14 DAY TRIAL // The story of Firefox, a browser that came out of nowhere and is now threatening to dethrone the Internet Explorer "tycoon", is a nice one, but it's far from having reached a happy end.
Firefox is getting closer by the minute to the 10% market share, which means that in a short time the browser that put the Internet on fire will become mainstream. So far, Firefox has done a great job and nobody could impute anything to the open source browser, but except that Firefox is now under fire. And not from IE (which is anyway waiting for a wrong move), but from those who are determined to use it for spreading malicious codes.
It's not Internet Explorer Firefox should be afraid of (although Internet Explorer 7.0 has enough resources to deliver the decisive attack which will render the recently born browser into a nice memory), but of its own popularity.
As long as it stayed below the 10% threshold, Firefox has been regarded as a debutant, but once it will exceed it, the browser will be an interesting case study and if you look only at the rate at which the updates have been issued in the last months, we will realize that Firefox's love story is about to come to an end.
As for the competition coming from Internet Explorer 7.0, things are a little bit more complicated. Although everybody is lambasting Internet Explorer, it's still the number 1 browser among the majority of users, and as soon as they will be offered a better version which will accomplish only half of what Firefox does, they won't be interesting in searching for an alternative.
Let's not forget that after all, the market share of a browser is not determined only by a select group of users who knows how to appreciate the security and the functionalities, but also by a large number of user for whom the words security or exploit don't mean much.
In conclusion, Firefox has still many obstacles to overcome before its faith is decided. And all we can do is keep our fingers crossed!