InfoWorld is reporting some stats from NetApplications.com stating that Firefox is gaining ground in the browser market.

Market share for Firefox was 8.71% in June, up from 8% in May. Each month the Firefox market share has been rising by a half or whole percentage point, with the majority of growth matched with a loss in IE share.

Analysts are expecting that once Firefox grabs 10% of the market its growth will accelerate significantly, obviously benefiting from mass market recognition. Some analysts, using slightly different models, have already pegged Firefox as having reached and surpassed this 10% marker.

Anyway, it's not been an entirely up week for Firefox. As reported on CNet (thanks to Scoble for the link), the latest 1.0.5 update, which had many security matches, had some code changes that caused some extensions to stop working. A new release is scheduled to fix this. Meanwhile, all non-English versions of 1.0.5 have been halted - to some angst from the public. PR nightmare.

When Asa Dotzler was at Gnomedex, we had a brief chat about the issue of Firefox extensions. In order to build a core product that simplifies the web experience, they have decided to leave many features to other developers in the form of extensions. They are thereby not responsible for those extensions and people are free to add them on or not, customizing their web experience.

However, we can see here that Mozilla is not completely free from managing the extensions. Rather than leaving the fixes to the developers - in essence, asking them to release new versions - Firefox will now be updated to manage this. I think this is a good PR move on their part, as the developer community is important to Mozilla, but their desire to correct the code to work with the extensions has caused flare ups from those countries who never received the 1.0.5 release, and are now forced to wait. It's an interesting trade-off.

It seems this has been the week for reflection on Firefox. ZDNet has four-page interview with Asa Dotzler all about grassroots marketing and the reflection of this in the mainstream press. Though the Firefox movement began as a grassroots campaign, it has grown to gain more than significant mainstream coverage - hundreds of references on most mainstream press websites.

One interesting thing to note is that with the release of IE 7, about 50% of businesses will not be able to upgrade - since IE 7 will not be released for Windows 2000. Asa expects significant corporate growth for Firefox will come from this opportunity.

We're excited about Microsoft launching IE 7 — it will remind a lot of people that if they want better features they have to spend hundreds of dollars upgrading. Even if we stopped supporting Windows 98, a company can support [Firefox on Windows 98] themselves as it is open source. This is one of the advantages of open source — you can avoid the forced update cycle.

As we improve our tools for corporate deployments and people feel they're being left behind on Windows 2000, hopefully we'll see a real domino effect.

The article gives a tidy little overview of recent movements in the Firefox sphere, as well as going over some of the features to appear in 1.1 (including auto install of patches and drag and drop tabs!) - and, I'm sure, a feature or two will drop without our even noticing.

I love watching the progression of the Firefox movement - it says volumes about what people want in their online experience. So, little PR hiccups will not, in the end, stop what has begun.

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