Firefox Hits 400 Million Downloads

Owen Dansley writes "Firefox hit another milestone this past Friday, when it passed the 400 million download mark. From its launch in 2004 it took one year to reach 100 million downloads, hitting 200 million downloads just one year later. According to figures released by US consultancy firm Janco and the IT Productivity Center, Firefox currently has 17.4 percent of the browser market — up 5.6 percentage points in the last year. Also within the last year, Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser dropped 9.6 percentage points to a market share of 63.9 percent."

Comments

Interesting

[somersault]

How many of those downloads were downloaded using Firefox? :p

Re:Interesting

[IronWilliamCash]

As per the article probably around 17.4%

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

And how many were downloaded from unofficial mirrors and computer magazine disks? :)

Re:Interesting

[HateBreeder]

That's obviously assuming that all Firefox downloads distribute normally amongst internet users.

I suspect it to be quite different (think, "auto-updates").

Re:Interesting

[morgan_greywolf]

Or were installed as part of a Linux distro? Or were downloaded from PortableApps.com? Or were downloaded as part of some 'open source CD for Windows'? Or were just copied from a friend? How many are installed as part of a standard corporate desktop image?

How many were updates? How many were downloaded to replace another copy after say, a wipe-and-reinstall? How many were downloaded, but never installed?

Anyway you look at it, counting downloads doesn't reveal much about the number of Firefox users?

Re:Interesting

[Colin Smith]

No, but it's the same propaganda that Microsoft uses.

Re:Interesting

[morgan_greywolf]

So? Look at my posting record. I'm certainly no fan of Microsoft. But in this case, they're right. Counting downloads tells you just about nothing about the number of Firefox user -- and it cuts both ways. I have four copies of Firefox sitting on machines used by myself and my wife and my step-son, that I can say for certain were decidedly not downloaded from Mozilla.org.

Re:Interesting

[svendsen]

So you are saying they are now at the same level as MS? Nice...

Re:Interesting

[gravis777]

Probably more than you think. I use Firefox to download updates to Firefox. If I am on a machine with a version older than two, you have to go to Mozilla.com and download the entire package. I also use Firefox to download the installer so that I can slap it on a thumbdrive and install whenever I go to someone's machine.

My question is, how many of these are repeat customers. I am running three Windows OSes on one computer, Linux and OSX on another, not only did I download Firefox on each machine, but I will redownload when alphas, betas, release candidates and final releases come out. I bet in the last four years, I have done more than 50 Firefox downloads myself.

Another thing to take into account is how many people have Firefox, but do not use it? I install it on anyone's machien that I am doing work on, and its on all the computer images when we role out new computers. I tend to see way more Mac users using Firefox than PC users (probably just because Safari is just so horrid, even the betas do not come near what Firefox has done for years, although I must admit Safarri is improving).

So, yeah, 400 million downloads, with maybe 50 million people actually using it.

One of these days, someone is going to announce more software downloads than there are people on the planet.

Re:Interesting

[somersault]

Though there's also the fact that you can download it onto your work network then install it onto users machines from there. I set it to default for all new machines we send out with our offshore workers

Re:Interesting

[ArcticFlood]

You make it sound like it's not possible to download something more than 6.7 billion times. I imagine several web pages have been downloaded (viewed) over ten billion times.

I don't see anywhere that they are equating downloads to users.

Re:Interesting

[Chris whatever]

Yes i installed firefox several times myself so the 400 million mark could be just like less than 100 millions and if they took updates in all it could go as low as less than 20 millions, even lower and i'm guessing a hell of a lot lower than what they say

Re:Interesting

[Kelson]

If I am on a machine with a version older than two, you have to go to Mozilla.com and download the entire package.

IIRC 1.5 will now auto-update to 2.0, though it'll probably be a 2-stage process -- update to the latest 1.5, then update to the latest 2.0.

I will redownload when alphas, betas, release candidates and final releases come out.

They're only counting final releases.

So, yeah, 400 million downloads, with maybe 50 million people actually using it.

According to this comment, Mozilla estimates about 120 million Firefox users at present.

Re:Interesting

[Tim C]

Ah, so it's ok to be disingenuous as long as everyone else is doing it too?

Re:Interesting

[bbbaldie]

Here are the September statistics from my Baby Boomer memories site, I Remember JFK, which has a demographic of 45-year-old and older visitors: MS Internet Explorer 63.3 % Firefox 26.5 % I think the fact that an older audience like that is over 1/4 Firefox users says boatloads about the inroads they've made on IE.

Re:Interesting

[morgan_greywolf]

...MS Internet Explorer 63.3 % Firefox 26.5 % I think the fact that an older audience like that is over 1/4 Firefox users says boatloads about the inroads they've made on IE. No doubt. It's certainly a better representation than counting downloads, though hardly representative of the general Internet population.

Re:Interesting

[somersault]

It's kinda sad how much my post was modded up. I just wanted first post and it was the only mildy relevant thing I could think of to say XD

But it is interesting to wonder nevertheless, these surveys can be interpreted in so many different ways if you put different arguments forward about how the amount of downloads actually represents the amount of people using it..

Re:Interesting

[fymidos]

400 million is the number of downloads. You can easily find the number of firefox users, if you multiply the firefox market share with the number of internet users. Say you have a billion users, and firefox accounts for 15% of them, so there you go, ~150 million users.

> My question is, how many of these are repeat customers

it goes both ways. Our university computer labs were set up with a single redhat cd 4 years ago, 50+ computers, thousands of users, and they all use firefox, with a single download and maybe 5-10 updates after that.

Re:Interesting

[tobiasly]

So you are saying they are now at the same level as MS? Nice...

When in Rome...

Re:Interesting

[petermgreen]

You can easily find the number of firefox users, if you multiply the firefox market share with the number of internet users. Say you have a billion users, and firefox accounts for 15% of them, so there you go, ~150 million users.
The problem is you can't reliablly find the firefox market share. Every site you get data from tells a different story ranging from a few percent to more than 50% and of course you don't know if they are telling the truth.

Safari

[nano2nd]

It is interesting to note that the release of Safari for Windows has had zero (or negative) impact on its market share. At the time there were a number of naysayers suggesting that Safari would steal market share not from IE but from Firefox.

I'm guessing the quality issues surrounding the Safari for Windows beta have put pay to this concern.

Also, outside of Windows, I thought I'd switch from Firefox on my Mac to Safari following the introduction of tabbed browsing in version 3 but, several months later I'm still Firefox.

