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Why you (probably) won’t be using Firefox a while from now

Mozilla CEO John Lilly on the number of fast, capable browsers in the market:

“The world is a lot different from a year ago, and we have three brand new browsers and there is a lot more competition and as a result the users are getting a lot more technology…”

“… I think it is uncomfortable, because our rivals have 2-3 times the magnitude of people and resources, and they are relentless.”

The state of the browser market pretty much proves that it’s impossible for an open source project to remain a popular front-end application for too long.

A successful open source project will see one of two trends:

- Commercial entities, each with its own USP will pick, modify and integrate portions of the project into their own products. This is what’s happening with Firefox. (Chrome, according to Google, used ” components from Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Firefox”). Firefox as an open source project is likely to thrive, but its best features and technology will probably find their way into more popular commercially-backed browsers [1].

- It will see widespread adoption, but on back-end IT infrastructure instead of the desktop. Linux and *BSD are examples of this. I guess this is because after a point, the marginal cost of polishing the UI is more than what developers are willing to bear, and that end users demand more. Regardless, the core functionality of such applications is on par with/often superior to commercial alternatives, so a combination of this + low price point makes them an attractive choice for back-end deployment [2].

[1] Android was a commercially-backed open source project (based on Linux kernel 2.6) from the beginning, so I guess we’ll treat it like Chrome.

[2] This isn’t a value judgement on the quality of open source products, or the viability of the open source development model itself. The past couple of decades do seem to have proved, though, that end-user open source applications are tough to build and sustain in their original form.


July 6, 2009 ·  Post to Twitter ·  Email this ·  Chrome, Firefox, Google, IE, Insights, Internet, Linux, Microsoft ·  9 Comments


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9 Comments


  1. Dave on July 6th, 2009 6:41 pm

    Only thing is, Firefox has amazing extensions and community support. Don't see IE or Chrome getting anything similar anytime soon.

  2. Kir on July 6th, 2009 7:52 pm

    The strength of firefox is neither it's extensions nor community support. To a web browser in the market (as opposed to in-development), those are fairly irrelevent.

    The market advantage firefox has is that web page publishers actually TEST against it. This puts it far ahead of Safari, Chrome, or Opera. A web page failing to render correctly in Firefox is considered a fatal flaw.

  3. Rahul Gaitonde on July 7th, 2009 12:35 am

    You're right – Firefox's authority among web publishers is important today. I wonder if that's a market advantage, though. If Google/Apple do increase their respective browser market shares, won't that be an incentive for publishers to test against Chrome/Safari than Firefox?

    In that case, the onus of standards compatibility would lie almost entirely on the discipline of the Firefox developer community (instead of the incentive of being the gold standard for compatibility among web publishers).

    More generally, there really isn't a market imperative for Mozilla. In my understanding, the stated goal of the Mozilla Foundation is “promoting openness, innovation and opportunity on the Internet”. If Firefox-based browsers follow those 3 principles and gain share at Firefox's expense, the Foundation won't see them as competitors. Therefore, the concept of a “market advantage” probably shouldn't apply to Firefox.

  4. El Rorro on July 7th, 2009 3:42 am

    You are not completely right. Let me explain. Firefox has a license that obliges people who take code from it to release it as open source (that´s not the case for Webkit). So basically, whoever takes Firefox code and put it in his browser has to release the code, making it an open source project, the way Chrome is. Chrome is open source! Dah!

  5. Rahul Gaitonde on July 7th, 2009 5:03 am

    Browsers aren't likely to win because of technical superiority. Chrome, though open source, has Google's weight behind it when it comes to distribution (just as IE has Microsoft's).

    For instance, Firefox used to be the only browser that Google included with Google Pack. It's added Chrome to that list now (and will likely phase out Firefox). Gmail and Orkut (perhaps other Google properties as well) have a little box that invites a user to try out Gmail/Orkut on Chrome, with a download link.

    If Chrome can include most of Firefox's technology _and_ have Google push its distribution, it's definitely got an advantage of Firefox.

  6. John Leach on July 7th, 2009 7:24 am

    Firefox is already backed by a commercial entity, The Mozilla Corporation. A for-profit company with tens of millions of dollars of revenue.

  7. Rahul Gaitonde on July 7th, 2009 9:00 am

    That's right – over $66 million in 2006 according to the Wikipedia page for Mozilla Corp.

    And that's an interesting point, because 85% of that revenue comes from its tie-up with Google (“assigning [Google] as the browser's default search engine, and for click-throughs on ads placed on the ensuing search results pages.”). While that relationship doesn't _need_ to change, it'll be interesting to see whether Google does change things to push Chrome adoption.

  8. Axel Taferner on July 8th, 2009 2:54 pm

    “The state of the browser market pretty much proves that it’s impossible for an open source project to remain a popular front-end application for too long.”

    I don't think the state of the browser market _today_ proves that at all. You are making a prediction based on comments made by John Lilly and other observations. However as of today, Firefox is still the top dog alternative browser by a long shot, with no signs of letting up.

  9. More Firefox: beating the competition and making money : Rahul Gaitonde on July 9th, 2009 10:03 pm

    [...] Why you (probably) won’t be using Firefox a while from now [...]

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