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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.
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.
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