Re:Safari

[Jeff DeMaagd]

The initial quality was bad for Safari, but it improved considerably after the first update.

I don't really think quality is the problem. I have reliability problems with Firefox, but I'm still primarily a Firefox user. I think it's a matter of what you're used to and what it takes to switch to something else. I want to block flash on a site-specific basis and there's not a good way to do that.

Also, outside of Windows, I thought I'd switch from Firefox on my Mac to Safari following the introduction of tabbed browsing in version 3

Safari version 2 had tabbed browsing and that has been available since the introduction of OS X 10.4.

Re:Safari

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never heard of Safari?

www.apple.com/safari

Re:Safari

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still under the impression that Safari for Windows was released for iPhone and now iPod touch web development. I have yet to see any campaigns from Apple to switch to Safari. The package download of Safari with iTunes has boosted it's prevalence but apart from downloading it, for the music player, there is no need/want/force to start using it.

Re:Safari

[matazar]

I have Safari install, but I can't stand it.

To be fair though, I don't use Firefox either, though it is also installed. Opera is still the best browser out there.

Re:Safari

[mattgreen]

Jobs never said such a thing. The Apple site calls Safari the best web browser on any platform. It doesn't call it the best web browser for mobile development, nor does it try to label it as such. The "Safari is an SDK" argument is little more than cognitive backpedaling by people who can't fathom that, yes, even Apple can release things with quality issues.

Re:Safari

[Anonymous Coward]

If you ran a survey to measure how many even know what the computer software Safari is, 80% would have no idea and 19.5% would take the guess it's an expansion pack for Zoo Tycoon 2. I belang to the latter group myself before reading this.

Re:Safari

[TheRaven64]

I found the market share numbers in the summary quite interesting. If IE has 63.9% and Firefox has 17.4%, then this leave 18.7% for other browsers. I wonder what percentage of the remainder is Safari / Opera on the desktop, and what is mobile browsers.

I thought I'd switch from Firefox on my Mac to Safari following the introduction of tabbed browsing in version 3 but, several months later I'm still Firefox. Safari has always had tabbed browsing. Version 3 added the ability to re-order tabs, and detach them (but sadly not the ability to move tabs between windows). It also added the ability to re-open accidentally closed windows (but not tabs) and all of the windows and tabs from the last session (the big feature I missed from Opera).

Re:Safari

[AccUser]

Safari for Windows is aimed at those developing iPhone applications. If anyone expected Safari to take marketshare from either IE or Firefox, then they were Mac Fanboys who shouldn't have even been listening.

Re:Safari

[Idaho]

It is interesting to note that the release of Safari for Windows has had zero (or negative) impact on its market share

There has not been a release of Safari for Windows yet. Probably you meant the public beta.

Even so, I doubt that it will gain a lot of users on Windows anytime soon (even after it is released).

I think the cause is that the beta of Safari for Windows doesn't feel like a native Windows app at all. Neither does Firefox feel native while running on a Mac. This would explain why on my Mac Mini, I use Safari exclusively, but on Windows and Linux, I use only Firefox.

Re:Safari

[speaker of the truth]

I found Opera unable to render Slashdot as cleanly as Firefox and also had problems with displaying other sites I use (although a refresh fixed the formatting problems, no I can't provide a link as its an ISP website) that Firefox also has no problem with. The other site is most likely built for IE, although I do find it interesting Opera's problem dissapears after a manual refresh with Firefox having no problem at all.

Re:Safari

[speaker of the truth]

The problem isn't the low quality of Safari, but the fact they've done very little since its release to encourage Windows users to switch to it. I can't imagine any other reason for it to exist other then for SDK purposes given Apple has done very little to catch the Windows browser marketshare.

Re:Safari

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I want to block flash on a site-specific basis and there's not a good way to do that.

I want to clarify this to say that there's not a good way to do this in Safari. There are some ways, but they aren't very good, definitely not as good as FlashBlock.

Re:Safari

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I would not turn to Safari until it support Windows IME.

If you mean Windows ME, and if you are serious, good luck with that. It's a version that is nearly eight years old now, and it was the worst of the 9x series anyway. Using ME is basically an odyssey in masochism.

Re:Safari

[SirTalon42]

Funny you call KHTML broken, when KHTML is far more standards compliant than Firefox. Firefox being a descendent of Netscape simply inherited the code that many of the older sites developed themselves to be broken for, as well as having a better 'lets clone IE mode'.

Re:Safari

[Intron]

Looking over my website hits, it looks like 70% IE, 27% Mozilla, 0.3% Opera, a few Nokia or Blackberry and the rest is spiders. What does Safari identify as? I'm not seeing it at all in 30,000 hits.

Re:Safari

[Gilesx]

It's a version of Firefox for smug people.

Re:Safari

[notthe9]

Neither does Firefox feel native while running on a Mac. This would explain why on my Mac Mini, I use Safari exclusively, but on Windows and Linux, I use only Firefox.

I think that Firefox for Mac isn't really supposed to feel like a native app—it's supposed to feel like firefox. Mozilla puts out another browserm Camino, that uses Cocoa, native OSX widgers, various other OSX system resources, etc. I don't know if it's as native-feeling as Safari, but I think it's really what's intended to be the Mozilla browser for Mac.

Re:Safari

[UbuntuDupe]

I would probably be a regular Windows Safari user, but I didn't like the "always crash on startup" feature. I know I'm a little particular about what I want in a browser, but that was kind of a deal-breaker for me.

(Oddly enough, that's also why I don't use Ubuntu...)

Re:Safari

[xtracto]

ng. If IE has 63.9% and Firefox has 17.4%, then this leave 18.7% for other browsers. I

But is that 63.9% of IE7 or counting all previous versions?

Re:Safari

[A Friendly Troll]

The problem is that it's based on KHTML (from KDE where it's used in Konqueror) which has always been goofy. It is just buggy and doesn't render stuff correctly all the time. Apple has certainly improved it but they should have just went with the Gecko (Firefox) engine for Safari instead of the broken KHTML. Often it's hard to tell what's broken, and what's not.

For example, yesterday I read a blog post from one of Opera's employees, outlining a debug session with Yahoo! Mail, which stopped working in Opera 9.5 alpha. Yes, there's a bug in Opera which makes Y!Mail broken. However, there is also this:

This breaks Y!Mail because they take a string of perfectly fine XML, wrap it in HTML comment tags, put it inside an <XML> tag, add it inside the BODY tag with that horrendous IE thingy called insertAdjacentHTML, serialize the DOM of said tags by reading .innerHTML, strip away the comment tags again and send the string to the DOMParser.

