Firefox has rapidly gained market share at the expense of Internet Explorer and accounts for over 25% of world market share. How has Firefox grown so quickly? And why is it a serious contender for the Browser crown? To answer these questions, it is useful to look back at the history of web browsers.

The Netscape 90's

In the early days of the internet, the browser of choice was Netscape Navigator. When Bill Gates finally woke up to the reality of the Internet, Microsoft's response was to release Internet Explorer and try to kill off Netscape.

This started the first of what became known as the 'Browser Wars' --- a series of competitive releases with each side attempting to add more features than the other.

But the early versions IE were far inferior to Netscape Navigator and it took the release of IE3 for Internet Explorer to achieve feature-parity. Even then, there was no compelling reason to switch.

In late 1997, Microsoft released IE4 and this was the turning point in the Browser War; Netscape usage began to decline soon after:


While numerous theories have been proposed as to why Microsoft emerged as the victor, for me it was clearly due them having a better product.

Stability, not features

Prior to tabbed browsing, I would typically have around 20--30 browser windows open in a session. My browser state became important to me and there was no way to save the browser's state.

The first Browser War was mainly a war of features, and stability was unfortunately relegated to the sidelines. This meant lots of crashes and a very frustrating experience for users.

The reason I switched to IE after the release of IE4 was due to improved browser stability. Netscape never managed to solve the problem of Navigator's poor reliability. In fact, each new release seemed to be worse than the previous version and in the end, I stopped upgrading to the latest versions.

Long stagnation

Eventually, IE achieved market dominance with a peak market share of over 90% by 2002. With no competitive impetus, browser development stopped. The release of IE6 in 2001, would be the last major release of IE until 2006.

In 2004, a new browser was released and posed a credible threat to IE. It was the browser that is now known as Firefox.

Features, features, features

Firefox is a descendant of Netscape and was originally a cut-down version of the browser component in the Mozilla Suite.

Firefox boast features such as tabbed-browsing and incremental find but its two greatest strengths are that:

1. It is open-source; and
   
2. It can be easily extended with add-ons

Now that both IE and Firefox are stable, features and performance once again become more important for users.

Engage and extend

Firefox has roundly beaten IE on features. The built-in features of Firefox are not what makes it special. What makes Firefox special is the ability to extend and customise it by either directly editing the source code or by installing third-party add-ons.

For example, I replaced the normal tabbed browsing in Firefox with the Tab Mix Plus extension which allows finer grained customisation. I also have extensions to block adverts, disable JavaScript, test for bugs in web pages and do all sorts of other cool things.

By being offered under an Open Source licence, Firefox gives users and developers confidence that it is here to stay and so has managed to grab a huge amount of mind share.

Microsoft normally beat others on features. Firefox has managed to beat Microsoft at its own game by building a more feature-rich and customisable product. It is unlikely that the Firefox team could have done this without fostering a developer community around an open source product.