Firefox has better surfing experience than IE, but not good enough for market capitalization.
By admin at 23 May, 2008, 4:02 am
The war for browser’s market capitalization seems never ending. Earlier it was between Microsoft and Netscape and now Microsoft’s IE and Mozilla’s Firefox. Like it or Don’t, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is still the dominant medium for web browsing. Firefox comes second, followed by Apple’s Safari. According to the April 2008 data from w3school:
- Microsoft IE: 54.9%
- Firefox: 39.1%
- Apple safari: 2%
Major advantage of Firefox is its add-ons, free programs that add special functionalities to the browser. Reportedly, Firefox gives better and faster surfing experience than IE. Some of the biggest advantages I found in Firefox are
- Firefox download manager allow you to manage your download file easily.
- Size of the Firefox installation exe (7.1MB) is half the size of IE.
- Page info and page rank information comes handy when you are a webmaster or a blogger.
- Firefox keeps the HTML file formatting
Recent release of Firefox3 comes with various improvements over previous release. Firefox 3 address bar helps users auto-complete the URLs they type in. Sites you visit frequently pop up higher on the list. Bookmarked sites also get special treatment. Therefore, it is lot more user friendly than Microsoft’s IE.
Though Firefox has lot more advantages than IE, Analyst believes that most consumers find IE7 adequate for their needs and are too lazy to change. Since Windows is dominant operating system worldwide and Microsoft ships IE with the operating, many users are reluctant to change to Firefox. They feel incremental value addition from such sifts will not be high enough. Unless Mozilla do tie up with OEMs such as Dell, to ship Firefox with their product, it will be tough for Firefox to beat IEs in terms of market capitalization.
Going to Microsoft’s way, Apple has now begun offering optional download for Safari whenever you receive an update of its QuickTime or iTunes Software on windows. If you don’t want to install the 50MB safari, you need to manually uncheck the option. It seems Apple is forcing us to use Safari by default.
Interestingly, usage of Firefox is more in Europe than in US. Why? May be European countries are more resilient towards Microsoft’s dominance in the Operating Systems. Recently, European Union fined Microsoft heavily in the long fought battle of anti-trust case.
Hi,
Thanks for visiting my site. Regarding this post, I cannot argue with statistics, but at least from my marketing experience, more bloggers and Internet Marketers are changing to Firefox. I can tell that from my own site stats which shows around 70% of visitors use firefox.
thanks Anthony,
its true that firefox getting more acceptance with bloggers. But common users still resilient to change to firefox.
wow, that’s contrary to the situation here. people i know use mainly firefox. there are a few who use k-meleon as well. most of them, including myself, are of the opinion that ie sucks!!! weird that its still more popular than firefox worldwide