Coverage on Mozilla’s patch to cover its latest browser version, Firefox 9 has clouded market scrutiny of its lack of success till date. Firefox 9 has only captured 5.6% of the Firefox market more than a week after release. In stark contrast, versions 6 and 8 caught on fire with users; representing 45% and 36% of Firefox traffic within a week, respectively.
The newly released Firefox 9 has only captured 5.6% of the entire Firefox market more than a week after its world-wide release. Coverage on Mozilla’s hotfix, patch 9.0.1 to its latest browser version, Firefox 9 has clouded the lack of 9.0′s success. In stark contrast, versions 6 and 8 saw dramatically different adoption rates; representing 45% and 36% of Firefox traffic within a week, respectively. The Chitika Insights team has found that, as of today Firefox browsers do not update automatically to 9.0.1 until the process is initiated by checking the browser properties. We wonder whether there may be a bug in Mozilla’s famed auto-update process.
This adoption rate study follows the methodology set out in our previous Firefox studies, where we analyze the traffic from users on Mozilla Firefox 9 as a share of users on any Firefox version, with a sample of hundreds of millions of traffic hits from our network. Unfortunately, for Mozilla, this version does not chart the same growth pattern as its predecessors, but the version is still gaining market share each day. While the exact time of the software release is unknown, we saw Firefox 9′s share during the first few hours of Tuesday, December 20. Moreover, as Gabe Donnini reported with Firefox 8, the most rapid adoption occurs in the first 48 hours, and the market is still digesting the software release in the 1st half of that time frame. As a result, we find Firefox 9 remained at 1% of all Firefox traffic, but by the end of the second day post-release, its share doubled.
Nevertheless, the nagging question of the relatively slow adoption rate remains unanswered. The question is pertinent for another reason; many other news outlets have given Firefox 9 great reviews. For example, Lifehacker and Extremetech reported its advantages to include superior Javascript performance and integration with the Mac OS X Lion. In today’s competitive browser market, mistakes could be costly for Mozilla given its’ inferior monetary backing compared to Microsoft, Apple and Google. Rest assured, Chitika Insights will continue to track the success (or failure) of Firefox 9.