| Resellers slow to adopt Firefox despite exploding popularity |
Dec. 17, 2004
Firefox's popularity may be spreading like wildfire, but resellers are taking a wait-and-see attitude toward the open-source Web browser, according to an article by Rebecca Rohan at The Channel Insider. Rohan writes . . .
Several recent announcements have highlighted the growing popularity of the open-source, Mozilla-based, multiplatform browser Firefox 1.0. Yet spot calls to resellers found none of them peddling the increasingly popular and free Firefox browser to Windows desktop customers.
The first announcement by WebSideStory Inc., a Web analytics firm that uses Web beacons to track the aggregate online behavior of more than 30 million Internet users on a given day, found that in the "one-month" period from Nov. 5 to Dec. 3, Firefox's online usage share in the United States grew 34 percent, from 3.0 percent to 4.1 percent, compared with growth from 2.7 percent to 3.1 percent for the "month" from Oct. 8 to Nov. 5.
"We're tracking usage, not downloads," said Erik Bratt, director of public communications at WebSideStory." People can download all they want, but if they're not using it, they're not truly adopting the product."
Mozilla.org claims 10 million downloads for Firefox between Nov. 9 and Dec. 11.
On June 4, Bratt noticed a decline of about a percentage point in usage in Internet Explorer for the first time, and Firefox was the main beneficiary. "I didn't know if it was going to be a fad or a trend, but it turned out to have some legs," Bratt said.
"What we've noticed," Bratt continued, "since just before [Mozilla] released their 1.0 version of Firefox on Nov. 9, is that the month of Oct. 8 to Nov. 5, the 34 percent increase in Firefox usage corresponded to the release of the 1.0 version. Before that, they offered the beta version. Maybe there are lingering concerns about security for Internet Explorer, as well as consumers seem to like the Firefox product." |
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