Are The Fat Times Over For Firefox?

Once you've made your beachhead with those open to alternatives, what are you left with?

Attacking the market dominated by inertia, definite biases (pro-proprietary, pro-Microsoft, pro-prepackaged-because-we-don't-WANT skilled in-house staff (because they're threatening or because our airhead CEO/CIO/CFO is intimidated by them or carries some invented (unfounded in their own skills) arrogance)), outright stupidity (ignorance is far less an enemy), I would think is a far more daunting task.

I, for one, find it almost impossible to even THINK of communicating with that group!

So, slowing? Yeah, probably inevitable.

Overcoming the barriers thrown up by THIS group may be rather like a religious conservative Republican and an agnostic/atheist liberal Democrat trying to convert each other... possibly even worse... as those two at least have some -chance- of operating on principle. The Democrat side appears to be more favorable to OSS ... viva la revolution!!

GOODNESS GRACIOUS!!!!

Does nobody take statistics classes any more?

As market share increases, growth rate tends to decrease...for a very good reason: There are fewer amenable non-users to recruit to the cause!!!

Look at it this way:

Assume a simple and uniform group of 100 potential users. We won't worry about early adaptors, differing needs, or anything. Let us simply assume that people sit down to do software upgrades when a convenient moment presents itself, and that everybody wants to install Firefox. Now, let us presume that 20% of users get a chance to install software in a marketing period.

Marketing period 1: from 0 -> 20 users. Growth rate: infinite

Marketing period 2:

20->36 users. Growth rate: 80 %

Note: This reflects the fact that there are now only 80 potential converts.

Marketing period 3:

36-> 49. Growth rate: 36%

Note: This reflects the fact that there are now only 64 potential converts.

And so on.

Yep, all that, too... :-)

Only took the classes in Lies, Damned Lies, I must of missed the Statistics class :)

dinotrac: Very good point, but you missed one, which is the room to grow. There is a lot of room still for FF to grow. The way I look at is, imagine you are driving your car and picking up speed, manual of even automatic, you are bound to have short periods between changing gears where your acceleration will drop down a bit to pick up again. The more speed FF obtains, the lower the accelaration. It is only natural. That is exactly what is happening to FF. I anticipate FF acceleration to pick up again to gain more speed. As more Linux desktops are deployed to replace Windows, FF share will grow.

I agree, Abe. The growth is rather whimsical. We have to wait for web developers now, and after they changed a number of sites, Firefox might grow further (next gear).

There's also another strange thing I'd like to point to:

I bookmarked the Firefox counter. (It's here: http://www.infocraft.com/projects/ffcounter/ ) A while ago I calculated how fast FF would grow, but, looking at the download-counter, it seems the download-speed (total number of unique FF downloads, only windows as far as I know) has GROWN (due to some nice video ads by Firefox, as other people say in a newswire posting that was on LXer a while ago). What does this mean? Well, I don't know, since I don't know that much about statistics. But if the growth in downloads has grown and the growth in observed market share declined, a number of FF-users uses the internet less then a while ago, could be a conclusion. Strange it is.

However, statistics shouldn't be confused with facts, they only tell us we can do with numbers whatever we like.

I predict 100M users in october. Curious if that's going to happen.

hkwint : "We have to wait for web developers now"

I think developers are moving to FF faster than we think. I have been watching http://www.Webreference.com for a while now and about a year ago Mozilla/FF was about 7%, today it is 22.48% & IE is 55.68%. This site is mainly visited by developers. I am sure FF share will keep increasing among developers just because of the tools it has available for them and its compliance with the standards. MS pretty soon will have to get better at complying and consequently web pages that used to not open in FF will open fine. This will encourage web surfers to switch for all the other good reason FF is better than IE. So I don't see anything to fear, it will only get better. The pundits analysts can claim all they want, but that will not change the actual facts.

Abe - your interpretation of the stats is way off. Every item that is listed as NS (guessing Netscape) is NOT equivalent to Firefox usage. Hence, whatever the version numbers mean some percentage has to be subtracted to get even close to the real FF usage. While some Netscape version utilize Mozilla code it varied by release. Moreover, even the most recent Netscape was a hybrid of FF and IE functionality.

These numbers are very murky and I would use them only to see a trend not much else.

The only hopeful sign I might pull off this data is that: if the major fraction of visitors are web developers that could be a good sign for standard based (not to be confused with MS "standards") sites appearing more regularly on the web in the future.

Are the fat times over for Internet Explorer? After all, they are the ones with the *declining* market share.

mdl writes: "Are the fat times over for Internet Explorer? After all, they are the ones with the *declining* market share."

Well, mdl, it's just that the Mozilla Foundation can't afford to pay Wag-Ed to send hot 20-somethings to schmooze reporters.

As Ben Franklin once said, say something loud enough, and often enough and it becomes the truth.

Good question!

Coming to think of it: This people say Firefox users may be waiting for IE7, and then migrate to IE7. But, it could also be possible, IE6 users are still waiting for IE7 to be better, and if it turns out to be not that better as MS says, they migrate to Firefox after all, like this is the last chance for MS.

Just what they want you to believe.

...but are any of these clowns noticing that? No, they're announcing that Firefox appears to be skyrocketing at a slightly shallower angle than before.

It's very heartening in its own odd way that they have to scrabble so hard to find something even slightly negative to say about the incendiary vulpine.