Firefox Continues Gains against IE

kurtz_tan writes "News.com reports that the popularity of alternative Web browser Firefox continues to rise at the expense of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, according to a new study by WestSideStory. The study measured market share by embedding sensors on major web sites such as those of Walt Disney, Best Buy, Sony and Liz Claiborne. WebSideStory retrieves data from 30 million internet users a day passing through its monitored sites. The company then takes a snapshot of two days and compares the growth. Since beginning its measurements last summer, WebSideStory has been cautious to draw any broad conclusions about Firefox's popularity. This time around, the company said many people are not only downloading Firefox, they're sticking with it and using it."

Comments

Re:.88%?

[jusdisgi]

Also, the websites they use probably skew the results as well...

If they want accuracy they should try throwing a few porn sites in, or maybe popular search engines.

Granted, their method isn't perfect...that probably isn't possible. But it's a lot better than your idea. These guys want a picture of normal, actual internet users that they can count. Neither search engines nor porn will provide that.

In the porno case, you just hand everything to IE, as all those hits from the popup windows roll in. Also, the control in those situations is passed mostly from the user to the site, which isn't ideal for these tests either. And search engines are visited by scripts a lot, most of which misidentify themselves as one browser or another. So, either way you're adding a lot to your inaccuracies.

Choosing high-traffic sites from major providers does sound like favoritism (or at least just corporate whoring), but it's really probably about as accurate a picture as we can get of how people browse.