That's how most "brokenness" happens... As you can see here, they have used a proprietary IE method, and they have used a proprietary Gecko object, the DOMParser, which is buggy by itself. So, if Opera or KHTML-based browsers want to make Y!Mail work, they have to emulate both IE and Gecko - and their emulation of what Gecko does must adhere to DOMParser being broken (the bug is present since 2000, Bugzilla entry linked to in the blog post in this paragraph).

Don't be so quick to blame KHTML - there's plenty of "Yahoo Mails" out there, and web coders who aren't doing things in the standard way.

Re:Safari

[Cato]

Firefox has little if any code in common with Netscape 4.x - there was a complete rewrite of the layout engine (NGLayout, now called Gecko) as part of the Netscape 5 and 6 project, and this same Gecko engine is now used by Firefox. So there was no inheriting of broken code. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecko_(layout_engine) and other pages for backup on this.

Re:Safari

[Oddscurity]

Windows Input Method Editor is what the GPP was probably talking about.

Re:Safari

[penguinstorm]

Why I use Safari on Windows at work:
- Web pages are very pretty compared to Firefox. Much prettier
- Killer bookmark management that no one's ripped off yet
- The mo'awesome find feature ever in 3.0. Love it.
- best browser based RSS feed implementation (I live Mozilla live bookmarks....except there's NO INDICATION that any article are new. I have to keep clicking.)

Still, I don't expect it to have an impact on market share for quite some time, if at all. Perhaps in that great unforseeable future where Mac OS X runs on a broader selection fo hardware...

Re:Safari

[Kelson]

Nobody uses Safari, even on a Mac.

Not according to any stats I've seen. Safari's marketshare tends to be around 2/3 to 3/4 of total Mac marketshare.

As an example, my main website, which gets a significant amount of general-audience traffic for a comic book fan site it hosts, is currently showing 4.0% Safari for the first 10 days of September, and 6.5% Macintosh for the same period of time. Go back to May -- before the iPhone and Windows versions -- and it's 3.9% and 6.1%.

I'm too lazy to go looking for more general stats right now, but I seem to recall the proportions being similar.

Re:Safari

[m50d]

Surely most of the potential switchers from firefox to safari would have already switched to opera, no?

Re:Safari

[Lars T.]

It's a version of Firefox for smug people. No, that would be Camino

Re:Safari

[Lars T.]

Safari for Windows is aimed at those developing iPhone applications. If anyone expected Safari to take marketshare from either IE or Firefox, then they were Mac Fanboys who shouldn't have even been listening. Gee, I knew Mozilla COO John Lilly was a Mac Fanboy.

Re:Safari

[hendridm]

I'm guessing the quality issues surrounding the Safari for Windows beta have put pay to this concern.

It's not better than Firefox, it takes a long time to load initially (at least on my machine), it doesn't support FF plugins, and I keep getting this crap that asks me to upgrade QuickTime or some such nonsense (which I hate).

Re:Safari

[ArabChat]

Apple is an evil, they should make FF better instead of pushing a newer browser. I'm in love with FF in Windows and DesktopBSD.

Re:Safari

[Shadowmist]

I remember that Mozilla got rather steamed about Apple's release of Safari when the latter's Windows version was released. There was also the expected kneejerk reaction from both the anti-Maz nazis here and the "Everything must be Open source" nazis here as well.

Thats not really so impressive......

[budword]

Unfortunately I'm responsible for at least half of those....once for each time I've had to re-install.....

Re:Thats not really so impressive......

[SolitaryMan]

Unfortunately I'm responsible for at least half of those....once for each time I've had to re-install.....

And I'm responsible for none of those despite the fact that I did Linux install 200 million times for the last three years, so we kinda cancel each other out.

Re:Thats not really so impressive......

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

That would be funny if I hadn't really had to reinstall Firefox after some auto-update for an add-on apparently reset every preference I had ever set, including some for other add-ons, a few days ago.

(In case anyone's wondering: I had an update of HTML Validator, which seemed to go fine, and Firefox started up as normal after the update. The time after that when I started Firefox, my home page had been reset and several tabs opened up, one of which was all about the Download Statusbar add-on I also use; there was no message about a Download Statusbar update first. I subsequently discovered that all my font/links configuration, tab behaviour, cookie/privacy settings, and more had been reset. Even my Slashdot-friendly add-on had had its settings put back to defaults! So much had changed that I decided the only safe thing to do was export the bookmarks, zap the lot, and then reinstall Firefox and all my add-ons — excluding the two suspects in the "trashing all the settings" case, of course. I'm still trying to find all those little settings I had tweaked in about:config. My disillusionment with the whole modular, add-on based architecture is pretty high right now...)

Re:Thats not really so impressive......

[AeroIllini]

(3 years) * (365 days) * (24 hours) * (60 minutes) * (60 seconds) / (200 million installs) = 0.47 seconds per install

Wow! What distro are you using?

</smartass>

Re:Thats not really so impressive......

[Danga]

Stories like this make me happy I am an Opera user. It has nearly everything the average user needs built in already although if you do want add-on's it still has that ability with widgets. It is faster, more memory efficient, more secure, and more standards compliant than any other browser available as well. I don't have to fiddle with tons of settings and add-on's, I just download the latest update and it all works.

For what it is worth I used to be a Netscape then Moz user until I discovered tabbed browsing in Opera around 2000-2001 or so and I haven't gone back. At first it was slightly annoying dealing with the ads but the rest of the user experience made up for that and they eventually got rid of the ads completely (people STILL don't know this is true!) so that is no longer an issue.

To each his own, more power to those those who like to have to install 1,000 add-on's to FireFox to get it to work how they want. I prefer having most of the functionality I use built in in a non-bloated way which Opera has mastered doing.

Re:Thats not really so impressive......

[Kelson]

Stories like this make me happy I am an Opera user. It has nearly everything the average user needs built in already although if you do want add-on's it still has that ability with widgets

I'm still hoping to see more developer tools by the time 9.5 final rolls around. There's only so much you can do with custom buttons and bookmarklets. Something comparable to Firebug, or even just the ability to do validation in the background on certain sites (rather than having to submit the page to the online W3C validator every time), would be an immense help.

(For the record, I'm posting this with Opera 9.5 alpha.)

Re:Thats not really so impressive......

[bvimo]

Damn Quick Linux, DQL installs quicker even than a Windows virus.

Re:Thats not really so impressive......

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

FWIW, I'm seriously considering giving Opera a try. I just decided that mentioning that before was a bit trollish.

