Thursday, 17 November 2011

Chrome to Finally Pull Ahead of Firefox in November


Google Chrome goes number two.
Market share data released by StatCounter indicate that Chrome this month will pass Firefox in market share for the first time.
During the first half of this month, Chrome closely matched Firefox's market share with 25.45 percent versus 25.47 percent. In this period, Chrome gained 0.46 points over the October period, while Firefox lost 0.92 points. IE gained 0.48, most likely because of a recently launched advertising campaign.

Firefox has been caught in a downward spiral for some time now and Mozilla will have to get much more aggressive about addressing this trend. Over the past six months, Firefox lost 13.04 percent of its market share (IE: -7.29 percent; Chrome: +31.46 percent) and Firefox is, for the first time, losing market share faster than IE does (-3.82 points over the past six months versus -3.20 points).

It will be critical for Mozilla to deliver key features to Firefox without hiccups if it wants to reverse the current trend. Among those features are silent updates, which were originally planned to arrive with version 10, but may be delayed until version 11. Also Mozilla needs to integrate Chrome history and bookmark migration features rather sooner than later - right now, it appears that those may not arrive until version 11 or 12.

Given the fact that feature and strategy changes in browsers usually take half a year to show impact on market shares, Mozilla could be in for a rough ride and a turnaround may not not happen until Q2 or Q3 of next year.

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