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and your assertion is highly questionable due to the high usage of Netscape among non-techies before Firefox even came out

Mozilla+Firefox+Netscape had a market share of less than 3% in May 2004. IE had 95%. The rest was split between Safari, Opera and a number of less used browsers.

I think that if a browser is endorsed by the techies AND brings advantages to the masses, it will succeed.

This was the case with IE succeeding over Netscape Navigator, Firefox succeeding over IE and now Chrome becoming a strong contender to succeed over Firefox in the next couple of years.

Market share may be down to but it ain't over until thecounter sings.

http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2008/January/browser.php

I'm a web dev that's been tracking stats (browser, res, bit depth, etc) for about 6yrs now and I have data since 1999 and I want to point out a common mistake most people make:

Most sites are results are heavily biased compared to the bigger userbase. A place like W3C has an abnormally high level of Firefox and Opera users because the majority of their fanbase are webdevs. Also Wikipedia does cater to younger and more tech savy groups. And if the stats at /. were published, I'd expect to see something like 50% of users are on Firefox.

The best overall stats I've ever found have been at http://thecounter.com/stats/ as their sample size is very large and comes from multiple sites.

As of March 1st, TheCounter says 18% of internet users are running Firefox, which is pretty close to the Wikipedia stats, so they're userbase is expanding to virtually all sufers.

It's not impossible to make a page that works in IE6. Still it's a good thing that you explain up front that you don't want to do that so they can go and find someone else who does. I'm sure there are a lots of people in China, India or Russia who would be quite happy to make a website that works on browser that even now is number 2 in popularity. E.g. see here

http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2009/February/browser.php
1. MSIE 7.x (42%)
2. MSIE 6.x (34%)
3. FireFox (17%)
4. Safari (4%)
5. Opera x.x (1%)

I bet they'll do it for less than you charge too.

Right now, according to MarketShare, IE6 and Firefox 2/3 are roughly tied for market share (about 20% to each). TheCounter says that IE6 has 34% of the market while Firefox has 17%, and even W3Schools says that IE6 still has about 20% of users.

The moral of this story is: lots of people don't upgrade. They don't even run Windows Update. They use the browser they got when they installed XP, and they probably don't even know anything else is out there.

This is why, whenever Microsoft ties an application to the operating system, the market suffers. It becomes really hard to compete in that space. Right now, nobody's making money selling a web browser that competes with the one that comes with Windows. This is the way it's been for more than a decade now. The antitrust action against Microsoft was nothing more than a slap on the wrist; it did nothing to restore competition.

If Microsoft is so interested in bundling high-quality apps with the operating system for the good of its users, then why haven't they bundled Microsoft Word?

> They still own 90% of the desktop

They also owned over 90% of the web browsers in 2003. Now it is less than 80%. http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2008/August/browser.php

> their server market share is growing

By what study?

> charging them head on while screaming is not going to work very well

I think we are doing just fine. It is the Microsoft who is losing here. Why do you think they first ignored us, then tried their FUD campaign and now they want to be our friends? To me it seems that we are doing better and better.

Lets see (16+18+40)/3

24% sounds close.

Firefox @ 16%
Firefox @ 18%
Firefox @ 40%

So which one is right?

Overall:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
By version, and the source of that:http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2007/December/browser.php

IE 6 users are equally likely to move to Firefox as they are to IE7 ...

Reality check:

1. MSIE 6.x (44%)
2. MSIE 7.x (35%)
3. FireFox (14%)
4. Safari (3%)

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the word "equally", but we have 35% vs. 14%. Add the IE6 users, the number becomes 79%.

Should I also remind anyone that IE8 is under progress, including new UI and engine that passes ACID.

Here at some stats for OS usage

http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2007/December/os.php

How would you react if someone said

"I'd be bothered for real if my government wasted taxpayer money pandering to the 5% who can't access a machine using Windows"

Or more to the point

"I'd be bothered for real if my government wasted taxpayer money pandering to the <1% who can't access a machine using Windows or Mac OS"

Isn't there a complication here though? They have to have some sort of DRM because some of the stuff they broadcast is not theirs and they only have rights to broadcast it in the UK. DRM by its very nature can't be opensource, since it relies you send both the encrypted data and the key so a third party and the only protection you have is obfuscation. So they need to support several binaries. From my experience, cost scales linearly with test platforms - if you're doing it properly each release needs to go through a battery of tests, and you need to repeat it on each supported platform. A platform is one box for testing with one install of the OS and one tester. You need a developer familiar with the OS too.