Re:Thats not really so impressive......

[Danga]

For situations such as yours I completely understand why you use FireFox since it does have some extensions that Opera has nothing to compare to. I was mainly saying that for the average user I think Opera is the best choice since it has so many things already built in that you need extensions for with FireFox.

Both browsers are great choices and personally I prefer Opera both because it performs better and I have just gotten used to it since I have used it since about 2001. That is cool that you at least have given Opera a shot instead of just striking it down like many FireFox users on Slashdot love to do. Opera 9.5 definitely has fixed some annoying issues that used to drive me to use FireFox or IE at times too, I am very happy with it. I hope the official 9.5 release has some developer tools that you find useful.

Re:Thats not really so impressive......

[Danga]

I hope you do give it a try. If you don't like it then that is alright but at least you gave it a shot. From what I have heard web developers say is Opera has decent developer tools but they just aren't yet quite as good as Firebug so it probably is lacking in that respect. As just a normal browser I think you will be pleased though.

Re:Thats not really so impressive......

[hairyfeet]

Try this-http://mozbackup.jasnapaka.com/.I run it once a week and have never had to worry about screwy updates hosing my settings.It says it doesn't promise extensions backup to work but with the basics(adblock,flashblock,noscript,downloadhelper,imacros) I've not hard a problem yet,though YMMV.

Re:Thats not really so impressive......

[Kelson]

That is cool that you at least have given Opera a shot instead of just striking it down like many FireFox users on Slashdot love to do.

Actually, Opera and I go way back. A friend introduced me to it when we were both working at a computer lab in college, around 1998 or 1999. I used it as my primary browser around 2000-2001, until Mozilla got to the point where it was stable enough to use on a daily basis, and Opera just didn't have the site compatibility I wanted at the time. Plus I was switching to Linux, and the Linux version was new and extremely buggy, and Opera 5 started getting very cluttered. I kept checking in, and kept paying for upgrades (in part to encourage them to keep developing for Linux). Around Opera 8, I thought that the Linux version had finally caught up with the Windows version in terms of stability. And they were working on declutter, and of course standards support and compatibility were far beyond what it had been 5 years before.

At this point, I'm using Firefox at home and for development at work, and Opera for most of my surfing at work. I'm in the process of a major bookmarks cleanup/sync operation with my personal bookmarks, after which I'll probably switch back and forth more at home.

Which means?

[AmIAnAi]

Numbers like these are essentialy meaningless. They don't readily translate to installed copies or active users. I've dowloaded Firefox and Thunderbird at least 10 times in the process of setting up new OS installs for family PCs. But that only equates to three users. And of those, I am the only one who actively uses Firefox.

Re:Which means?

[BlueParrot]

Sure, the numbers are not precise. 400 million could translate to only 100 million users, or even less, but there is still some level of information in there. That is, we know that the ballpark figure of a program which had 400 million downloads is likely to be higher than a program which only had 10.000 downloads. It is called uncertainty. Some numbers ( such as important physical constants ) are known to a very high precision, other numbers may be more difficult to measure, and are accurate within maybe a factor of 10 or so. As a friend of mine put it. "To a mathematician pi can be expressed as a converging series of fractions, to a physicist it is close to 3.14, to us engineers it is roughly 3, everything is linear, and 3inches of steel ought to be enough, so make it 10 just to be sure..." He was joking of course, but even if only 1% of downloads translate to actual use, 400 million is still a large number, and different uncertainties cancel ( i.e, many users get their copy of a mirror or dedicated repository. Companies download it once and push it to 300 computers etc ... ). 400 million is a "rough" number, but it isn't completely meaningless.

Re:Which means?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

It probably pays to check their methodology. I think every x.x.x.1 update download might count as a download. For me, that would count for more than 10 downloads for three different computers, one user.

It's the porn

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone knows that Firefox is the browser of choice when surfing for porn, the extensions and plug-ins (no giggling at the back) make it much better than IE.

Down Them All is the dedicated Hand-Shandyist's best friend.

Re:It's the porn

[BenoitRen]

Even more tools for easier porn browsing with Firefox can be found here: http://www.squarefree.com/pornzilla/

I wonder.....

[micropitt]

....if this number is just for the stable release or does it include the nightly builds? How about other browsers build on Firefox like Seamonkey?

Re:I wonder.....

[Kelson]

Just stable builds of Firefox downloaded from the official mirrors.

Updates downloaded through the auto-update system aren't counted. Neither are copies downloaded from third-party mirrors, or installed via a Linux distro CD, or downloaded once, put on a USB keychain or LAN share, and installed on multiple machines.

Mozilla's Asa Dotzler remarked on another site last week that they have an estimated 120 million users right now, and I seem to recall the retention rate being something like 25%.

Still, it's impressive that the number of downloads has actually doubled each year. It took a year from the 1.0 release to reach 100M, another year to reach 200M, then another year to reach 400M. That means that interest in the browser is actually growing.

Re:I wonder.....

[BenoitRen]

You mean Gecko, the rendering engine and libraries, not Firefox.

If you want to get nitpicky, Firefox is an interface fork of what is now SeaMonkey.

Google Desktop?

[Grisha]

Since when was Google Desktop a browser? And why would Firefox need to be "looking over it's shoulder" because of it?

IE isn't down and out yet

[dontspitconfetti]

Despite Firefox gaining some popularity (and Safari showing up in random places, like your Grandmother's house) IE still has a sweaty, firm grip on the market.

Mozilla Firefox has a journey ahead of them before the numbers start to show in their favor.

Re:IE isn't down and out yet

[grcumb]

Despite Firefox gaining some popularity (and Safari showing up in random places, like your Grandmother's house) IE still has a sweaty, firm grip on the market.

Mozilla Firefox has a journey ahead of them before the numbers start to show in their favor.

It's not about being in the majority. It's about being a presence.

For as long as other browsers constituted a tiny minority, small-minded web developers could design for IE and IE alone. The rationale for that was: 'We don't have time or money to bother with standards - everyone uses IE, so we make our site work in IE.'

The argument for standards-based approaches is already valid. We can argue that this approach will work reliably on all platforms. Code for the subset of existing standards that are reliably supported, and you can rest assured your site's visitors will have a consistent and predictable experience.

This level of prevalence subverts Microsoft's ability to indulge in Embrace/Extend/Extinguish behaviour, as they are no longer as well positioned to dictate how web content gets displayed.

