Although I do not follow Web browser market share numbers with the rapt attention of, say, the American League East standings (Sox up 7), I was still fairly certain that this blog headline was a crock: “Firefox has almost caught IE in browser share, now 33% of market!“
It’s a crock on both points, all right. Although that didn’t stop the blog item from being rocketed to the front page of Reddit, presumably by some combination of Firefox fanatics, Microsoft haters and others who failed to read any of the Reddit comments pointing to more accurate market statistics. (Cooler heads soon demoted it.)
Crock or no crock, the item did remind me of a Buzzblog post from about a year ago that posed the question: “When does Firefox really threaten IE?”
At that point, April 2006, Firefox was the browser of choice for about 10% of Internet users.
And a year-and-a-half prior to penning that post, November 2004, I wrote a Firefox column under the headline “Tugging at IE’s pant leg”, which started out: “Bill Gates will hold a yard sale to help make ends meet before his company’s Internet Explorer is displaced as the world’s dominant Web browser.”
So here we are in May 2007, Gates hasn’t had that yard sale yet, but Firefox does continue to encroach on IE’s territory. Firefox users represent 15.4% of the market as of last month, according to Net Applications. (Higher in specific regions of the world.) Toss in the other various browser options and IE’s share stands at 78%, still a commanding presence but significantly less impressive than the 93% I noted in that 2004 column.
So when does Firefox really threaten IE? Last time I posed that question my seat-of-the-pants answer was 20%. A number of readers (including poker buddy Paul Gillen) offered the view that Firefox was already there because of its popularity among the technically savvy.
So let’s go at the question from a slightly different angle: What set of circumstances need come to pass for that crock of a blog headline we started this post with to become reality? Give me a timeline.
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