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Firefox 3.5 Now the Most Popular Browser Worldwide
gQuigs notes a graph up at StatCounter Global Statistics, which shows that in the last few days Firefox 3.5 became the most used browser version worldwide, edging ahead of IE7. IE8 is rising fast (along with Windows 7), but over the last few months the slope of Firefox's worldwide curve has been steeper. (In the US, IE8 has always been ahead of Firefox 3.5; in Europe Firefox has led since late summer.) The submitter suggests using the time when Firefox rules the roost, globally speaking, to put the final nail in the coffin of IE6, which still has a 14% global share (5%-7% in the US and EU; China and Korea are holding up IE6's numbers).
Considering most Firefox users are more tech savvy than average and many of them are likely to have already blocked StatCounter altogether, this is impressive.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
You're going to see IE8 be absolutely huge over the next 5 years - even if firefox is preferred by geeks and the somewhat tech savvy.
As the huge 32/64bit transition begins (next 12 to 36 months my guess) business's finally can roll out 64bit Windows 7, avoiding Vista entirely and finally retiring Windows XP.
This is going to continue to increase IE8 marketshare much like IE6's was boosted from XP, so what we can only hope is that IE8 isn't garbage (me, I don't know? I use Firefox also)
For what it's worth, I work for one of the state govt's of Australia and one of our departments has just switched from Win2k to XP :/ so I'm guessing we won't be moving to Windows 7 for at least 2 years.
You know it's not once you've tried to write (and maintain!) different CSS fuckups for different IE versions.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
Now that Firefox is the dominant browser, perhaps the topic graphic should default to Firefox instead of IE? It is more recognizable.
I see "This site requires Internet Explorer 6" on our Intranet all the time. Peoplesoft for example, urgh.
Of course, the site will run perfectly with Firefox if I change the user agent string.
Corporate Intranets with lazy admins or dumb policies are what keeps IE6 alive.
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Firefox 3.5 is a very slow piece of shit, reminds me of old Internet Explorer versions. I am using Firefox 3.6 Beta6 and it is so much faster! I hope most of these Firefox 3.5 people upgrade to 3.6 ASAP when it is released.
Total marketshare isn't the most interesting metric, the rate of change is. Right now FF 3.5 is gaining users faster than IE8. The question (which the graph doesn't readily answer) is whether the net FF adoption rate is faster than the net IE adoption rate. I.e, is the total number of FF users going up faster than the total number of IE users? Is FF3.5 going up fast just because FF3 users are upgrading more quickly than IE7 users?
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Not to mention that IE8's growth seems to be exclusively at the expense of 6/7 so IE as a whole has declined greatly, or the market has grown while IE use has remained constant.
Hole punching??? How about flipping the front panel switches! OTOH, the old plugboards were even more archaic.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
I live in Japan and adoption seems really conservative. Let's first take version numbers away to get a better view.
Japan
Firefox has been having a 21-23% share for the 2 years, with IE still leading though dropping from 70 to 65%
Growth in conservative. UK seems to have a similar trend.
Singapore
About 30% share and growth is conservative.
Malaysia
Growth from 30% up to 40%, with an equal drop in IE share.
This looks like a market where Firefox can overtake IE?
France
very interesting trend. W38 2008 and W26 2009 had a short period where IE use was displaced by Firefox, but IE use was resumed in a few weeks.
Does that mean users in France are open to the idea, but still don't deem Firefox a good replacement yet?
Interestingly Vietnam seems to have a similar trend.
China
IE has 95% share all the way, with a drop recently, giving way not to Firefox, but to Maxthon.
Poland / Finland
Firefox is the most popular browser!
North Korea
Nobody really wins. Only IE, once in a while.
Antartica
Go figure. But firefox seems to be winning?
It would be nice if we could have a world map of the most popular browsers in each country
so we can adjust our expectations when talking to overseas partners...
Recent months it looks like FF is holding its own while chrome steals users from IE. But likely it is mostly FF users trying chrome and FF gaining more recruits from IE.
When chrome looses it's shiny appeal unless chrome seriously holds it's own in the browser battle they will lose users quick, and almost all to FF. So the real test is to come there over the next year.
IE however will likely gain users as people get windows 7 (taking from the rest). Many people will be upgrading from xp having been longtime FF/opera users. Much of the boost to FF was due to IE 6, people having not yet tried 8. But I imagine trying IE8 on win7 will at least not feel extreme hatred like with 6. And I imagine they will gain some users that way (hold steady for a bit as win7 comes into full swing).
The nice thing about the chart is this. The browsers going up are: FF, chrome, Other. Ones dropping are: IE, Opera, Safari. This PERFECTLY coincides with which programs are OSS and which are closed. OSS taking about 39% currently, compared to a mere 25~26% 1 year ago. By this time next year OSS will have won the browser war and by the nature of OSS growth I find it unlikely that closed source will ever be able to take it back.
With OSS being in common use on many computers the oss fear will be most dispelled. What other sectors could oss take next I wonder? I don't think openoffice is ready yet. Nor are music players (winamp is too smooth). Gimp seems to be losing interest and can't top photoshop, paint.net no longer oss. Foxit seems to be doing well. VLC, MPC seem to be taking a pretty big chunk of the market as well.
Baby steps.
It wasn't so long ago when IE had +90% of the worldwide browser usage share. I would have had nothing against IE, if it weren't for its incompatible implementation of web standards and being Windows-only. I believe it is a crime to limit a web site access to users of a certain browser and a certain OS. Probably this is what Microsoft wanted all along, to make the WWW an extension of Windows. I experienced this first hand when some sites, like my bank, were IE-only. Luckily, for me, Wine helped a lot in breaking that barrier. This is less of an issue now, IE8 is better with standards, and the usage share of alternative browsers grew to a point that they can't be ignored.
Also the EU's latest legislation should help level the playing field. I especially like the interoperability bit, and I hope it extends to ensuring IE complies with standards and doesn't introduce proprietary extensions.
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Actually IE8 might be soon the king of IEs even corporations now have a serious upgrade look.
I expect that IE7 wont really have the impact IE6 had and frankly spoken IE8 while not being really that good is good enough for now.
Still I applaud the rise of firefox, this will open enough pressure on M$ to finally support SVG and raise their ACID compliancy from 20% up to decent levels without lying that ACID tested unfinished standards (which it does not)
And that fine too. I don't see why any browser should have more than 20-25% share. Looks like we're heading somewhere even better than replacing IE with Firefox.