The second half of 2011 was, it seems, a recovery period for Mozilla’s Firefox team. After a prolonged Firefox 4 development period that caused Mozilla to miss the most critical evolutionary phase of web browsers since the defeat of Netscape, Firefox has been losing market share and there is doubt whether Firefox can rise again. An updated roadmap is the prescription to keep Firefox competitive.
There are good reasons for Firefox enthusiasts to be hopeful for 2012. After a 2011, which more the once raised doubt whether Firefox can be sustained as the strong flag of openness in a cut-throat competition over advertising revenues and platform leverage between Google and Microsoft, Mozilla was able to end the year with news of substantial funding by Google, which should give Mozilla an opportunity to march on its own path and hopefully deviate from Google’s direction in areas that matter to the web and return to a phase in which Firefox was setting and delivering trends that shaped its identity.
2012 has to be the turnaround year for Firefox, supported by a solid roadmap. The foundation has been provided by an apparently flattening market share that has reached the bottom level of Firefox’ user base somewhere between 24 and 25% in StatCounter’s charts. It seems unlikely that Firefox will drop significantly lower at this point. In fact, the February forecast suggests that IE has lost more market share in 6 months than Firefox in the past 12 months, which isn’t entirely good news, but certainly a sign of an improving environment for Mozilla. For February, it appears that Microsoft will be dipping close to 36% share, Mozilla to about 24.5% and Google climb to close to 30%. If the current trend holds up, Chrome will surpass IE market share within 2 weeks for the first time. Keep in mind that IE has held the majority market share among web browsers for close to 15 years.
The Firefox roadmap is not exactly what I would have imagined it to be and it’s easy to criticize the browser in the way that there isn’t enough meat on the bones. As far as the first half of the year is concerned (Firefox 13 will be released on June 5), the user can look forward to Chrome-to-Firefox data migration support, add-on sync, greater add-on compatibility, a new tab page, the new Home Tab app, the complete silent update feature, web apps integration, smooth scrolling, a new download manager, a faster session restore and start-up performance enhancements. It’s a pretty decent lineup of changes, even if some may claim that most of them are carryover delays, some of which were targeted for Firefox 6 and most of them for Firefox 9, at some point in 2011. You can read through the entire list here.
H2 will bring Firefox Share, a feature first mentioned for Firefox 5, as well as Mozilla’s vision of web-wide secure logins and IonMonkey, Mozilla’s new JavaScript engine. Depending on your preference, some features will be more important than others, but it appears that there is one standout feature that is most critical for Firefox. The new Australis interface, which is pitched as a theme refresh, but should be marketed as a changed UI. Designed by Stephen Horlander’s team, this is the first post Alex Faabborg and Alex Limi Firefox interface and, if Mozilla can push through with it, it is much more than a theme refresh. It’s a new surface that departs from the unity look of browsers today and takes the risk of recreating an identity for Firefox. With a focus on apps, this may be the look and feel Firefox have been waiting for, even if design is always a matter of taste.
A new appearance can differentiate Mozilla from its rivals and refresh Mozilla’s perception among browser users. At first sight, this interface cannot arrive soon enough and should even be re-prioritized and not debut in H2, but in H1 together with Firefox web apps integration.
If Mozilla can deliver on the roadmap this year, there is no doubt that it will end 2012 on a much higher note than 2011.
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