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75% of the people who download Firefox don’t become active users

August 8th, 2007

According to the Mozilla wiki: “In order for Firefox to reach our market share goals, we need to improve our ability to retain users. Currently, approximately 50% of the people who download Firefox actually try it and about 50% of those people continue to use it actively.”

Firefox’s claims to success have been supported by clocking up the number of downloads, encouraged by payments from Google, but it turns out that 75% of the people making those downloads don’t “continue to use it actively.”

Mozilla also has a 12-point plan to increase retention levels, though it’s actually an 11-point plan with one item repeated.

Well, I’m not convinced that 25% is such a bad figure. I remove at least 90% of the programs I download and try, often within seconds. Sturgeon’s Law applies.

But Mozilla does have a real problem, which is that the days of easy pickings are over. Microsoft’s IE7 works well and so far hasn’t had the sort of security problems that afflicted IE6. (In fact, Firefox suffered from more vulnerabilities than IE, in 2006, according to IBM.)

It also has competition from Apple’s Steve Jobs, who has publicly committed to wiping Firefox out. Whether he’s just blowing smoke remains to be seen.

Frankly, the 12-point plan doesn’t seem to offer much of real value (ZDnet has made some comments on the ideas). Nor does spending big bundles of cash on TV advertising. If you have any other ideas, they need them over at the Mozilla wiki.

Every Windows user has benefitted from Firefox — even the ones who didn’t download it — because it forced Microsoft to get off its rear end, improve the product and compete for users.

Netscape folded because its marketing strategy was a shambles, and because it couldn’t keep up with Microsoft’s product development. (Netscape abandoned v5 and gave the code away to Mozilla; Netscape 6 was rubbish.) Now Redmond is back on the road, it would be a terrible shame if Mozilla went the same way.

Guys, you are not going to win by “1. Change the Firefox icon label to closer resemble action of getting to web”. You need to build a better product and come up with a better marketing strategy. Preferably soon.

Via Blogs.guardian.co.uk

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