Slashdot is reporting that Mozilla Firefox is now used by 13 percent of web users, up from 9 percent in April 2005, and 2 percent in May 2004. That’s impressive, if overdue, progress. Microsoft’s market share has dropped from 94 percent in 2004 to 83 percent today. Opera and Safari have been below 2 percent since 2004.
It’s interesting to note that FireFox has succeeded where commercial browser efforts like Opera largely failed to make a dent in Microsoft’s market share. This, it seems to me, is one of the many reasons to prefer a legal environment hospitable to open source development efforts. Microsoft may have killed Netscape using “monopolistic” tactics (personally, I think incompetence on Netscape’s part was mostly to blame) but such tactics can’t hurt a volunteer-driven effort like Mozilla, which isn’t focused on the bottom line. Having open source projects in the mix ensures there will always be some competition for the market-leading firm no matter what happens in the marketplace.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.