Steve Jobs put together a slide of his view of the Web Browser market share and what he wants. This is my view of the Web Browser Market share and what *I* want to see. I have Keynote too baby.
Given the current state of the Web browser market — if Mozilla keeps doing what they're doing, Apple keeps doing what they're doing, and Internet Explorer continues to suck, then my wishful projections aren't far off.
It's:
- Internet Explorer at 40%; it'll stay with the highest share because of corp usage, and default distribution
- Firefox at 30%; because of International strength, simplicity and product strength
- Safari at 15%; because of default distribution on Mac OS X
- Others at 15%; variations of Firefox/IE, Opera etc.
What's more realistic is:
- Internet Explorer at 55%
- Firefox at 20%
- Safari at 15%
- Others at 10%
I've been tracking browser market share since 1999. What amazes me about it is the fluctuation over the years. You'd think it would be more stable but it's not. Two more things: 1) before the web was young and so users were being added like crazy. Now it's more of a zero-sum game. 2) With all this talk about browsers, Flash has *all* the users. It amazes me how they did it. mozilla.org should have Adobe and Flash in their sights if keeping the Web open is their top priority. Adobe and Flash scare me.
Needle Movers
The biggest needle movers:
- If Google enters the browser market or continues to ride Mozilla Firefox. I'm hoping the latter. If Google enters the browser market, they're just getting greedy because they already have the primary hooks in Firefox. Google needs to continue to help distribute Firefox, especially to maintain their goodwill with developers and the Web.
- How Mozilla does in Asia, China, Japan, and Korea. Also if they pay for PC distribution or improve on getting Firefox in the Enterprise space.
- Some other browser that we don't know even know about that's better than what's available today.
- Major cheating by either Apple or Microsoft by making certain programs only work in IE or Safari.
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Have to go to the beach now…I'll update this post in a bit.