The double-digit market share that Mozilla Firefox currently enjoys will be a distant memory in three to five years, according to one of the people who created the browser.
Blake Ross, who developed Firefox with Dave Hyatt when he was 19 years old, now says the browser is not being aggressive enough. "I think the Mozilla Organization has gradually reverted back to its old ways of being too timid, passive and consensus-driven to release breakthrough products quickly," Ross said.
According to TechCrunch, Ross made the comments on Quora, a question-and-answer service that tends to attract prominent thinkers and professionals. When someone asked whether Firefox, which now holds roughly a quarter of the Web browser market, will still have double-digit share in three to five years, Ross said, "I'm pretty skeptical."
Outbound Mozilla chief executive John Lilly disagreed, citing new features with the upcoming Firefox 4.0 and the mobile version of the browser, Fennec, coming to Android phones.
Firefox's market share has remained stagnant at just under 25 percent for several months now, according to statistics from NetApplications. The leader, Internet Explorer, loses users on a monthly basis, but mostly at the expense of Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari. It's been said that Firefox may never reach the 25 percent mark.
Why? Probably because in a way, Firefox has become Internet Explorer. It's a powerful browser with a great library of add-ons, but it's slow to start, resource-hungry and burdened with a bulky interface. I can get a bigger window to the Internet in Chrome without sacrificing access to my most-used features. If there are any breakthroughs Firefox needs, it's a new interface and better resource management.
The funny thing is, when I look at analytics for the tech and gaming sites I write for, Firefox goes toe-to-toe with, or even exceeds, Internet Explorer, and Chrome is quickly gaining. The tech-savvy have traditionally favored Firefox, but now they're moving elsewhere.
