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Firefox Achieves 10% Global Market Share
sebFlyte writes "ZDNet is reporting that according to OneStat's latest figures, Firefox has passed the 10 percent market share mark. At 11.5 percent, it's still got a long way to go to reach Internet Explorer's 85.5 percent, but it's heading in the right direction. The report also mentions some odd geographical variation: Firefox's market share is almost three times higher in the US than UK, for example." From the article: "...other companies have noticed a decline in Firefox over recent months. Last month, Web applications provider NetApplications reported that the open source browser's share of the market dropped by 0.7 percentage points from August to September. Although this wasn't the first time that Firefox' share has dropped, RedMonk analyst James Governor said he believes the overall trend for Firefox is upwards."
Don't the "makers" of Firefox need cash?
If NPR has pledge drives, shouldn't the Open Source movement?
Just asking.
Help end the use of Sigs. Tomorrow
I think an important bit of data would be to have been told in the synopsis whether FF's growth comes at the expense of IE, or the other smaller browsers (Opera, etc). If it's simply killing off the weaker browsers, then the news really isn't that good, but if it's really taking share away from IE, then that really is important.
And Apple's Safari, supposedly, just hit roughly 3%. Are these percentages
better indicators of OS market share than actual purchase levels which don't
take into account pre-existing machines already in use?
Too many pages require IE for Firefox to be 100% usefull (although thankfully thats declining).
A guy in my company was chastised for having Firefox on his computer. He tried to explain he was *helping* but they made him remove it and gave him an earful. Later, I explained all of the features and benefits... they still didn't want it on any company PC's and have no clue as to what it even is. Pretty sad.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
My website doesn't render properly with IE, and I get quite a few visits from various tech sites. Firefox's market share for my site is therefore around the 20-25% mark.
I'd be interested to see how the content and target audience affects the browser distribution at various websites.
P.S. Please don't visit my site. It's rather dull, and I'd prefer not to break it.
Argh.
...how much can we trust those figures? Not a lot I would say. In particular I find the 3* as much FireFox usage in the US compared to the UK disturbing. I would expect the two nations to have roughly the same uptake rate since they are braodly similar. I would also expect other European nations to have a slightly high uptake rate (as has been shown in other result). Perhaps the figure is absolute rather than per 1000 people or maybe there is some error in their recording which causes people browsing from unknown countries to get lumped in with America. Either way without an explanation it casts doubt, in my eye, on the validity of the results.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
The first one pissed me off because the .de and .com versions don't seem to have problems. The second one was problematic because my wife wanted to order something and didn't understand why the website was broken (Firefox is mandatory at my home). She blamed the website though, but I had to show her Internet Explorer so she could order the stuff she needed.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Personally I want to see Firefox at a stable 33% with two strong competitors each holding another third of the market. The last thing we need is another phase of single browser dominance, even if it's an open source one.
If I were to guess I would say that people who use Firefox spend a whole lot more free time on the web that people that suffer with IE.
This figure does not take in to account browser choice. I would also surmise that most people who use a web browser at work are forced to click the big blue "E".
At my computer labs at school we do have a choice between IE or Firefox. The IE icon is in it's default desktop location underneath My Computer and My documents. I imagine this is clicked out of habit rather than preference. The Firefox icon is on the bottom of the desktop. It will take years of habit changing before Firefox is the preferred browser for a majority of users.
...of course, that's on a rather technical web site, RubyForge. Numbers are here.
The Army reading list
4. Netscape = 0.26 %
.77% below .26%. Talk about making the number look like you want huh?
5. Opera = 0.77 %
I don't think I would trust statistics from someone that puts
The only reason I can't use Firefox 100% of the time is Yahoo! Stattracker. I know I am a fantasy football nerd, but this app WILL NOT run under Firefox.
I agree with the parent; if more sites (especially the larger ones) offered proper compliance, it would be much easier for people to give up IE entirely.
I think that part of the problem in getting web developers to support firefox in addition to IE is that IE exists in addition to firefox on 90% of these machines. The logic is probably something like, "Why should we bother re-writing all our code when they can just fire up IE?"
An especially annoying aspect is that my company talks a lot about offering non-Microsoft solutions, but many of our internal applications are locked to IE. It's getting better, and Firefox has the official status of a "supported" browser, but IE is still an effective drag.
And don't get me started about MS Office. That's a love-hate relationship and a half.
Moving onto dreams, I'd really like to be able to banish Microsoft from my life. The two major alternatives seem to be Apple or Linux, but I haven't made any move yet...