Consider this -

http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2007/September/os. php

Now supporting Windows with one binary is pretty easy.

I'd guess you could support 90% of machines with that binary. It'll work on x64 too. You'd probably test on XP, Win2k and Vista. So three test platforms. But only one developer.

So each Windows "test platform" gives you 30% market share. Actually if the developer knows what he's doing, he'll write code which works on all supported Windows versions and maybe Win9x too, so one platform gives you 90% market share.

Adding a binary for MacOS gives you another 4%. But you need a fat binary for x86 and ppc and you'd probably only support OS X or later. So you need people to test on two more platforms, an x86 Mac and a PPC.

Each Mac "test platform" gives you 2% market share. Maybe a decent MacOS developer can make it more like 4% by writing portable code like in the Windows case.

And then there's Linux. Now it looks like you need a bunch of binaries x86, x64, ppc, sparc, shared lbraries, static linked and all the combinations thereof and all need to be developed, tested and supported. All for a tiny market share. Ok, you could only support x86 and x64 and have shared and static links. But that's still four more platforms to test on for 1% market share between them.

So you can see the why people distribute closed source application for one OS - the costs of supporting more platforms far outweighs the benefit. Or why people don't bother with Win9x (or Vista!) support, or only support Red Hat x86 instead of Linux. All those things save money and don't affect the number of possible users much.

Still kickin' 0% !! Way to go, Linux !!

http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2007/June/os.php

OS Stats
Fri Jun 1 00:01:02 2007 - Sat Jun 30 23:58:00 2007 30.0 Days

1. Windows XP 54432747 (81%)
2. Win 2000 3862599 (5%)
3. Mac 2666623 (4%)
4. Win NT 2511918 (3%)
5. Win 98 1571989 (2%)
6. Unknown 999498 (1%)
7. Linux 344807 (0%)
8. Win 3.x 78191 (0%)
9. WebTV 41986 (0%)
10. Unix 23485 (0%)
11. Win 95 19368 (0%)
12. OS/2 2064 (0%)
13. Windows ME 1773 (0%)
14. Windows Vista 81 (0%)
15. Amiga 52 (0%)

Actually if Microsoft cared about money, they'd leave Linux well alone. <1% market share is not worth the anti trust hassle. Even if they destroyed it, it's not like Linux users would buy windows licenses anyway. They'd probably rather go and serve Theo De Raadt or Steve Jobs or one of the proprietary Unix vendors. Hell it's open source, it's not really possible to kill it. All that would happen is that Microsoft's numerous enemies would use it as an excuse to gang up on them with patent lawsuits, complaints to the government and so on.

As someone already pointed out, there is a per-machine fee charged by Microsoft, mainly due to the way licences are sold in volumes to OEMs (per machine, not per copy).
It would be very interesting to see the implications of forcing Microsoft to move away from this kind of licensing, and present numbers based on the actual Windows copy installations instead of OEM per-machine licensing numbers. While it won't change the market much and the actual number of copies installed, the updated numbers could very well indicate a market share lower than 85% for Windows.
Just my 2c. I might be horribly wrong :)

Well of course Microsoft counts only sold Windows licenses actually leaving their premises (virtually speaking). To verify quickly from an independent source, let's check TheCounter's OS Stats for June 2007. 86% for XP+2000, and 91% if you add NT and 98 in the mix. Sounds as if things match. TheCounter has been fairly reliable metric in for browser usage, that's based on what the browsers report they run on (the huge majority of installed browsers out there don't lie about their OS).

The vast majority of systems with a general purpose CPU are embedded systems. And the vast majority of those use a static linked binary. Which means if they use GPL software they'd have open source all the software in the box. Given that most people don't build systems from scratch - they buy in a closed source OS or other components from a third party, they can't do that.

Mind you, I think most software for this sort of system is either developed in house or bought in from a third party who developed it in house.

And even in the desktop PC market place, GPL software is pretty rare, <1% of the boxes run Linux

http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2007/May/os.php

Apache is doing pretty well against IIS. Mind you even there, IIS is growing faster

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2007/05/01/may_2 007_web_server_survey.html

Some of the Apache numbers are due to open source parking.

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2007/04/04/open_ source_parking_spoofing_headers_to_benefit_apache. html

You'd know all this if you'd ever tried to write a driver for Windows.

