Riding high on residential

The Mozilla Firefox browser exceeded 20% market share in November 2008 for the first full month since tracking began, and remains the second-most-popular web browser behind Microsoft's Internet Explorer, according to Net Applications, which compiled share for browsers, search engine referrals and operating systems, reports MarketingCharts.

Internet Explorer remains the market leader, with over two-thirds (69.77%) of all usage, while Firefox had 20.78% share and Apple's Safari captured 7.13%. Other browsers, like Chrome, Opera and Netscape had shares less than 1%.

Firefox share jumped about eight tenths of a percent, which Net Applications said is much higher than average, in part because of increased residential use during the month. Firefox has a much larger residential share than corporate share.

In addition to showing steady growth for the past several years, the research cited the following four factors for the increase:

• The US election: Firefox usage share increased significantly in the days surrounding November 4th (especially in some non-US countries such as Japan), then held roughly steady for the month.
• The US Thanksgiving holiday: Firefox share jumped from Wednesday the 26th to the end of the month because of increased residential use.
• Extra weekend days in November: The average 30-day month has 8.57 weekend days, while November had 10. Again, residential use on weekends drove share up.
• Higher unemployment: With an increase in unemployment, a higher than typical percentage of people browsed from home rather than the office.

Moreover, Firefox's share trend points to above 20% share for December and beyond, Net Applications predicted.

"Reaching 20 percent worldwide market share is a significant milestone for Firefox," said Mozilla CEO John Lilly. "It's a huge achievement by the global Mozilla community, one that just a few years ago most would have considered impossible. The open web is more vibrant than ever, and the thousands of Mozilla contributors around the world have played a major role in making it that way."

In August 2008, Firefox parent Mozilla extended an existing contract with Google to 2011. In exchange for "a substantial sum," Google will continue to serve as the default search engine on Firefox.

2006 revenues from the deal ballparked $57 million — 85% of Mozilla's total revenue. It remains unclear how Chrome, a browser Google debuted in September, will affect the future of the liaison. The search giant is likely biding time to gauge whether Chrome becomes a viable rival to Firefox.

About the research: Net Applications collects data from the browsers of site visitors to its exclusive on-demand network of live stats customers. The data is compiled from approximately 160 million visitors per month. The information published is an aggregate of the data from this network of hosted website statistics.