Firefox's numbers represent a decisive victory for the web community. While it's reasonable to expect that their share will continue to grow, the critical battle has already been fought. Every subsequent step Microsoft takes in the browser wars will be defensive in nature. They can't win any more.

Does Mozilla/Netscape really make up 29.01%

[BigTom]

10% still using Netscape? Who'da thought it?

Re:Does Mozilla/Netscape really make up 29.01%

[Chapter80]

My thought exactly! Who are these 10% using Netscape? They must be AOL users with the built-in browser.

Re:Does Mozilla/Netscape really make up 29.01%

[BenoitRen]

What? I thought AOL embedded IE.

Ahem...

[Mystery00]

Somebody explain what "market" Firefox is occupying, and why it matters.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

If you look at those usage statistics, Firefox is only a fragment below IE6, and quite a bit above IE7. Of course, I have no way of knowing how accurate these are, but I tend to trust W3 content.

So, when they say that IE "still" has over 60% of the "market share", why does that matter? Usage statistics are the only ones any web developer should care about, I have IE installed, because it came with Windows, so I'm assuming that my IE is part of those market share statistics, but I do all my browsing with Firefox, so as far as I can see, this is useless information. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Re:Ahem...

[quantum bit]

If you look at those usage statistics, Firefox is only a fragment below IE6, and quite a bit above IE7. Of course, I have no way of knowing how accurate these are, but I tend to trust W3 content.

1. w3schools.com is not operated by the W3C.
2. The page you linked mentions that the usage stats for a site geared toward web developers will be skewed toward alternative browsers

Re:Ahem...

[Dunbal]

I had a look a another page on this website out of curiosity. I was tickled to note that despite the fact that linux usage has remained fairly steady at 3.odd percent, Windows Vista - for all the hype and OEM bundles, has exactly the same usage as linux so long after its release.

      Oh wait, I hear the sound of Microsoft shills and Vista apologists headed this way...

      Vista's retail "great success" is almost, but not quite, the same magnitude as W's "Mission Accomplished"...

Re:Ahem...

[Halow8888]

Usage statistics are the only ones any web developer should care about, I have IE installed, because it came with Windows, so I'm assuming that my IE is part of those market share statistics, but I do all my browsing with Firefox, so as far as I can see, this is useless information. Correct me if I'm wrong. You also forget that people must run IE for certain things, such as updating Windows.

Re:Ahem...

[petermgreen]

I would imagine most people browsing w3schools are doing so from work. Corps tend to hold off upgrading for as long as they can get away with. There is no real pressure for workplaces to upgrade to vista. Many of them buy upgrade/downgrade licenses for every machine, OEM copies of vista buisness and ultimate come with downgrade rights to XP pro and many OEMs are still offering XP to buisness customers.

Home users have it much worse, home basic and home premium OEM do not come with downgrade rights, neither do upgrade releases so the only easy and legitimate way for them to get XP onto a machine from a typical home orientated retailer is to buy it full retail (yes they can pirate it or use a grey market whitebox OEM copy but both require contact with geeks who know where to obtain such things).

P.S. I don't like vista either but I realise that slowly it will take over the windows world just like XP did.

Re:Downloads vs. Active Use

[FatAlb3rt]

most people reject it after trying it

How do you figure? 17% is probably more than last year...the numbers are still going up. Where is it exactly that you get "most " from?

Firefox is Better

[tjstork]

Really, its just that simple. IE is prone to locking up, and when it does, it brings down your whole Windows desktop because it is "built into" Windows. Firefox doesn't have that problem. First off, it tends to work more often, and on a wide variety of sites.

Re:Firefox is Better

[El Lobo]

Hmm... Do you REALLy know what you are talking about? A (rarely) crashing IE can be killed by killing the iexplore.exe process. The shell is not affected AT ALL.

problems with firefox running slowly lately

[Phasefire]

I've been a fan of Firefox for about a year now. In the last few months it has been running really slowly on every machine I use it on. I've spoken to my coworkers and they've noticed the same thing. I tried switching to Opera after reading on slashdot that it runs faster then IE7 and Firefox http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/07/044243/ It does seem to run noticeably faster. Has anyone heard if Microsoft did to Firefox what it did to ICQ? (slowed it down by patching Windows to benefit MSN and detriment ICQ) just adding my two cents

We've won!

[WhiteWolf666]

Not that we can rest on our laurels, but Firefox has reached the market share level that really matter; "adequate penetration".

Misquoting the Supreme Court, I can't define exactly what that is, but I know it when I see it.

Firefox is a real force in the realm of web browsers. Even if it hovered at 17-18% forever, that would be enough to insure that most websites, and most webapps support Firefox. Even Microsoft's latest web offerings work on Firefox (Windows Live, Silverlight, etc. . .). That's a huge deal.

We don't need to dominate the market (OSS). It's nice when we do, but its not necessary. All that is necessary is for OSS software to have enough of a toehold to remain relevant in the minds of web developers. Few companies are willing to discard 1/5-1/6 of their customers.

If Linux could ever get to 15-17% desktop marketshare, we would see tons of Linux games. Not 100% of games would be ported, but many, many games would be.

Gratz Firefox! Gratz Mozilla Foundation! You did it.

Re:We've won!

[porkThreeWays]

Browsers are like girls. As long as your get adequate penetration you are pretty much ok.

Re:We've won!

[RuBLed]

I really can't comprehend what you are saying...

Not to take anything away from the numbers, but ..

[mgpeter]

Since well over a year now, Firefox by default has been automatically checking for updates and downloading the new version when available on nearly every install. On networks this can be compounded because even if you are not an "Administrator" Firefox will still install download the update although the user cannot install the program. These download numbers are still probably counted.

On the upside, Mozilla does not count the number of installations on GNU/Linux systems (which would probably easily overtake the amount of "false downloads" that may be counted).

Anyway, to combat this on the networks I manage (and because I am a lazy SOB) I created a "Network Installation Utility" that remotely installs Firefox on the Domain Computers (or A.D. computers if you aren't using Samba). If anyone wants it you can find it at: http://www.pcc-services.com/kixtart/firefox-script.html. (I adjusted the default behavior of Firefox to not check for updates.)

But of course using this utility will totally mess up Mozilla's numbers since you can install Firefox on a few hundred computers in a few minutes (depending upon network speed) without even downloading Firefox once.

Re:Downloads vs. Active Use

[Eivind]

17% sounds about right. That doesn't sound like rejection to me though, it's not long ago that only typical nerd-sites could even top 10%.

