Why 2009 Was When Big Tech Began To Control Web 2.0

It's 2009 and Firefox is being challenged by Google’s new Chrome browser, as Microsoft IE continues its slow decline. Meanwhile, Facebook acquires trendy social software app FriendFeed.

In July 2009, RWW had 2,650,000 page views, of which nearly 1.3 million were unique visitors. Nearly half (49 percent) of visits were from Firefox users, with 25 percent using IE. Safari (12.5 percent) and Chrome (8.5 percent) were the next most popular.

That Firefox dominated our statistics in 2009 indicated that our readers were tech-savvy and likely to be open-source supporters. In the much wider home and office market, Microsoft still had nearly 70 percent web-browser market share with IE; Firefox was second, at just over 20 percent. But Firefox users were our people, and our people were the early adopters who pointed to where the market was heading. It was obvious IE was toast, if you looked at our stats and read our browser posts—which highlighted the innovations in Chrome and Firefox, and the lack thereof in IE.

The real question was would Firefox be the next mainstream browser of choice, or would it be Google’s Chrome (released last September)? The answer to that question was becoming more obvious in 2009.

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