Since its initial release in 2004, market adoption of Mozilla Firefox has increased rapidly. Firefox is the second-most popular browser worldwide, after Internet Explorer.

[edit] Usage share

Usage share of web browsers (IE not shown):^[1]

Firefox	Safari	Opera	Netscape	Mozilla
Chrome	Other

Web-surfers have adopted Firefox rapidly, despite the availability of Internet Explorer on almost all Microsoft Windows NT PCs. Internet Explorer has seen a steady decline of its usage share since Firefox's release. As of October 2009^[update], according to NetApplications, Firefox had 24.07% worldwide usage share of web browsers, making it the second most-used browser, after Internet Explorer.^[2] Europe, according to a study released by the firm XiTi in December 2008, generally had higher percentages of Firefox use, with an average of 31.1%.^[3]

[edit] Download count

A graph of Firefox cumulative downloads in millions

A graph of Firefox download rate in thousands per day

Downloads have continued at an increasing rate since Firefox 1.0 was released in November 2004. No other Mozilla Foundation product has experienced such growth.^[4]

These numbers do not include downloads using software updates or from third-party websites. They do not represent a user count, as one download may be installed on many machines, or one person may download the software multiple times. According to Mozilla, Firefox had more than 300 million users as of June 2009^[update].^[18]

[edit] Industry adoption

Since the pre-1.0 stages, several well-known websites and web applications, including Gmail, have supported (and in some cases, required^{[citation needed]}) the use of Firefox. Since March 30, 2005, the Google search engine has utilized the link prefetching feature of Firefox for faster searching. Google, Inc. also recommends Firefox as the browser for its Blogger.com weblog service.^[19] On May 18, 2005, eBay announced support for Firefox for its eBay Picture Manager.^[20] In 2006, Microsoft released a Firefox-compatible Windows Genuine Advantage browser plug-in.^[21]

Search engine companies including Google, Yahoo! and A9.com now also offer Firefox extensions for accessing their services, in addition to their original Internet Explorer add-ons. Google has released four Extensions for Firefox,^[22] further affirming the company's interest in Firefox.

In addition, some software packages, such as the Ubuntu distribution of Linux, are bundled with Firefox.

[edit] Institutional adoption

During the FOSDEM 2005 conference, Tristan Nitot, president of Mozilla Europe, noted that Firefox has had more success in the consumer market than with institutions.^[23] He also theorized that pressure from Microsoft caused institutions who had adopted Firefox to remain silent about it.

Some observers, such as Serdar Yegulalp of TechTarget^[24] and Jim Rapooza of eWEEK^[25] note that Firefox does not provide tools that make institutional deployment easier, such as a client customization kit (which Mozilla has since released^[26]) or Microsoft Installer (MSI) packages. Yegulalp also notes that although Firefox does not natively support ActiveX plugins, which are sometimes used in institutional environments, third party bridges are available.

While institutions may not be actively deploying Firefox in large numbers, more and more are allowing their employees to install Firefox, according to JupiterResearch. They found that in 2006, 44% of companies with more than 200 employees allowed Firefox on their employees' systems, compared with 26% in 2005.^[27]

[edit] References