Does Firefox Market Share Matter?

John Lilly, Mozilla’s COO, clarifies his stance on Apple’s Safari strategy after his previous missive attracted more attention than expected. (Writing about Steve Jobs is always a great way to pump the ol’ traffic stats.)

He hits on a point that I’ve heard repeated on many occasions by top Mozillians: our goal is not to maxmize market share, but to ensure choice on the web (my paraphrase).

I understand and respect this point of view, but it does have implications for the (brace yourselves) Mozilla platform debate, which in my mind is very much ongoing. If you see Firefox as an old school web browser then John’s thesis is pretty convincing. 20-25% market share is plenty to ensure that people sit up, take notice and (hopefully) fix their broken IE-focused web apps to conform to web standards.

If you see it as a platform, however, a whole other dynamic takes hold. One of the most important considerations for any app developer in choosing a platform is how widely the associated runtime is deployed. In the case of AllPeers, we’re running on top of Firefox, and the more people who have it, the easier our lives are. (Of course we’re also keen to help switch people over to Firefox, as our recent bundle announcement attests.) As we move slowly towards a shared Mozilla runtime, the same is going to apply to all Mozilla-based apps. So perhaps it’s time to revisit Mozilla’s traditionally relaxed stance on market share.

Oh and John, is it me or does your favicon look a lot like the logo of golf fashion god J. Lindeberg?

Bookmark to:

2 Comments »

1. Maybe you should put favicon link to your page’s head section, unlinked favicon is probably only seen in MSIE and Firefox, but for example not in SeaMonkey.

   Code:
   <link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”/favicon.ico” type=”image/x-icon”/>

   Comment by Adam Hauner — 6/18/2007 @ 6:05 pm

2. All that is so true. So you have the platform which isn’t really being given proper attention as a product, and an indifference to getting as much market share as possible.

   Then you look at a company like Adobe. What’s their motivation? Selling authoring tools and IDEs and such. At least it’s a motivation. And they are invested in their platform as a product. And intend for it to be used by application developers. (Then add in the open source bits, like the Tamarin donation, open sourcing Flex 3 frameworks and SDKs, WebKit) And they know how to get software on other people’s machines. (Shared runtimes)

   To me, for application development, this is serious competition. I think it will be interesting determine which platform is better for various types of applications.

   Comment by enefekt — 6/18/2007 @ 10:41 pm

Trackback URL RSS feed for comments on this post.

Leave a comment

Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>