17 Sep

Firefox is growing trendy for the common viewer

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-.

08/09/0409/09/0410/09/0413/09/0414/09/0415/09/0416/09/0417/09/04
IE62809391430411721322543383729274439432983416484234380865145987875
IE550870615449934572559164344346757312709466174288367759053
IE494268101497not taken124086130751137542144749151380
Mozilla682356737769782658921321974166102795110808641135247
NN7317419341740361169474727439413461675483835505864
NN6not takennot taken262363104232951348563661238610
NN5280483326900364350416702520788565912611693658746
MICROSOFT96.3096.2496.1295.9795.9395.9095.8795.84
GECKO3.703.763.884.034.074.104.134.16

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.

%d bloggers like this: