The browser war took a different route after the arrival of Firefox on the scene five years ago. Back in the 1990s the then king of browsers, Netscape lost its ground to Internet Explorer after a long battle. The Mozilla open source project spearheaded by Netscape did not really click with the users. A federal antitrust case against Microsoft accusing it of implementing monopoly in browser market did not improve the scenario either. However, the open source enthusiasts saw a silver lining in the cloud when Firefox 1.0 made its debut in November2004.
Since then Firefox has built its user base in a slow but steady manner. Now nearly one fourth of web users have Firefox installed on their PCs. Though Microsoft’s IE is still at the numero uno position, it has been struggling to stop users switching to Firefox and rival browsers over the last couple of years. Firefox has gained popularity with web users because of its intuitive interface, speed and ever growing number of plug-ins. The fact that IE became known for its vulnerabilities and a soft target for hackers also helped Firefox to grow its user base among Windows users.
Firefox added some pretty useful features since its inception like tabbed browsing and a download manager and IE was slow to catch up. However, at its 5th birthday Firefox has got more than one rival to deal with in the form of Chrome, Google’s fast and popular browser.
This may seem surprising to some as Google and Mozilla has been on friendly terms since the inception of Firefox. The founders of Google have helped Firefox to become what it is today. However, things took a different turn when Google decided to enter the browser market with its own Chrome. The beta version of Chrome that took the web by storm implemented the core components of Firefox like speed, security and open source. Though the relation between Google and Mozilla has not really soured after the release of Chrome, Mozilla has reduced the release cycle of Firefox noticeably.
The new releases of Firefox have been optimized for speed and user friendliness, things that have made Chrome popular since its birth. Firefox developers are also trying to maximize the browser’s usable area following the minimalist interface of Chrome. Firefox developers do not perceive Chrome as an arch rival; that position belongs to IE. They also count on the fact that Firefox’s market share is growing steadily despite the recent attempts of Microsoft to revamp its ageing IE. Chrome might dent the user base of IE with its plethora of new features but Firefox has enough juice in it to sustain the growth.