Getting further off topic, but for me to move away from Windows, I think the new non-Windows operating system should be pre-installed by the manufacturer with high assurance of software equivalents for all of my primary applications *AND* the ability to import my old data, which has mostly been trapped in Microsoft formats. I've done enough of cross-booting to say that cross-booting is not convenient enough...
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
People stop you to ask about it, or give you a knowing nod. It's like being part of a special club.
I have to disagree. This is excellent news for my site...
You should our website. Evertime you place your mouse cursor over some text the entire pages starts jumping around. It's a horrible experience and can really disorient the viewer. The last time I recommended our web master make our website Firefox friendly, I was given the reply of "Firefox is only 2% of the market share". Hmm, good thing I saved the email because now I can reply with the current stats. Plus with a little management on my side, maybe it will happen this time. Thanks Slashdot and ZDNET!
Banks should encourage more and more people to go paper less and use online banking from what ever device the user prefers.. it saves them paper, time and money.
I have used quite a lot banks' online banking without any problems in firefox, on rare occasion I have to set the user agent to IE , but never actually have to use IE.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
Is Opera UA still stuck on IE by default ?
Would be nice to be able to monitor Opera market share, especialy since it got Free (as in Beer)...
Well, www.ev6.net is one such site.. It renders perfectly in every other browser, including ie5 for mac.. Any version of IE on windows screws it up (tho i didn`t try the beta of 7).
There is a notice on the site saying that you need a modern browser with support for CSS, this notice uses a CSS property to mark it non displayable which broken browsers like IE ignore.
Navigation of the site works perfectly in any browser however, even lynx.. The layout looks screwed in IE for windows, and obviously any graphical elements are lost in lynx.
Why is it like this? Well, i wrote the site by following standards, the result works perfectly in mozilla/safari/opera/etc, just not in IE.. My attitude is that it`s the browser that`s broken, not my site, and i won`t modify my site to cater to buggy browsers.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I can't believe 9 out of 10 people still fire up IE to surf the web. *deep sigh*
"hey, could you pass me a paper towel? er.. I mean... DEPLOY ABSORBTION PANEL!"
Sadly, despite your letter writing, you still fired up IE and gave them business. Unless there is ZERO suitable competition to purchase from, then a better approach would be to have written and let them know that their named competition did receive your business due to their unrestrictive Web site.
Pushing for Free Software and open formats/protocols is not easy and it does require some sacrifice of convenience. Some people only understand the bottom line.
"Insanity is doing the same thing over again expecting a different result."
My employees install Firefox for 90% of our customer base. hey delete all IE icons and references. Yet within weeks almost 90% of the customers are back to using IE. The reason? Familiarity.
I can't figure it out. I'm no OSS fanboi, but IE sucks. Why the addiction for so many?
I can only imagine that the next major release of Firefox (1.5) will cause another wave of Firefox adoption. Personally, I am currently not pushing Firefox that strongly since I know that if I help someone install 1.0.7 today, I'll have to do the same thing with 1.5 in a few weeks. But I will once again be pushing the browser heavily once a new, production-version of the browser is ready. Also a new release means new publicity. I think 1.5 will easily push Firefox into the 15-20% range.
*chuckles* actualy... if you knew anything about css you would probably rewrite it and then discover that very little of CSS's features work in IE and then you would have to retrain yourself to not know anything about css and break all your code to make it work properly.
Web Design was where I first learned to hate Internet Explorer.
~Anders
My bank (SunTrust) won't let me pay bills unless I'm using IE or Netscape. So I installed the Firefox User-Agent Switcher plugin to let Firefox tell the website that I'm using IE. Firefox renders the online banking web pages well so there's no reason they couldn't support Firefox. They're just too lazy to test it.
When I use the User-Agent Switcher plugin, the bank is collecting bogus data about which browser I'm really using -- bogus data that supports their contention that "everyone's using IE, why should we support Firefox!" Irksome.
I use NoScript.
One recent exploit that worked even with NoScript enabled was the highly critical 'Firefox IDN URL Domain Name Buffer Overflow'.
http://secunia.com/advisories/16764/
I'll probably be modded down for this...
I've had Firefox installed on my wife's computer since before the 1.0 release. I deleted all the shortcuts to IE, and after that just assumed she was using it. Until looking over her shoulder one day, asking her about a movie, I see that she gets to the internet by opening up the start menu, and clicking on windows update . . . shudder. Some people do like Internet Explorer, and will go through extra means to get to it. My wife doesn't know how to recreate desktop shortcuts, but did remember that windows update runs on IE. Hence, she was able to fill up her windows machine with spyware despite my precautions. I haven't figured out what the appeal for IE is yet, maybe she enjoys clicking on the giant stacks of IE windows in the taskbar, and painfully locating the site she was just on.
only one everything