Firefox Passes IE6 In Browser Share

Jared sends word of Ars Technica coverage of Net Applications' monthly browser share numbers. What's significant this time is that Firefox has finally passed IE6 in worldwide share. "Internet Explorer remains ahead of the rest of the competition, but since month after month it continues to lose ground to all other browsers, Firefox has now finally surpassed IE6, which is easily the most hated version of Microsoft's browser. ... In October, all browsers except for IE and Opera showed positive growth. Between October and September, Internet Explorer dropped a significant 1.07 percentage points (from 65.71 percent to 64.64 percent) and Firefox moved up a sizeable 0.32 percentage points (from 23.75 percent to 24.07 percent). ... Although IE's decline seems to be unceasing, the real shame is that the old versions have more share than the newer ones (we can only hope that as Windows 7 gains popularity, this trend will reverse)." Ars presents a graph with their own site's browser share picture, and as you might expect it's very different from the general population's.

Comments

Re:StatCounter etc

[AliasMarlowe]

Opera is also listed as #3 for Europe, ahead of Safari and Chrome. The gap between Firefox (all versions) and IE (all versions) is also rather narrower for Europe than for North America.
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-eu-monthly-200902-200902-bar
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-na-monthly-200902-200902-bar

The numbers

[Stan Vassilev]

What they mean is, all versions of Firefox put together (2, 3, 3.5) have surpassed one version of Internet Explorer (6), the oldest one. If you look only at oldest versions, only newer versions, or all versions together, IE has a solid lead over Firefox in all three categories. I'm not sure about the significance of this, as IE6 being at over 23% share, most sites still to support it for the foreseeable future.

Re:StatCounter etc

[aodhan]

Hi,

I work at StatCounter and I would just like to point out that we have a very diverse sample size from around the world.

As per http://gs.statcounter.com/faq#sample-size for July 2009 here was the breakdown of our sample pageviews for the month.

        * 1.3 billion United States
        * 570 million Brazil
        * 280 million Turkey
        * 260 million Germany
        * 250 million Thailand
        * 240 million China
        * 240 million United Kingdom
        * 180 million Indonesia
        * 160 million Canada
        * 140 million India
        * 109 million Russia

Not on my site

[imakemusic]

I help run a website for an art gallery/shop - make of that what you will. The stats for our site is quite different:

Firefox (all versions) 42.1%
IE (all versions) 40.1%
Safari 7.8%
Chrome 4.5%

Go firefox!

IE6

[FrostedWheat]

I decided to collect some stats for the trade services section of my companies website. Our typical customer is *not* technically minded in the least:

MSIE 8.0, 38.4%
MSIE 7.0, 33.8%
Firefox/3.5, 9.5%
MSIE 6.0, 9.1%
Chrome 9, 8.4%
Firefox/3.0, 3.0%
Safari 4, 1.5%

IE 6 is dropping fast, but a very poor showing for Opera and Safari. The OS stats are dominated by Windows XP (62%) and Vista (33%), with OS X and other flavours of Windows taking the remaining few percent. No Linux at all sadly.

Re:StatCounter etc

[p51d007]

The only reason IE is still as high as it is, is because 99% of the people using it don't know there is an alternative. Heck, it isn't that hard to get people to switch. If I can get my SEVENTY SIX YEAR OLD father to switch to Firefox (he calls it Mozilla LOL), then you can get anyone to switch.

Re:StatCounter etc

[Just Some Guy]

As a white person, your parents, and their grandparents, and so on, haven't been subject to the legacy of US slavery and ongoing racism.

I'm part Irish. I'd like you to tell my grandparents that they - and their neighbors, the Italians - are part of a white, privileged, un-discriminated-against upper class.

Of course, you'd have to go to the Irish and Italian ghettos to find them.