Several years ago, Mozilla was a real up-and-comer — its Firefox browser was the first serious challenger to Internet Explorer in a long time, and the company’s identity with open source enhanced its public perception as a worthy upstart.
Of late, however, Mozilla has had a tough time. The recent news that Google Chrome has — by at least one measurement — done what Firefox could not and unseated IE at the top of the browser market underlines the disastrous effect that the search giant’s late entry has had on Mozilla’s flagship product.
“Open source is less of a novelty,” says 451 Research senior analyst Jay Lyman. He also notes that IE itself has become better, meaning that Firefox had been forced to confront both formidable open source and proprietary rivals.