14 DAY TRIAL // Firefox 3.5 dropped this week and downloads will soon reach 15 million worldwide. Bringing a lot of improvements, enhanced performance, especially for JavaScript, and some big new features, Mozilla's latest browser is looking like a solid release. If you don't take into account the 60-or-so bugs it was launched with that is, though there is a patch already on its way, planned for the second half of the month. But, almost 5 years after it was launched, has Firefox dethroned Internet Explorer? Well, yes and no.
Firefox is still the number two browser, still far behind Internet Explorer and facing increased competition. But its market share is growing, while IE's dropped by 11.4 percent since March, to 54.4 percent if the Statcounter measurements are accurate. That is the combined market share of IE 6, 7 and 8 which, broken down, shows IE 7 with the biggest share, of 30.1 percent, followed by IE 8, which has seen a healthy growth since it was launched in March, taking 15.4 percent of the market. And finally, answering the prayers of web developers around the world, IE 6 has dropped to just 8.8 percent.
But, while Firefox isn't the browser with the biggest market share, the Mozilla Foundation has actually succeed in what it set out to do, make the browsing experience better for everyone. With the increased competition from Firefox, Microsoft had to do something so it got to work and finally launched a new version of its browser, the IE 7, a full five years after IE 6 was introduced. And today we're finally seeing the flawed browser fall into obscurity, though, to be fair, it’s still bigger than Safari, Opera or Google Chrome. And while some might argue that IE 8 is far from perfect and that Microsoft is still holding back development, for the proposed HTML 5 standard for example, it is still a huge improvement over the previous versions.
Will this be enough for Internet Explorer to maintain its dominance though, or has Firefox's day finally come? It's hard to believe that IE, or any browsers for that matter, is going to achieve the sort of numbers it enjoyed a few years ago but with increased competition from Safari and especially Chrome it's also hard to see Firefox becoming the dominant browser and, more likely, we'll have a more homogeneous browser market in the years to come.