I've written several drivers for Windows. Incidentally, Windows isn't completely back compatible for drivers - they don't guarantee an XP driver will work on Vista for example. E.g. Win2k introduced WDM and plug and play to NT kernels which forced most drivers to be completely rewritten. The API for display drivers is very dependent on OS. Vista and later have a kernel mode framework which doesn't work on earlier OSs. NDIS has changed enormously, mostly for performance reasons.

Having said that it's not too hard to make a driver which works on two to three revisions of the OS, and usually with one binary. Probably you could do a driver which does Win2k, XP and Vista for example spending a couple of weeks coding and testing when the betas come out or bugs get reported, and that's 90% of the OS market. I.e. a few man months of effort over five years gives you a driver which supports the vast majority of computer users. Most companies only care about the last two revisions of the OS anyway.

But this is completely different from Linux where the interfaces inside the kernel change between minor kernel revisions without changing performance at all, and the kernel maintainers go out of their way to make it impossible to use binary drivers. So you spend endless effort supporting a platform with 0% of the market.

The cost/benefit ratio is enormously worse for Linux and even if you do it a people will just call you a leech because you didn't release the source code. Given that there's no commercial reason to do it, why bother?

You'd know all this if you'd ever tried to write a driver for Windows.

I've written several drivers for Windows. Incidentally, Windows isn't completely back compatible for drivers - they don't guarantee an XP driver will work on Vista for example. E.g. Win2k introduced WDM and plug and play to NT kernels which forced most drivers to be completely rewritten. The API for display drivers is very dependent on OS. Vista and later have a kernel mode framework which doesn't work on earlier OSs. NDIS has changed enormously, mostly for performance reasons.

Having said that it's not too hard to make a driver which works on two to three revisions of the OS, and usually with one binary. Probably you could do a driver which does Win2k, XP and Vista for example spending a couple of weeks coding and testing when the betas come out or bugs get reported, and that's 90% of the OS market. I.e. a few man months of effort over five years gives you a driver which supports the vast majority of computer users. Most companies only care about the last two revisions of the OS anyway.

But this is completely different from Linux where the interfaces inside the kernel change between minor kernel revisions without changing performance at all, and the kernel maintainers go out of their way to make it impossible to use binary drivers. So you spend endless effort supporting a platform with 0% of the market.

The cost/benefit ratio is enormously worse for Linux and even if you do it a people will just call you a leech because you didn't release the source code. Given that there's no commercial reason to do it, why bother?

Interesting, given that Firefox has a 12% market share that 15% of the people that clicked use Firefox.

Guess Firefox users aren't smarter than IE users after all.

Actually they released it for Linux on x86, which is not the same thing

Linux has tiny market share, and the vast majority of that is x86. They probably need to distribute a load of binaries to get it to work on all x86 distributions. Why should they spend time on Linux/Sparc support which is a minority of a minority?

but its got a cross-section of info on browser usage and related

http://www.thecounter.com/stats/

Firefox is actually only 11% of Internet browsers. 1. MSIE 6.x 55860506 (63%) 2. MSIE 7.x 17991613 (20%) 3. FireFox 9759473 (11%) (source: http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2007/January/brows er.php )

TheCounter gets a very good sample of the Internet userbase, so instead of arguing like retarded kids what "X downloads for IE and Y downloads for Firefox means" we can see what people USE:

http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2007/January/brows er.php

19% for IE7, 11% for Firefox. End of story.

"But IE is preinstalled, but Automatic Updates, but, but."

Yea, we know. And? Firefox doesn't need skewed stats, nor it needs lame excuses. All of you, grow up :P

Though IE 3 was bundled, it was of such bad quality that the vast majority of people (70%+ IIRC) still used Netscape 3/4. Only when IE4 came out did they really start to make a dent (and overtake) netscape's userbase. There are lots of historical statistics out there to see this which are quite interesting.

Looking at the link you posted, the data shown is for October 2005, despite the URL. The data for September 2006 (http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2006/September/br owser.php) looks much better.

I hate to sound like a hater, but I couldn't find their survey methodology anywhere. The site I know and whose methodology I know (I didn't say trust) doesn't paint quite as rosy of a picture.

That said, Internet Explorer remains the most popular target for attacks, with 69 percent of all browser attacks targeted specifically at that browser alone. 20 percent of the attacks monitored during the period in question were targeted at Firefox.

