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."

Comments

Firefox is on the up!!

[Bongoots]

Download Mozilla Firefox!

Mozilla's browsers global usage share is still growing according to OneStat.com

Amsterdam - November 2 2005 - OneStat.com (www.onestat.com), the number one provider of real-time web analytics, today reported that Mozilla's browsers have a total global usage share of 11.51 percent. The total usage share of Mozilla increased 2.82 percent since April 2005. Microsoft's Internet Explorer still dominates the global browser market with a global usage share of 85.45 percent which is 1.18 percent less as at the end of April.

"The global usage share of Mozilla's browsers is still growing and it seems that Netscape users and some Internet Explorer users are switching to the Firefox version. It also looks like that browser users of Internet Explorer for Apple's Mac are switching to Safari because the global usage share is still growing. It is also interesting to see that Microsoft's Internet Explorer has less global usage share in the USA as in the UK. Mozilla's browsers are more popular in USA and Canada as in the UK" said Niels Brinkman, co-founder of OneStat.com.

The most popular browsers on the web are:

1. Microsoft IE = 85.45 %
2. Mozilla Firefox = 11.51 %
3. Apple Safari = 1.75 %
4. Netscape = 0.26 %
5. Opera = 0.77 %

Source: http://www.onestat.com/html/aboutus_pressbox40_bro wser_market_firefox_growing.html

Nearly 17% of Canada, over 14% of the USA and just under 5% of the UK use Firefox!!

Re:Firefox is on the up!!

[GoodOmens]

I just can't wait until we see sites declaring "Page will not render correctly under Microsoft IE".

Too many pages require IE for Firefox to be 100% usefull (although thankfully thats declining).

Re:Firefox is on the up!!

[pmike_bauer]

The order is alphabetical!

1. internet Explorer
2. Firefox
3. Konquerer
4. Netscape
5. Opera

Re:Firefox is on the up!!

[stecoop]

The order is alphabetical!

I am going to start an initiative to recommend that Firefox immediately change the name to Airfox making it the #1 browser on the net.

Re:Firefox is on the up!!

[eMartin]

That's pretty lame.

All it really shows is that you can't do what most other sites can, which is design a website that works at least pretty well in most browsers, and by making the message large and bold, it seems more important than your services and you just come off as either too arrogant or too lazy to find a few little workarounds.

After all, at first glance, the only things that seem to be "buggy and broken" are a few alignment problems that anyone who spent a few days learning HTML and CSS1 could have fixed.

If there is actually some part of your site that simply doesn't work, I'd understand if you put a small note on that page, but telling people that the web browser that came with their brand new computer is old/obsolete just makes you look as foolish to them as the sites that tell me I don't have the required browser/plugins installed when I know my version of Firefox and installed plugins can handle the site do to me.

Re:Firefox is on the up!!

[Steve Cowan]

>As wierd as it may be to you, Firefox is the NON Standard browser until it gains the majority marketshare.

It's not "the" standard browser, but it is based on published "standards". The contention is that MS takes standards, then deviates from them just enough so that they can control and dominate it. If you have a browser in a dominant position, such as IE, deviating from established standards make those standards meaningless in the first place. Suddenly instead of having a democratic body determining how the web "works" with technologies like http, html, java, css, etc., MS takes their majority marketshare and uses it to their advantage by implementing those technologies, but just a little differently than they're supposed to.

Lazy web designers who only bother to ensure their page works in IE are not doing the world any favours.

Apple's Safari Is Up Too

[skrysakj]

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?

Sad thing is...

[rAiNsT0rm]

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.

Re:Sad thing is...

[shish]

Allowing employees to install unsupported/unmanaged applications is a critical mistake from a security perspective

And forcing them to use IE isn't? :p

Re:Sad thing is...

[Nate B.]

Based on conversations I've had with some that work in our corporate headquarters, the Software Business Alliance (SBA) apparently has them convinced that FF, OOo, and friends are "licensed for personal use only" and these people believe the company will be billed a significant sum for such "improperly licensed software".

Perhaps the SBA is carrying on its excellent work in your company as well.

Higher for some websites.

[HugePedlar]

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.

There are still too many non standard websites....

[jawtheshark]

And writing emails to these guys doesn't help. Just in the last week I came across two websites: Audi Belgium and ALS Verlag . Both sites majorly fuck up on navigation.

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.

A ways to go.

[dasil003]

For web developers the important thing is that we've passed the first inflection point: that is, companies can no longer afford to ignore Firefox.

But we're still a long way from the second inflection point: where can stop hacking to support IE (6, maybe 7). That's not happening for a long time, but if you look back 5 years, supporting IE 6 is really a piece of cake compared to IE 5, NS 4, etc.

Re:Not much further to go

[schon]

Take my bank for instance. Their online banking doesn't work all that well in any other browser than IE.

Not all banks are like that, and you can always switch banks (or threaten to switch.)

I bank with TD/Canada Trust. I use their internet banking every day, and it works perfectly in Firefox.

Let them know that "Use IE" is not an acceptable answer.

Re:Not much further to go

[nine-times]

I don't foresee web developers dropping support for IE for as long as IE has a substantial install base. They'll start supporting Firefox in addition to IE.

However, this still might be bad news for Microsoft, and may lead to a drop in IE use anyhow. The reason is, if they're supporting Firefox, then they're more likely to be following real standards, and paying attention to their cross-browser incompatibility. This means fewer pages will be IE only, and pages developed for Firefox (and therefore more towards real standards) are very likely to work in any standards-compliant browser.

10% might be enough that poorly-written IE-only pages will be viewed as a problem. Once there's no penalty for using a non-IE browser, we may see more people switching.

Yes its not the browser

[wombatmobile]

At 10% FireFox is starting to become interesting to malware producers. I guess I'll switch to Opera.

That's what's good about web standards. It's becoming increasingly possibly for you to make a choice like that because content less and less tied to one browser.

FF and Opera are both commited to implementing and supporting web standards like XML, SVG, and CSS. The bigger share they get, the more reason people have to develop standards-compliant content.

A virtuous cycle.

diversity, not domination please

[SuperBanana]

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

You know, it's exactly that attitude of "world domination" that got the Web into the mess it is today. Firefox is not for everyone. I don't want to see it become "what you have to use whether you like it or not", because we've been down that road.

What is nice to see is that users of alternative browsers do make more than single-digit percentages, which of course means they're harder to dismiss. If Apple, The Mozilla Foundation, and Opera can all assure they take the high road at all times with regards to fixing rendering/parsing/etc bugs, MS won't be guaranteed to be the same, but it'll certainly make life easier on web designers.

If designers have to somehow work around 3, 4, 5 different browsers' rendering habits and bugs- things will be a disaster, they'll be frustrated and tempted to just support IE and "the next biggest fish", etc.

Also- I hope all the non-IE browsers are now 'shipping' by default with their own browser strings, not set to pretend to be IE...