Five Years Ago, Firefox Revived the Browser Market

Firefox is five years old. Five years ago, Microsoft seemed to have an absolute lock on the browser market with Internet Explorer, having long ago crushed Netscape. The browser wars were over. Or so it seemed.
According to Net Applications' Market Share, 64.6 percent of Web users run Internet Explorer, compared to 24 percent running Mozilla's Firefox. Other browsers like Apple's Safari, Google's Chrome, and Opera have another 10 percent of the market. Two years ago, IE controlled almost 80 percent of the browser market and Firefox had only 15 percent.
On a blog celebrating the fifth anniversary of the browser, Mozilla took stock of Firefox's accomplishments. Firefox 1.0 was the forerunner of today's modern browsers -- Safari, Chrome, Opera and Firefox 3.5, Christopher Blizzard writes on the blog.
Modern browsers
"The modern browser is built for the future of web applications -- super-fast JavaScript, modern CSS, HTML 5, support for the various web-apps standards, downloadable font support, offline application support, raw graphics through canvas and WebGL, native video, advanced XHR capabilities mixed with new security tools, and network capabilities," Blizzard said.
Firefox has been a major positive for consumers, Tim Bajarin, principal analyst with Creative Strategies, said in an e-mail. "Creating an open-source competitor allows for more flexibility in browser design and also speeds up the development of new features and functions so that it can evolve faster than a corporate browser like IE," he said.
"Consumers like this pace of innovation and Firefox has used this to help them gain serious market share in the browser wars," he added.
The Next Five Years
There's still much work to be done, Blizzard said, but the technology is in place -- thanks to Firefox -- to advance the web over the next five years. "We're helping to standardize and implement some new CSS capabilities that are being developed in other browsers, we're leading the web toward a modern font system, and giving web authors and users more security tools," he wrote. "Our job is to help keep the web rich and moving forward -- this is a huge part of our public-benefit mission."
A key benefit of Firefox's development over the years has been the web's embrace of standards, which has driven an explosion of latest-generation browsers.
Firefox "set up the current frame for development on the web that we have today," Blizzard said. "It allowed Apple to take KHTML and turn it into Safari, which then allowed Chrome to pick up that work and enter the market and render a standards-based web. Now we don't have just one or two browsers, but many, and a lot of that has to do with the way that early web developers approached development."
An Open-Source Exception
While open-source development has clearly opened up the browser market, open-source projects in other markets haven't made much of an impression.
"Other open-source desktop applications, such as OpenOffice, have failed to ignite much user interest," David Coursey wrote in PC World. "You might think Firefox would have encouraged a wave of open-source development, but from the perspective of a typical business or home user, it has not happened. Firefox is the exception that proves the rule: There is no appetite for big open-source development projects (that aren't operating systems)."
What's on tap for the future of Firefox? Issues around data, privacy and identity will "loom large," Blizzard wrote. Standards-based video solutions will develop and mobile will become massively important.