So Firefox is still less targeted than IE

That's some surprise, let's see the stats:

http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2006/September/bro wser.php

1. MSIE 6.x 19259574 (81%)
2. FireFox 2418997 (10%)
3. Safari 551590 (2%)
4. MSIE 5.x 416434 (2%)
5. MSIE 7.x 369996 (2%)
6. Unknown 260811 (1%)
7. Opera x.x 156979 (1%)
8. Netscape comp. 94551 (0%)
9. Netscape 7.x 83822 (0%)

Oh wow that's some shock eh? 60% of the attacks go to the browser with over 80% penetration! That's against the logic.

Especially now that firefox is so popular. Firefox makes up 10% of users on the general Internet (as counter by thecounter.com), with IE at 85%. My own tech related site has 76.4% of users using firefox, with just 10.1% on IE, and my other more casual site has 23.1% firefox and 64% IE (the rest being safari, opera, konq, etc.)

Well, this is one firm's results and we all know how sometimes findings can be biased. If you want the full report from onestat, it is here with all browsers covered.

Interestingly, Adtech found similar results (~12% in Europe) while The Counter put Firefox at more around ~9-10% for those months. Net Applications placed Firefox at around 10% also. Of course, Wikipiedia has a decent article on this with combined data at the bottom.

I guess 13% seems like kind of a stretch and 10% seems a bit more realistic. I don't know what makes any one source more reliable than the other though as none of them really talk about their strategy for attaining these statistics.

The big question shouldn't be "where is Firefox's percentage" but instead "how do we make Firefox more appealing to non-technical users?" Because it's clear that the technically savvy people have adopted Firefox but you'll never make it past 15% of the population with that attitude. I hate to say it, but introducing some functionality that Internet Explorer doesn't have might be the only way to accomplish that. And when you do that, you lose the stability and security that made it so popular in the first place. Solution? Perhaps a MySpace plug-in in light of recent news? :)

I usually check the counter.com to get a better idea of what people are using. They recorded 134 billion units (hits?) last month.

thecounter.com reports about 5% of users still use Windows 98. That percentage will be much lower by the time Firefox 2.x stops getting security updates.

There are lots of people in the world that are still using Windows 95/98/Me. More than Mac, Linux and UNIX combined. Many have older machines that don't support Windows 2000. Most have no idea how to upgrade an operating system. Some only get a new operating system when they buy a new PC. Many can't afford either a new PC or a new OS. None have a clue what Linux is or how to use it.

But, many of these people can, with a little help from a webpage or a techie friend, install a new browser. One that can protect them from online nasties. One that doesn't let people install random bits of code. One that lets them explore new areas online. This is far easier than an OS upgrade. Or a new PC. And it's free.

Firefox officially dropped Windows 95 support quite a while back, but it does still run fine on Windows 95. I keep instructions on how to Run Firefox on Windows 95 on my website for just this reason. It gets a couple thousand page views a month. And I still get emails from people thanking me for compiling it.

Windows 98, on the other hand, has been officially supported this entire time. And lots of people are running it. While we may not have a solid source for stats (and, no, W3 Schools is not a solid source for stats... it's geek-centric and not reflective of the overall web), something like TheCounter.com provides some global OS stats that are a bit more indicative of the net at large... at least in terms of those visiting smaller sites.

So, basically, dropping Windows 9x support would be a disservice to lots of folks around the world. Now, if Firefox 2.0 is going to keep support for it AND have security patches issues for quite a while after FF3 is released, that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. But having an actively-maintained, secure browser for these older Windows users is important.

"There is no "lack of Linux adoption"; at this point, Linux is the most common OS after Windows, with OS X trailing a distant third on servers and a closer third on desktops. Linux supports far more hardware than OS X, and far more hardware out of the box than Windows."

Really? According to these stat trackers, OSX's share is an order of magnitude larger than that of Linux. OSX is approximately 3% to 4%, and Linux is 1/10th of that.
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid= 2
http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2006/May/os.php

Last time I looked, there was a Flash plugin for Linux. Also, companys wouldn't buy a Flash license just for a single custom container, they had some graphics artist made it for them, same with the underlying PHP and MySQL stuff. The container alone is useless. At least it's reusable.

The accessibility can be improved significantly, too, since Flash already offers a lot of stuff for screen reader compatibility. One could, for example, implement a button that speaks out the letters with ease - these things are what Flash was made for.

Given the readership of Slashdot, how does it handle users who aren't on operating systems published by Microsoft or Apple?