Re:Downloads vs. Active Use

[El Lobo]

Why should I be proud because it's open Source? Is Open Source a "magical status" that automatically gives your software a better quality or a better appeal? Sorry, not for me. i am the original author of a quite succesful program , which is now OS (since last year), but I am not more proud of it than I am for my other non OS projects. OTOH I actively try to support the programmers who sell commerciall versions of a good product (like Total Commander, WinRaR or The Bat!). Yes, there are good OS replacements but being OS doesn't have that "magical quality" in my eyes.

Re:skew

[servo335]

Not necessarily repeat downloads. People like me keep the most recent version backed up come place for use upon reloading windows or firefox so i don't have to download it again. Now my question is how many people download firefox and save it toa cd or jump drive and install it on other peoples pcs when working on them?

auto-update doesn't count

[cyfer2000]

auto-update is not count as download. The 400 million number doesn't include auto-update.

Re:auto-update doesn't count

[SCHecklerX]

well, as a linux user who does not run as root, auto-update no workee, so I do have to download it again each time there is a new version. Well, I guess I don't *have* to, I could run it as root when I know there is a new version out, but it's easier for me to just download and install.

Re:auto-update doesn't count

[MajinBlayze]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Package_Manager

seriously

(yes, I recognize, or at least hope, that this was in jest, but still)

Re:auto-update doesn't count

[Lars T.]

"auto-update" doesn't work with some firewalls - e.g. the one at my workplace. The 400 million number does include some of my non-auto-updates.

Re:auto-update doesn't count

[shmlco]

Yeah, I've probably downloaded 30-40 of them personally.

Re:auto-update doesn't count

[TravisO]

How about the fact I manually go to the FTP via HTTP:// and download every RC build, plus I manually download new versions because the auto update takes like 24hrs to realize there's a new version. Add in the fact I do this at home and work and I'm probably personally responsible for 50 downloads. This fact is about as useless as they get, kind of like "hits" on your website.

Re:auto-update doesn't count

[cyfer2000]

But the 400 million number still doesn't include auto-update.

Actually a good point

[Colin Smith]

2. The page you linked mentions that the usage stats for a site geared toward web developers will be skewed toward alternative browsers. Actually this is a good point. Any and every web site which is created will be targeted at some sub sector of the population. So looking at the stats of any other site, or even the population stats as a whole is useless.

Re:Actually a good point

[notthe9]

Actually this is a good point.

It is a very good point. It is, by the way, a point the w3schools site makes

W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user. The average user tends to use Internet Explorer, since it comes preinstalled with Windows. Most do not seek out other browsers.

Any and every web site which is created will be targeted at some sub sector of the population. So looking at the stats of any other site, or even the population stats as a whole is useless.

Useless? Absolutely not. The meaning of stats like that are not "30% of people on the internet use Firefox," but that doesn't mean that there is nothing meaningful indicated.

Questionable data

[McDuckie]

I run several web sites and I would question the 17% share figure. The results I get from my weblogs are pretty consistent and indicate that Firefox's share of the market is closer to 11%, and that this figure has remained fairly static for the last six months at least with no real growth evident. In fact the only major change in browser market share during 2007 seems to be IE7 steadily replacing IE6.

The data I get for browser market share from my visitor logs for August 2007 is:

IE7 - 37%

IE6 - 35%

Firefox - 11%

IE5 (yes really) - 3%

Others (Opera, Netscape, etc.) - 14%

Of course you could argue how closely my visitor profile match the wider population of users, but I'd be surprised if other surveys were markedly different. To my eyes the data seems to indicate that Firefox has reached an equilibrium point in terms of its potential market share. One of FF's biggest early draws was its relative security compared to IE, but these days there have been plenty of security warnings about FF that may have eroded that "comfort factor". Still I'd be interested to hear if my experience is mirrored by anyone else - are 7% of FF users hiding from me, or are the claims BS?

Re:Questionable data

[SnapperHead]

Looking at my joke site (Listed above) since Jan 1st, 2007 I am seeing:

IE: 63.85%
Firefox: 22.93%
Safari: 8.14%
Opera: 0.51%
Others: ...

I know most of that Safari is me ... So, the number of people using Safari on my site is way lower then 8.14%. In fact, looking at the access logs once in a while, I don't recall seeing someone else using Safari at my site.

Better than you'd think ...

[shellbeach]

Wow, what a big number. But even with all of those downloads the logs from our server shows that only 17% of visitors are actually using it. Over 80% are IE variants.

Congratulations Firefox, you've managed to get a boat load of people to download your browser, but somehow most people reject it after trying it.

Well, actually ...

According to http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm there are currently about 1,173 million people using the internet. (God knows whether this is an accurate number or not, but they seem to think they know what they're doing, and for the purposes of this unscientific /. discussion I'll assume it's roughly correct.)

Therefore, 400 million downloads, assuming one download per person, would give a usage base of about 34%.

If Firefox usage is actually 17%, that suggests that about one in every two people that download it, stick with it. And that's pretty impressive if you ask me.

the clue in in the numbers ..

[rs232]

Firefox 17.4 % browser market -- up 5.6 %

Internet Explorer 63.9 % - dropped 9.6 %

400,000,000 downloads ..

Re:slownewsday

Re:the clue in in the numbers ..

[4D6963]

My point was that these figures weren't necessarily relevant, so obviously if you act like they're so relevant.. Plus, why do we even care in the first place, these are nothing but mere web browsers, not a way of life or political parties or whatever.

Us geeks and our 'important' issues...

Sigh, if only it were true!

[tjstork]

IExplore is only a U/I wrapper around a collection of objects that IE exposes. Some of those objects are used by the shell. This is why Microsoft walked into court, correctly, and said that IE was a part of the operating system, and, if you got rid of everything that was truly a part of IE, the desktop would not work. But, hey, that's just Microsoft saying that.... I'm just going by what Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and all the other guys said at the Netscape trial, and continue to say...

"It's all integrated!!!" So be it. And Firefox is better, because it's NOT.

Re:Sigh, if only it were true!

[El Lobo]

...Which has been proven to be bullshit whith the infamious Windows lite which completly removed IE from the system. And guess what... the shell still works. This is just another myth (partially created by Microsoft), but I've NEVER seen the shell freeze just because IE has freezed. The 2 processes are completly independent no mather what (insert name here) says.

Re:Sigh, if only it were true!

[tjstork]

Open a big PDF in IE, then, smarty!

Re:Sigh, if only it were true!

[El Lobo]

And kill then acroreader.exe AND iexplorer.exe. The shell will be up and running. In fact I have done that RIGHT now (not that IE crashed or something)

Re:Sigh, if only it were true!

