2008 was a pretty awesome year for Web browsers, the Web itself, and for everyone using the Web.
The major factor in all of those, I believe, is the increase in browser competition and the choice and innovation that came out of that. 2008 saw the "performance wars" heat up. It saw the "standards wars" heat up. And it saw new vendors joining the fray. It really was an awesome year for the Web.
So how did the year wrap up? Net Applications has just released their December monthly browser market share report so here's a look at what it says.
First, it looks like Firefox picked up over 1/2 of a point to put us at 21.34%. That's not quite as good as our November growth, but still a solid month for Firefox and probably puts us out of danger of ever dipping under 20% unless something pretty dramatic happens. (I mention this just because there's a lot of month to month wobble and it's nice to not be right on that edge :-)
After three months of availability, Chrome broke out of the sub-1% club, landing at 1.04%. That's a healthy gain of 0.21 points for them over November, and it may get some press attention for being above 1%, but it's worth keeping in context that it was only about 1/3rd of the growth that Firefox had in the same month, so not really too exciting for them. It was also their coming out of beta month so with that "bounce" and having transitioned ~99.9% of their beta users to 1.0, not as good as what they were hoping for, I'm sure.
Safari had its best month of the year in December, growing just over 3/4ths of a point to 7.93% share. Like us, they've consistently had strong months for November and December. As with previous months, that's all on Mac. Safari for Windows is basically dead in the water.
Opera didn't see any change in December, locked in at a measly 0.71% I suppose it's better than slipping lower, but it can't be encouraging.
The big looser, again, is Internet Explorer which dropped more than 1.5 points to land just above 68% share for the month of December. The good news here, for everyone (including MS?) is that while IE7 growth is leveling off, IE6 continues it's swift downward spiral.
Because this will be NetApp's final report of the year, here's my quick 2008 summary based on their numbers.
Firefox is unquestionably the biggest winner in 2008, gaining approximately twice as much as its closest competitor and taking more share from Microsoft than all other browsers combined. Adding more than 4.5 points (a ~25% improvement) to where it started the year, Firefox couldn't be better positioned for 2009 and the upcoming round of releases from all the major vendors.
Safari had a decent year too, adding about 2.3 points to their share of Web browser usage. That's a bit better than 40% growth for them and I'm sure the Apple OS X folks will be pleased. All of that is growth of the Mac OS against Windows, though, and none of it at our expense. (Mac Firefox has actually gained about 3 points against Safari and others on the Mac in 2008.) So what you're seeing here is not so much the effect of browser competition, but the advantage of being bundled with the OS. Safari is rising with Mac OS X, though not quite as fast as Mac OS X -- thanks to Firefox :-).
Chrome obviously had a short year and during that time really only did just so-so. It grew just over 1 full percentage point of the market in only 3 months which isn't bad. But that all came during the "good months" for not-IE browsers, and Chrome was easily outpaced by Firefox in those same three months. Not the greatest browser launch of all time that so many predicted.
Opera was mostly stable in 2008, just like they were in 2007, 2006, 2005, etc. I think they're pretty much dead on the desktop. My guess is they're mostly using it as their "real Web" testing platform so that their engine can continue to be strong on Mobile. Mobile-only browsers just don't get enough usage to be well tested enough to stay current with real Web content but a few million desktop users can get you plenty of testing. It can also be a decent source of revenue for a medium sized company like Opera (which, incidentally, is up to ~600 employees.) But stable or falling and well under 1% market share for year after year can't really be called competitive.
And finally, as with the month of December, the entire year has been bad, just awful, really really bad for Internet Explorer. IE has dropped just about 8 points!! since this time last year. That's twice the amount it lost the year before. They're not just falling, they're falling a lot faster. They've got huge advantages owning the desktop and even that isn't saving them. Consider that they've lost 8 points of the browser market in a year where 300 million new computers shipped with IE as the default browser. That can't be encouraging for them.
As I said in the opening, all of this is good for the Web. We've got increased competition, real movement towards open Web standards, and all kinds of innovation that's benefiting Web developers and end users alike.
And 2009 is going to be even more exciting.
