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From the article: ... enjoyed a 65% market share as recently as January 2009. But its share began to steadily slide in the late 2000s, ... The demise of I

From the article: ... enjoyed a 65% market share as recently as January 2009. But its share began to steadily slide in the late 2000s, ... The demise of Internet Explorer coincided with Chrome's rapid rise. Launched in 2008... there is a firefox-shaped hole in this story. Between 2000 and 2009, IE had moments where it was above 90%. The demise coincided with firefox's rapid rise. Chrome was a good browser, but it came a few years later. In fact, IE stopped evolving after winning the browser war against Netscape, with version 6. Presumably, Microsoft wanted to block a future where windows desktops were irrelevant. This allowed firefox to raise from the mozilla-grave and provide a convincingly superior alternative, while Microsoft was asleep at the wheel. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers where e.g. thecounter peaks IE in 2004Q2 with 95% . Other graphs and numbers on that page also point to the period of 2002-2004 as the point where IE started declining.

fomine3 4y ago
For Japan (nikkei writer lives), Firefox was never popular like in EU. People jumped from IE to Chrome. I don't know why, ActiveX (except Flash and Java) wasn't big except some special gov sites so not a blocker for daily usage. Maybe Mozilla did great marketing in EU/US? I saw Google Chrome TV commercial (with a new great song that I love), but never saw for Firefox.
- hyperman1 4y ago
  I never saw any commercial from firefox. Basically there were 2 options: IE and the mozilla suite. The last one was so bloated that almost nobody used it. Then some people decided to cut the fat, and threw everything except the browser away. The result was phoenix, a browser rising from the netscape ashes. It got renamed to firebord and then firefox, after name clashes with existing software. Mozilla took notice, and refocused away from the suite and to firefox. Apart from a serious downsizing, firefox got features like not being infectable by activex, being a bit faster than IE, and the killer feature: Tabs. And that was enough. Every techy saw a better browser, and firefox spread by word of mouth. Every techy who was sick enough of malware hunting installed firefox at friends and family, with the treat that free support would evaporate if IE came back. Meanwhile microsoft loudly proclaimed IE fast enough, malware problems with activeX and toolbars nonexistent, and tabs as too advanced for the average XP user. There were hard battles fought in the enterprise. The average corporate intranet was taped together with activex, and firefox was the heathen that ignored the holy group policies. Besides, microsoft had a very succesfull campaign repurposing enterprise windows admin and dev staff to just say no to open source and laugh it out of the network. Meanwhile, the average corporate underling had a better browser at home for free, and the internet slowly became unusable in IE. In the end, the end users won over their atrofied IT departments, but a lot of gnashing of teeth happened in the process.

fomine3 4y ago

For Japan (nikkei writer lives), Firefox was never popular like in EU. People jumped from IE to Chrome. I don't know why, ActiveX (except Flash and Java) wasn't big except some special gov sites so not a blocker for daily usage. Maybe Mozilla did great marketing in EU/US? I saw Google Chrome TV commercial (with a new great song that I love), but never saw for Firefox.

hyperman1 4y ago
I never saw any commercial from firefox. Basically there were 2 options: IE and the mozilla suite. The last one was so bloated that almost nobody used it. Then some people decided to cut the fat, and threw everything except the browser away. The result was phoenix, a browser rising from the netscape ashes. It got renamed to firebord and then firefox, after name clashes with existing software. Mozilla took notice, and refocused away from the suite and to firefox. Apart from a serious downsizing, firefox got features like not being infectable by activex, being a bit faster than IE, and the killer feature: Tabs. And that was enough. Every techy saw a better browser, and firefox spread by word of mouth. Every techy who was sick enough of malware hunting installed firefox at friends and family, with the treat that free support would evaporate if IE came back. Meanwhile microsoft loudly proclaimed IE fast enough, malware problems with activeX and toolbars nonexistent, and tabs as too advanced for the average XP user. There were hard battles fought in the enterprise. The average corporate intranet was taped together with activex, and firefox was the heathen that ignored the holy group policies. Besides, microsoft had a very succesfull campaign repurposing enterprise windows admin and dev staff to just say no to open source and laugh it out of the network. Meanwhile, the average corporate underling had a better browser at home for free, and the internet slowly became unusable in IE. In the end, the end users won over their atrofied IT departments, but a lot of gnashing of teeth happened in the process.