[tjstork]

Internet Explorer has experienced a problem or error. As a precaution, your Active Desktop has temporarily been turned off. To start the Active Desktop again, use the following troubleshooting tips

Re:Sigh, if only it were true!

[El Lobo]

Oh, so you are using Active Desktop, then you are LETTING explorer acting as your desktop!!!! You are EXPLICITY telling explorer to do that since this is NOT a default setting! And yet, the only thing crashing is the active desktop, which is then replaced by the "normal" desktop automatically. The actual shell "explorer.exe" is intact. Begone troll!

That's horrible!

[jollyreaper]

400 million downloads. Just think of the revenue they're losing due to that piracy. :(

Firefox crashes too!

[ShatteredArm]

My firefox I have running under Linux has been crashing every now and then over the last few months. It doesn't stall; the process just dies. I've rarely had it happen, but members of my family report it happening quite often. Also, it freezes on occassion as well, and I have to ps ax | grep firefox it.

See, firefox isn't as great as some people make it out to be. After encountering this site (which debunks many of the myths surrounding firefox's superiority), I decided to try Opera 9, which I quite like and now use on all my machines.

the future

[cinnamon colbert]

I personally amresponible for ~ 50 downloads, every computer at work, and geting a lot of friends and family
then i discoverd mozilla has taken large sums from google, the next borg evil overlord
no more downloads for me
google is evil, like ANY large corporation, and I won't be associated with it.

Re:the future

[40ozFreak]

google is evil, like ANY large corporation, and I won't be associated with it.


I'm so tired of the "google is evil" redundancy. The entire world can't be made up of mom-and-pop storefronts forever. And regardless of anything I read or hear, Google is far better aimed in the appropriate direction than many companies with a smaller band of influence.

Re:the future

[cinnamon colbert]

why can't the whole world be made of mom and pop storefronts ?
there are perhaps a small number of things - oil exploration, auto plants, things like that, that require large corporations, but as for things like google, who knows.

as for Google being better, Are the concentration camps of the Boer war beter then
the camps of WW II

as for google being better, that is because they have not yet entered the market place. Despite all the rhetoric about free markets, there is nothing biz people like less then free markets, the goal of every biz is to have a functional monopoly.
When you have companies with functional monopolys, they have enough excess cash to appear good, the prime example is bell labs from ATT/
however, as soon as the monopoly ends, and a biz has to compete, the veneer of nice stuff comes off and the true nature of a biz - a vicious, amoralistic animal that cares only about money - comes out.
It is not that google is evil, it is that large corporations, by their very DNA, are evil - they can't help it, any more then a hyena can help killing its prey by slicing open the belly and letting the prey strangle in it's own entrails.

Re:the future

[40ozFreak]

I can't say I fully agree nor disagree with your comments. I would concur that, by and large, big business is bad for the economy. Their band of influence and their bulging bank accounts put pressure on smaller companies that have neither the means nor the funding to compete on a large scale, leaving them to be swallowed up by their competitors. At the same time Google has made it possible, through Adsense and other features, for smaller websites to remain active through smart advertising that is subtle yet effective. I've read disheartening things with their Google Apps content and possession of user submitted property, namely this story. That sort of manipulation through fine print is the sort of thing that big companies pull all the time, and I find it both underhanded and unnecessary. Basically I can't find anything in what you say that truly disagrees with my principles, but as a whole I feel that Google does good things for the internet community, though they may drift at times.

How about IE7 versus Firefox?

[Kensai7]

I'm much more interested in a Internet Explorer 7 versus Firefox download hits comparison. I want to know the latest trend.

Re:How about IE7 versus Firefox?

[seriesrover]

Which is utterly meaningless. The point many people seem to be missing is that 'downloads' don't equate to trends whatsoever. Firefox is typically downloaded by geeks that go out looking for it. IE typically comes on a Windows CD. FF is probably downloaded many times for only a single usage and the opposite for installs (though would expect the former to be more common). For the typical Windows users they don't upgrade and get the latest and greatest if what they have works.

The only semi-valid statistic is usage stats from websites and even thats tainted at best. Depends on website, throughput of traffic, the demographics you want to attract\satisfy to your website, compatibility issues etc.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

I gotcha numbas right here!

[Immerial]

Here's some hard browser numbers from a site that I work on that gets about a million visits a month:

Past 90 days ending September 6th

Browser Stats
Browser version breakdown was only significant for IE.

IE 6.x 46.01%
Firefox 28.26%
IE 7.x 17.69%
Opera 2.36%
Safari 2.31%
Mozilla 1.95%

Unknown 0.03%
All others 1.39%

The interesting thing is that IE is slowly going down (IE -2.7%) and Firefox (+2.5%), Opera (+.6%), and Mozilla (+.9% crazy, right??) are gaining. Safari is currently staying about the same (-.6%). [-.7% other] This is in the past 3 months.

Traffic numbers
I don't have the August traffic numbers handy but here are the numbers up to July 2007.

Unique Visitors
12-Month Rolling Average
736,410

Total Visits
12-Month Rolling Average
976,840

Most Use by Country/Region, July 2007
United States- 354,185
India- 112,769
China- 67,188
South Korea- 55,666
Canada- 27,487
United Kingdom- 24,718
Portugal- 22,818
Germany- 21,634
Brazil- 16,668
Philippines- 15,555

Re:I gotcha numbas right here!

[AmIAnAi]

Here's some hard browser numbers from a site that I work on that gets about a million visits a month:
These figures are much more interesting to me and its great to see Firefox climbing. Of course, site traffic all depends on the target audience; for example, you'd expect to see a higher (and climbing) usage on sites like Slashdot.

I'd be interested to know if your site is aimed at Joe Public, or is it more focused towards the tech. literate?

Re:I gotcha numbas right here!

[Immerial]

The site is geared to educators, students and self-learners. So it is more of a Joe Public site than a necessarily tech literate aimed site. That being said, all of the stuff on the site is published under a 3.0 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, so it might attract a few more tech literate folks than a regular site would.

can we get auto-update numbers?

[Dan Ost]

It seems like a better measure of firefox users would be the number of auto-updates that occur after a new version is released. This won't count users that get updated via some package manager (emerge, apt, etc), but it would at least give a lower limit on the number of active firefox installations out there.

