Firefox Did Not Quite Make 10%

Posted on January 12, 2006

It was a great year for the Firefox browser. However, Firefox fell just short of its goal to have 10% of the browser marketshare by the end of 2005 according to an InformationWeek news story.

According to WebSideStory, a San Diego-based Web analytics provider, Mozilla's Firefox closed 2005 with 8.9 percent of the browser market, while Microsoft's Internet Explorer wrapped up the year with 87.6 percent.

Last week, NetApplications said that Firefox owned 9.6 percent of the market, and IE accounted for 85 percent.

"Despite making strong gains in 2005, Firefox did not meet its reported goal of 10 percent market share by year's end," said WebSideStory in a statement. "[But] although Mozilla didn't reach its intended goal, the browser still made significant strides over the last year."

Firefox may have come up short simply because many websites are still not Firefox compatible. A Techworld article says there are still many sites that are Firefox incompatible.
Firefox may have ended 2005 with nearly 10 percent of total browser market share, but new users are in for a nasty shock, according to recent research, which claims one in 10 websites don't allow full access to Firefox users.

The research, from UK site testing firm SciVisum, was based on tests of 100 leading UK consumer websites. The firm found three percent turned away users of browsers other than Microsoft Internet Explorer, while another seven percent used code that could only be rendered in Explorer.

If the popularity of Firefox keeps growing eventually some of the slower-to-convert sites will update their webpages to become Firefox compatible.

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