+-----------+----------+--------+ +----------+--------+ | Month | IE | Change | | Gecko | Change | +-----------+----------+--------+ +----------+--------+ | January05 | 69.70% | -1.10% | | 23.00% | +0.50% | | December | 70.80% | -2.70% | | 22.50% | +2.00% | | November | 73.50% | -1.70% | | 20.50% | +1.70% | | October | 75.20% | -0.60% | | 18.80% | +0.60% | | September | 75.80% | -1.50% | | 18.20% | +1.30% | | August | 77.30% | -1.40% | | 16.90% | +1.70% | | July | 78.70% | -2.00% | | 15.20% | +2.00% | | June | 80.70% | -1.10% | | 13.20% | +0.80% | | May | 81.80% | -0.70% | | 12.40% | +0.70% | | April | 82.50% | -0.30% | | 11.70% | +0.70% | | March | 82.80% | -0.20% | | 11.00% | +0.50% | | February | 83.00% | -1.10% | | 10.50% | +0.80% | | January | 84.10% | | | 9.70% | | +-----------+----------+--------+ +----------+--------+
Today the early January browser stats have been posted at W3Schools. They've split out the Firefox results from the Mozilla results - which is interesting, but not terribly helpful for Web developers.
Here's a slightly different format for their browser stats
As you can see, the last year has been good for Gecko and not so good for IE -- at least among the Web developer types that visit w3schools.
Posted by asa at January 3, 2005 01:10 PM
The strange thing in this stats is the 0.70% that left IE but not join Gecko. Since "not browsing the web anymore" isn't an option, and they doesn't seem to have gone to Opera or Netscape, where did they go?
Is it possible that with all the browser-switching-stuff people are start using IE-alternatives like Avant and Maxthon and that these identify themselfs in such a way they get counted as "others"?
Posted by: Bram on January 3, 2005 03:12 PMBram, the difference (per the stats) between the drop in IE users and the increase in Gecko users is actually 0.6% of the total visitors. Opera 7 gained 0.1% of the viewership, leaving half a percent of the visitors as mysterious "switchers". Mac and Linux have increased their combined share of visitors slowly and steadily, but I doubt they are the gainers since that would require almost a 10% usage jump in a single month for each (and no new users running Opera or Mozilla).
My best guess is that it is a rounding error. With Firefox being broken out as its own collumn for the first time, I wonder where (whether) the remaining "Phoenix" and "Firebird" users got counted, not to mention the Galleon and Camino users.
For the record, I'm only using one decimal place in this post since all the trailing zeros make it pretty clear that W3C Schools tracks stats to the nearest thousandth share, not ten-thousandth.
Here are some more (damn lies) stats for everyone to chew on.
The Gecko to IE use ratio (Gecko/IE) is increasing nearly exponentially on the W3C Schools site. If the growth trend continues, Gecko use should be on par with IE use in 18-24 months. If one runs the numbers using the more optimistic data points (recent growth rates are higher) it could be as little as 12 months.
12 to 24 months has been bandied about as the likely delivery timeframe for Longhorn, so if half of the content/layout/web-app people are addicted to Gecko by then we could be in for a very interesting "platform" fight. Keep in mind that between 7% and 9% of them will be running either Linux or Mac OS by then, too (again, extrapolating trends).
Posted by: Kommet on January 3, 2005 08:10 PMThis is all very encouraging, but Firefox needs to get even deeper into the market. Thee are several spots where Firefox marketing can get better without much effort:
** The Firefox download page (http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/all.html) lists only the foxes for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. A link to the various ports (http://www.mozilla.org/ports/) would be nice. Firefox is very portable, and should be established as the browser of choice for "exotic" OSes. There are many smaller platforms looking for a quality browser, and Firefox is just that. It just appears that users and web designers have not really understood that. Sure, these small platforms will not make a huge impact themselves, but they help spread the fame of Firefox.
** Corporations, universities, governments. The big organisations are next. Firefox MSIs are already coming up. How far are the marketing efforts here? Has there been an effort to recruit firefox fans who work in corpland?
** OEMs. Get Firefox on as many new PCs as possible. People use what you give them. Give them Firefox.
** ISPs. Many ISPs give their customers an install CD with lots of software goodies (at least, they do here in Europe, where I live). How about Firefox with an ISP-specific theme? How much do the ISPs spend on tracking down all those spam zombie boxes that were infected through MSIE and ActiveX?
Posted by: Adaxl on January 3, 2005 11:06 PMThese are not the stats just for W3Schools. If they were you'd see IE at about 30% or less. I don't know where they are getting their numbers from but it's obvious by looking at them that they are not measuring the browsers of web developers.
It says Opera 7 there, what about Opera 8? I prefer to group my stats into Gecko, IE, KHTML, Opera and other (mostly spiders). I don't bother with versions. I can't wait to drop IE support or at least hide CSS from it.
Posted by: Luke Shingles on January 4, 2005 01:11 AM