Re:Downloads vs. Active Use

[dvice_null]

> i am the original author of a quite succesful program , which is now OS (since last year), but I am not more proud of it

Open source is not magic. If you write a closed source software and then release it as open source, it will be the same shit it was before. The reason why open source software generally is better is because of the 3 rules from which you have t sacrifice at least one when making software:
- Time
- Money
- Quality

Because open source is often done on free time, without salary and deadlines. There is no need to worry about time or money. So all the effort can be put on the quality.

But of course again, there is no magic. If you are a bad programmer, writing open source program doesn't make the result better. But if you are a good programmer, time is usually the only thing that is limiting the quality of your programs.

But this doesn't make any difference between closed source program on free time and open source program on free time. But open source has another benefit. For example I have actually red the whole source code of one program and I did find some bugs from there, which might have never been spotted without someone reading the code. Or look this project, which has revealed several bugs from open source projects: http://scan.coverity.com/

Then open source has patches. There is one product which was really good and I enjoyed using it, but it had bugs I didn't like. It wasn't open source and it had only one developer, which then stopped developing it and the project was pretty much dead after that. No fixes, no development. If it had been open source, I would have fixed the bugs for free on my free time. But because it wasn't I couldn't do this. This is the main reason why I prefer open source over anything else. If it is broken and no-one else cares about fixing it, at least I have an option of doing it myself.

Error in the rankings.

[Vacuous]

Anyone else notice how opera has 0.47% more share than Mozilla in that chart yet still ranks below it?

Where's the seperate security context then?

[tjstork]

Seriously, if IE were truly a seperate process, then, why can't I run it under another user account, the same way I can just about every other process in Windows XP.

Forget Millenium, IE just not genuinely a separate process under Windows XP! It just isn't. If it was, it could run in its own security context, you know, like how most programs can under Linux!

Give it up dude. IE's market share is declining, and Firefox is gaining, and that's because consumers are choosing a browser that works over one that doesn't.

Re:Where's the seperate security context then?

[dreddnott]

Are you referring to the context-menu option Run As...?

This option is not available with the standard desktop shortcut to IE due to its unique CLSID. Navigate to iexplore.exe, however, and you can run it as any user that you could run other programs as.

I run Windows XP x64, which comes with both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of IE 6. You can even run both simultaneously, and they don't appear to be interdependent in any way.

This is all well and good, but you're actually right that Internet Explorer 6 is more than skin-deep into Windows. Open My Computer, type a URL into it - it becomes Internet Explorer, sort of - but no changes to the process list. Click back, and forward - the transformation is instantaneous. The same thing happens when you type a local path into IE - it instantly transforms into a My Computer window. I haven't bothered to upgrade to IE7 yet, as I don't actually use it, but there you go.

Your Own Statistics are More Valuable

[mauriatm]

Looking over my website hits, it looks like 70% IE, 27% Mozilla, 0.3% Opera, a few Nokia or Blackberry and the rest is spiders. What does Safari identify as? I'm not seeing it at all in 30,000 hits.

In AWstats Safari identity is seen easily. What's your website? Content may or may not affect your usage. 30K is a rather small sample size in my opinion.

Using apx 3.3M hits (650K uniques), I get FF 56.3%, IE 28.5%, Moz 3.1%, Opera 2.3%, Safari 0.5%, Konqueror 1% and others (inc bots) 8%. With 56% using Windows! - And I run a linux based site - go figure. Although my more recent daily/monthly statistics put IE at a much higher value ~37%.

Bottom line for me, EVERYONE else's statistics are meaningless. Every 3-4 months I see either IE increase, or FF increase. I don't know what "17.4 percent of the browser market" even means to me? Even more worthless: the magic millions of FF downloads.

It measures interest

[Kelson]

In roughly 3 years since the release of Firefox 1.0, the same (large) number of people downloaded it in year 1 and year 2. That means interest didn't drop off after the first year. Moreover, twice as many people -- 200 million -- downloaded it in year 3 as in either of the previous two years. That means interest in Firefox has actually increased over the past year.

Sure, some of those were early adopters of Firefox 2, before the auto-update kicked in. But a surprising number of people stayed on 1.5 until then, going by all the stats I've seen. And then we get into the fuzz factor: some of those downloads are repeats, but there are plenty of installs that won't be counted: downloads from third-party mirrors. Linux distribution CDs. Single downloads that are then copied out to multiple computers via USB thumbdrive or LAN shares.

So while it doesn't tell you how many users they have (and Mozilla didn't claim that it did), it does tell you that people are still looking for Firefox and still trying it out in large numbers.

As for how many people are actively using it, Mozilla currently estimates 120 million.

How many were installed as Spyware

[aiguyaiguy]

I have had to uninstall it twice already because other packages I have download to try installed it automatically without even asking me. Each time I uninstalled I let them know that this is the worst kind of SPAM and damages their reputation severely!

Re:Downloads vs. Active Use

[breeze95]

Wow, what a big number. But even with all of those downloads the logs from our server shows that only 17% of visitors are actually using it. Over 80% are IE variants. Congratulations Firefox, you've managed to get a boat load of people to download your browser, but somehow most people reject it after trying it.

Wow, did you know that you have validated the author's numbers. It wasn't your intention, but you did. The author claims that Firefox 400 million downloads translates into 18% market share more or less. Based on your server statistics, 17% of visitors were Firefox users. So, you see your server agreed with the premise that Firefox has a 18% market share and that the 400 million downloads are indeed valid.

Predicting the future.

[crhylove]

I'm just going to go ahead and predict the future and say that as Dell and others continue to offer Ubuntu, and start offering them for CHEAPER, since you save money on the OS (market economics dictate that this WILL happen, eventually), and as Ubuntu continues to improve and outshine Windows across the board (compiz>aero, firefox>IE, Pidgin>MSN, Thunderbird>Outlook, Gimp>Paint, Open Office (free)> MS Office (paid)), more people will BY DEFAULT be running Firefox, and then the market share will REALLY start to climb. Firefox is probably nearly as high as it can get considering the amount of n00bs out there that think the big blue E is their Internet. But as Vista continues to tank and suck, and Ubuntu continues to dominate, grow and improve......

Well, let's just hope Canonical realizes soon for all of us that Thunderbird is a better choice than that other crap email client and accelerate the process.

Firefox is definitely ftw, even if it takes another 5 years (which it might!).

Re:Downloads vs. Active Use

[quintesse]

No, it means that almost 1 in every 5 visitors of your website is using FF, you better not be neglecting them because that would be very bad for business (17% of your business to be exact, if you had shareholders they would lynch you if you said you don't care about them).

It was Me!

[scoot80]

I downloaded it for the 400 Millionth time after having to re-install windows that many times!