According to NetApplications, Firefox hit 9.6% market share at the end of 2005 gaining nearly a point over the November numbers. This is an amazing feat for the one year old browser against a formidable competitor that has owned the browser market for the past few years.
From my perspective Firefox has a couple of key advantages:
• The Firefox community is more responsive and tends to address vulnerabilities more quickly than the leading commercial browser (see previous blog post on Fidelity).
• Firefox was designed from the ground up with today’s technologies in mind, rather than retrofitting modern technologies onto an older browser infrastructure.
Here is my New Year’s prediction:
Firefox will have 15% of the browser market share by the end of 2006 (secretly, I hope that it will be closer to 20%).