firefox - that's just hogwash, unless they got rid of ActiveX - which they didn't, since then all those IE-only web sites would stop working too. All that was done in IE7 is to add additional layers of warnings to put the onus on the end user whether they want to run certain types of controls. Never mind that most users won't understand the warnings IE7 is putting up.

[Striker77s]

I agree that ActiveX is targeted by hackers and presents an extra risk. But you are over exaggerating the risks. I have used IE for about 10 years and haven't been infected once through IE. I wander all over the internet but I do admit that I'm not one to visit porn and hacker sites which seem to be a favorite for hackers to attempt to hijack your browser. Almost all major businesses and cooperations have been using IE for over a decade and there is no mass movement to change. If users were constantly being infected by virus through IE then businesses would dump it immediately. They don't care what buttons look like or if it takes you 10 miliseconds longer to get to website. All they care about is money and viruses and hijacking can cause a huge disruption to the money flow. So if IE was causing major IT problems they would dump it instantly. The fact is infections through IE are relatively low (it may be higher than FF, I haven't seen in defniitely stats) and most major infections still occur and propagate through e-mail. I hear all the time about how clunky and slow IE is, from my experience it simply isn't true. But I do admit that I tend to work on nice machines and if you have slow or outdated hardware FF is probably the better choice. I do concede that the installation size is much larger than FF, which is annoying but hardly a major concern when you have broadband for updates.

[FireFox_User]

I pretty much use firefox exclusively and use IE7 only if the website requires. But reading so much about the comparison between firefox and IE, here is what I think the common myths about firefox:

(1) Firefox is more secured than IE.
(2) Changing websites / intranet applications from IE only to Firefox is no brainer and does not cost a dime for the corporation to do so.
(3) Firefox has the world of best developers to develop it.
(4) Firefox is easier to use than IE.
(5) Firefox has way better performance that make IE looks so old, slow, and ugly.
(6) Regular users really care about browser customization and they must / should choose Firefox to do so.

[FireFox_User]

I pretty much use firefox exclusively and use IE7 only if the website requires. But reading so much about the comparison between firefox and IE, here is what I think the common myths about firefox:

(1) Firefox is more secured than IE.
(2) Changing websites / intranet applications from IE only to Firefox is no brainer and does not cost a dime for the corporation to do so.
(3) Firefox has the world of best developers to develop it.
(4) Firefox is easier to use than IE.
(5) Firefox has way better performance that make IE looks so old, slow, and ugly.
(6) Regular users really care about browser customization and they must / should choose Firefox to do so.

[Phil Smith]

Once upon a time there were two GUI browsers: Mosaic and Spyglass. Spyglass was bought by Microsoft, renamed Internet Explorer, and with the 300 pound gorilla's weight, became the dominant browser. Mosaic is the ancestor of everything else (actually of everything, since Spyglass used Mosaic code under license). Spyglass/IE has *always* been the inferior browser. There really isn't any need to document the ways Mosaic/Mozilla is superior, Mosaic/Mozilla has always led the way with Spyglass/IE being the weaker sibling.

One item that really bugs me, though, is Microsoft's refusal to implement alpha transparency in PNG's. (Oddly enough, they did implement it in the last version of IE for Macintosh.) It's a far superior method of implementing transparency, and causes me to have extra code which checks to see if the browser is IE, and if so, swap out the nice PNG's for ugly GIF's. My web sites are always full of stupid kludges I have to implement because things don't work well on IE.

But that's not the point I want to make. As users and consumers, our choices decide what kind of future we will be living in. It's really a decision to go with innovation and development, or to play it safe and stick with the same old same old. We are extremely lucky that Microsoft was unsuccessful in it's attempt to kill off Netscape, that it was able to morph into the open-source Mozilla project. That we have the w3 consortium to impartially implement standards which define the way browsers are supposed to behave. Anyone who thinks Microsoft will ever define and adhere to open standards has never dealt with Microsoft. Long ago I worked on an application which output RTF according to specs published by Microsoft. The one application which couldn't read it? Microsoft Word.

I just hope Firefox can continue its upswing. I urge everyone to use it, mainly for the future. HTML 5.0 is coming soon.