Given the current web stats, 97% of all web users are using IE5/6 or Firefox. Konqueror accounts for roughly 0%. I have to admit that I'm not targetting the Slashdot crowd as my audience but rather people in Germany and Austria that might want to see my work. Taking this into account, I'm also locking out pretty much everyone who can't speak German or who is to lazy to use a web translation service. I'm such a crook. :-)

Anyway, I still think that Flash is a good way of blocking bots. It's making good use of today's technology and we all should be thinking forwards. Nevertheless, we should not forget the past - but should not stick to it, either.

Unfortunately, a lot of folks are still stuck on 800x600. I found some stats a month or two ago when I was reworking a website and wanted to know what was safe to target. According to that page, about 16% of people are still on 800x600 -- I have no idea how they gather the data or how accurate it is. For a website that is aimed at non-technical users, it's probably too early to ignore 800x600 usability.

Simply stretching the article content area isn't necessarily that great either, IMHO, the relatively short articles that are common on news sites don't read that well when they are very wide and only a few lines long.... and there aren't any good solutions (other than Javascript or I guess Flash) for doing newspaper like columns.

ok, here's the first one I found http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2006/March/browser .php

Before anyone jumps down my throat, hear me out:

Firefox has failed to achieve any significant growth in months and months. They have stabilised at a (minor) 8% browser market share.

December November October September August July

Now, they've reached 8% which is commendable, but look at the effort expended in 2005 to push it further:
- Version 1.5 was released with 'much' fanfare, and eager anticipation
- Google started pimping Firefox and paying people to install it
- Many publications recommended Firefox
- The media made Firefox the new 'darling of the internet'
- Firefox was ranked very highly on just about every "must have" software list

All of that effort for minimal growth = failure.

Before anyone jumps down my throat, hear me out:

Firefox has failed to achieve any significant growth in months and months. They have stabilised at a (minor) 8% browser market share.

December November October September August July

Now, they've reached 8% which is commendable, but look at the effort expended in 2005 to push it further:
- Version 1.5 was released with 'much' fanfare, and eager anticipation
- Google started pimping Firefox and paying people to install it
- Many publications recommended Firefox
- The media made Firefox the new 'darling of the internet'
- Firefox was ranked very highly on just about every "must have" software list

All of that effort for minimal growth = failure.

Before anyone jumps down my throat, hear me out:

Firefox has failed to achieve any significant growth in months and months. They have stabilised at a (minor) 8% browser market share.

December November October September August July

Now, they've reached 8% which is commendable, but look at the effort expended in 2005 to push it further:
- Version 1.5 was released with 'much' fanfare, and eager anticipation
- Google started pimping Firefox and paying people to install it
- Many publications recommended Firefox
- The media made Firefox the new 'darling of the internet'
- Firefox was ranked very highly on just about every "must have" software list

All of that effort for minimal growth = failure.

Before anyone jumps down my throat, hear me out:

Firefox has failed to achieve any significant growth in months and months. They have stabilised at a (minor) 8% browser market share.

December November October September August July

Now, they've reached 8% which is commendable, but look at the effort expended in 2005 to push it further:
- Version 1.5 was released with 'much' fanfare, and eager anticipation
- Google started pimping Firefox and paying people to install it
- Many publications recommended Firefox
- The media made Firefox the new 'darling of the internet'
- Firefox was ranked very highly on just about every "must have" software list

All of that effort for minimal growth = failure.

Before anyone jumps down my throat, hear me out:

Firefox has failed to achieve any significant growth in months and months. They have stabilised at a (minor) 8% browser market share.

December November October September August July

Now, they've reached 8% which is commendable, but look at the effort expended in 2005 to push it further:
- Version 1.5 was released with 'much' fanfare, and eager anticipation
- Google started pimping Firefox and paying people to install it
- Many publications recommended Firefox
- The media made Firefox the new 'darling of the internet'
- Firefox was ranked very highly on just about every "must have" software list

All of that effort for minimal growth = failure.

Before anyone jumps down my throat, hear me out:

Firefox has failed to achieve any significant growth in months and months. They have stabilised at a (minor) 8% browser market share.

December November October September August July

Now, they've reached 8% which is commendable, but look at the effort expended in 2005 to push it further:
- Version 1.5 was released with 'much' fanfare, and eager anticipation
- Google started pimping Firefox and paying people to install it
- Many publications recommended Firefox
- The media made Firefox the new 'darling of the internet'
- Firefox was ranked very highly on just about every "must have" software list

All of that effort for minimal growth = failure.

