Firefox 2.0 Is Ripping IE to Shreds, Preparing the Way for Firefox 3.0

Firefox 2.0 is ripping Internet Explorer to shreds, preparing the way for Firefox 3.0. In the Enterprise Desktop And Web 2.0/SaaS Platform Trends, 2007, Forrester Research analysts indicate that Firefox has experienced a strong growth on the browser market, but especially when it comes down to business users. The consistent growth of the adoption rate of Firefox at the expense of Internet Explorer has taken the share of the open source browser all the way to 18%. Forrester's study has identified trends coming from no less than 50,000 enterprise users. But more than just end users, Mozilla seems to be converting the corporate environment, traditionally loyal to Internet Explorer. At the end of December 2007, IE had 79% of the browser market, with Mozilla owning 18% and the rest of the browsers sharing some 3%, said the report according to Mary Jo Foley.

"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% 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 - there is still no official MSI package, and riskaverse users have no recourse to paid support services. However, Firefox can no longer be accused of being immature. Many IE-only enterprise solutions have been tweaked to support the browser, and compatibility is considered mandatory for applications these days," reads an excerpt from the Forrester report's summary.

Mozilla is currently on the verge of releasing Firefox 3.0 Beta 5, with the final version of the open source browser planned for June 2008. Microsoft dropped Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 at the beginning of March and plans Beta 2 for this summer. Still, IE8 will be a tad late to the party, and this will mean that Firefox 3.0 could gain momentum against only Internet Explorer 7 and 6.

"Not only has IE 7 - Microsoft's five-year IE revision with tabs and candy - done little to squash Mozilla's uprising, but the vendor is having trouble retiring IE 6. By the end of 2007 - 15 months after IE 7's public release and three months before the IE 8 Beta - only 30% of enterprise IE users had switched to the new browser. Even with Microsoft spoonfeeding users high-priority automatic updates, enterprise apathy is proving extremely difficult to overcome," it is added in the study's summary.