It may be a surprise for many of you to learn that between June and July Firefox actually lost market share.
Web traffic monitor NetApplications recorded a 0.64% drop in market share, down to 8.07%. Microsoft's Internet Explorer had 87.2%, up from 86.56% the previous month.
Has Firefox reached a peak? It's hard to tell. The somewhat surprising statistics could simply be a 'glitch', something that will correct itself when stats from subsequent months are presented. However, it has been suggested that recent security concerns in Firefox have lead to a slow in its uptake.
Nobody likes to learn about security threats to any application, but given that one of the main reasons for moving away from Internet Explorer was, as far as many people were concerned, to improve security, you can see how security issues could quickly damage Firefox's reputation. However, if this is the case, Firefox may be a victim of its open source nature. It's hard to keep a vulnerability quiet unless an in-house developer discovers it, in which case a fix can be quietly rolled out in the next general update. If somebody 'in the wild' spots it and flags it, rapid action needs to be taken. Fortunately, this has been the case with Firefox, with updates to the software being released quickly.
But are they updates? Not really, they've whole new releases. You cannot currently patch Firefox, you have to reinstall it. Perhaps this is putting people off? This is soon to be fixed in version 1.5 of the browser.
What is the outlook for Firefox? It's impossible to tell from one set of surprising statistics, although if the results turn into a trend, there's likely to be a few suggestions that the Firefox fad has come to and end.