The following URL has some information from a counter service that seems to have aggregated their data. http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2005/September/jav as.php. I admit, this data is skewed because the service is probably not tracking users by IP (which is flawed anyway). However, if they're getting that many people with JS disabled and they have a pretty small slice of the pie, then it's obvious there are plenty more. The percentage is probably pretty accurate in either case.

If you're not using AJAX in some sort of application, chances are pretty good you're using it the wrong way anyway. It looks like we're probably going to continue disagreeing, which is fine by me, but I believe in moving past 1997 with "best viewed with so-and-so browser" or a page telling me to enable something I otherwise wouldn't have to. If that's an acceptable trade-off to you, fine. I prefer to keep it behind the scenes so it works for the user, javascript or not.

I just think it's funny that this story has been posted for over 10 minutes with no comments. That's about the level of excitement that Netscrape seems to elicit.

http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2005/September/bro wser.php

Browser Stats
Thu Sep 1 00:03:01 2005 - Fri Sep 30 23:58:40 2005 30.0 Days

1. MSIE 6.x 62223734 (83%)
2. FireFox 5806423 (8%)
3. MSIE 5.x 3170911 (4%)
4. Safari 1311540 (2%)
5. Unknown 825628 (1%)
6. Opera x.x 493514 (1%)
7. Netscape 7.x 470219 (1%)
8. Netscape comp. 336956 (0%)
9. MSIE 4.x 69689 (0%)
10. Netscape 4.x 53738 (0%)
11. Konqueror 53638 (0%)
12. Netscape 6.x 14293 (0%)
13. Netscape 5.x 8381 (0%)
14. Netscape 3.x 1977 (0%)
15. MSIE 3.x 1968 (0%)
16. Netscape 2.x 193 (0%)
17. Netscape 1.x 33 (0%) - wtf?

But if you are writing a website that has to support hundreds of thousands of users and your customer base ranges from young nerds with the latest Firefox to late-middle aged

And Google doesn't qualify for that market... how, exactly?

This is why I responded in the negative to the statement that AJAX is OK for 90% of users. It isn't. Really.

While browser stats are a bit of voodoo science, TheCounter.com publishes theirs (and their counters are used on a hell of a lot of sites, so it should be a pretty good representative sample).

http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2005/July/browser. php

From that, AJAX is supported by 90-95% of their visitors. If you have stats that say otherwise, by all means present them.

Actually, it probably is a blip. TheCounter.com for June and July.

They show a 2-point increase in share for FF, passing IE 5.x for the first time, while IE6 continues its very slow decline.

Web site stats services are (probably) indicative of broad trends in the overall web audience, but little more. All we can tell from this is that Mozilla-based browsers are probably close to 10% of the 'general' audience and growing slowly, IE 5 is probably less than that and shrinking somewhat, and IE 6 usage is roughly static.

W3Schools is (if anything) a worse indicator of general-audience share than the stats services since it is a smaller sample and is heavily skewed towards the tech-savvy.

Actually, it probably is a blip. TheCounter.com for June and July.

They show a 2-point increase in share for FF, passing IE 5.x for the first time, while IE6 continues its very slow decline.

Web site stats services are (probably) indicative of broad trends in the overall web audience, but little more. All we can tell from this is that Mozilla-based browsers are probably close to 10% of the 'general' audience and growing slowly, IE 5 is probably less than that and shrinking somewhat, and IE 6 usage is roughly static.

W3Schools is (if anything) a worse indicator of general-audience share than the stats services since it is a smaller sample and is heavily skewed towards the tech-savvy.

Actually, it probably is a blip. TheCounter.com for June and July.

They show a 2-point increase in share for FF, passing IE 5.x for the first time, while IE6 continues its very slow decline.

Web site stats services are (probably) indicative of broad trends in the overall web audience, but little more. All we can tell from this is that Mozilla-based browsers are probably close to 10% of the 'general' audience and growing slowly, IE 5 is probably less than that and shrinking somewhat, and IE 6 usage is roughly static.

W3Schools is (if anything) a worse indicator of general-audience share than the stats services since it is a smaller sample and is heavily skewed towards the tech-savvy.

This is just plain FUD, or some kind of commercial service provider has found a cheap and easy way too get a lot of publicity. Not only is the number so low that it is within the error margin of their results, furthermore, there are other sources which even say that Firefox' market share has risen 2% in the same period.

See also http://www.webstandards.org/buzz/archive/2005_08.h tml#a000545

Nothing to see here people, move along!