A funny thing to happened to Firefox on the way to vanquishing Internet Explorer: the Mozilla browser's success opened the door for a host of its other competitors.
Even as Internet Explorer's market share has slipped--down a dramatic 8 percentage points to 65.5 percent in about the last year--Firefox programmers face a surprising question: should they be more worried about the programmers in Redmond, Wash., or about those working on Apple's Safari, Google's Chrome, and Opera?
Firefox has gained about 3 percentage points to 22.5 percent in market share, according to Net Applications' statistics since July 2008, and Firefox backer Mozilla doubtless hopes for more gains with the release of Firefox 3.5 planned for Tuesday. But Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome each gained 2 percentage points, to 8.4 percent and 1.8 percent, respectively, indicating a growing appetite for alternatives to Internet Explorer that's not completely met by Firefox. Opera stayed flat at about 0.7 percent.
In short, Firefox isn't the only scrappy underdog in town, and Firefox fans' easy us-versus-them polarization is transforming into a more complicated multilateral equation.
Having other IE challengers helps legitimize Firefox, because the idea of straying from the IE fold appears more legitimate, but the alternatives also collect some of the new users venturing farther afield. For its part, though, Mozilla likes to see the glass as half full.
"One of our biggest challenges is helping people to understand that they have a choice about their Web browser, and how big a difference that choice can make," Firefox director Mike Beltzner said. "Every release is an opportunity for us to bring improvements directly to our growing user base, but also help many users indirectly by putting pressure on Microsoft to improve their product as well."
Version 3.5 has been, relatively speaking, long in the making. It began its life as what was intended to be a quick and modest upgrade to Firefox 3.0, but the version number expanded along with Mozilla's ambitions for the software.
