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Firefox Growth Slowing?

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the reaching-equilibrium dept.

ninja_assault_kitten writes "Silicon.com has an interesting article on the apparently slowing growth of Firefox. To quote the article, 'The slackening of Firefox's growth could mean that the browser has converted a substantial proportion of its natural constituency, thought to be early adopters and the technically savvy. It could also show that the browser's widely publicised security flaws have begun to undermine the foundation's argument that people should switch from IE to be safer.' One thing's for sure, with the release of 1.0.3 and now 1.0.4 we can probably expect to breach the 80 million download mark shortly."

6 of 433 comments (clear)

  1. How many unique downloads? by xquark · · Score: 5, Interesting

    80 million I'm assuming a composite...

    Arash Partow

    --
    Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
  2. Corporate Adoption by chill · · Score: 4, Interesting

    And IBM is encouraging in-house employees to use Firefox.

    There are still several "business" websites such as financial services, B2B and corporate intranets that rely on ActiveX and IE.

    While Firefox's growth may be slowing, it is still growing -- just not as fast. When the IE-only sites start to get more complaints about usability from their customers, then you will start to see a steady stream of corporate support for Firefox.

    -Charles

    --
    Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
    1. Re:Corporate Adoption by chill · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Actually, I manage the network for a group of independent financial planners -- about 200 different offices.

      Many of them have already switched to Firefox and there are only one or two third-party services that are incompatible. These third party services offer 2nd-Level quotes and consolidated investment portfolio management for brokers. That is, hundreds of accounts -- not the stuff for the end user.

      I helped one major company make their site Firefox compatible just by pointing out "it already works if I make the browser lie and say it is IE". Their site is Java and the only holdback was the javascript checking for which version of IE to work around bugs.

      These brokers have tens of millions of $$ under management and when they say 'we want this", the firms DO listen.

      -Charles

      --
      Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
  3. Re:Widely Publicized? by Swamii · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If you look at last week's security advisory, it was published by Secunia, the same company that's published various IE security holes in the past.

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    Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
  4. Exponential Growth... by dolphinling · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Or it could mean that firefox's growth just isn't exponential, 'cause that would be pretty hard to keep up for very long...

    --
    There are 11 types of people in the world: those who can count in binary, and those who can't.
  5. or it could mean that they need to advertise more by Drunken_Jackass · · Score: 3, Interesting

    You know about Firefox. I know about firefox. But Joe User might not know about it/remember it. And we can't tell everyone about it now, can we?

    AFAIK, its growth was pretty much tied to the full-page ad in the NYT. If growth is slowing, they need to pump out some TV commercials, start advertising on google, and keep up the print campaign.

    Non-technical people tend to have a very short attention span on things like this. They just need to be reminded that it's out there.

    --
    There are 01 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and me.