I’ve been following TheCounter.com’s stats for a few weeks, and a very interesting trend is emerging.

I think that TheCounter is probably a more accurate view of browser status than most of the more technically-minded stats sites.

For example, w3schools claims there is a 20% market share for Mozilla. This is certainly not in the non-technical community. Government offices, for example, are traditionally slow to change technologies, and home-users tend to use what has come with their computer and nothing else.

Anyway – I believe TheCounter.com offers a more valid status.

Here is a slice of the last 9 or so days. I’ve only taken the stats for Mozilla-based browsers and IE-based browsers. I ignore all others, and IE3- and NN4-.

	08/09/04	09/09/04	10/09/04	13/09/04	14/09/04	15/09/04	16/09/04	17/09/04
IE6	28093914	30411721	32254338	37292744	39432983	41648423	43808651	45987875
IE5	5087061	5449934	5725591	6434434	6757312	7094661	7428836	7759053
IE4	94268	101497	not taken	124086	130751	137542	144749	151380
Mozilla	682356	737769	782658	921321	974166	1027951	1080864	1135247
NN7	317419	341740	361169	474727	439413	461675	483835	505864
NN6	not taken	not taken	26236	31042	32951	34856	36612	38610
NN5	280483	326900	364350	416702	520788	565912	611693	658746
MICROSOFT	96.30	96.24	96.12	95.97	95.93	95.90	95.87	95.84
GECKO	3.70	3.76	3.88	4.03	4.07	4.10	4.13	4.16

What I think is very interesting in this is that there is an uptake of at least .03% for Firefox every day. The first three recorded days are a bit spotty, but it is very obvious that there is a threat for Microsoft!

I’m just waiting for Firefox to hit 20% using this table before I try really plugging it to my company. As a web development company, we generally focus on the browsers with the highest market share, and that’s a real shame, as that’s IE6 at the moment, which has really spotty support for most standards, and introduces things which don’t work in other browsers.