Asa Dotzler - Firefox and more: webside story sees ie fall below 90%

February 26, 2005

webside story sees ie fall below 90%

Firefox and other Gecko-based browsers now account for 8.16% of the U.S. market, according to WebSideStory's latest report.

As Firefox and other Gecko-based browsers push toward 10%, IE has finally fallen under the 90% mark for the first time in WebSideStory's tracking history.

We're making great strides and doing it faster than anyone could have imagined. With your help, we're taking back the web.

Thanks to David for the heads-up. Posted by asa at February 26, 2005 05:28 PM

Comments

Asa, your link to WebSideStory is blank. Should it link here?

http://www.websidestory.com/services-solutions/datainsights/spotlight.html

Posted by: Programmerman on February 26, 2005 06:11 PM

Given the latest growth rates, the year end target still appears attainable, but a mid-year achievement is unlikely unless we see increased marketing activity from the Mozilla Foundation.

Them be fightin' words. Posted by: Robert Accettura on February 26, 2005 07:07 PM

I wonder how much growing we have yet to accomplish... according to that Websidestory link, it says Firefox growth is slowing... was 34% in about the first month after release, then dropping to 22% for about a month, and then 15% growth for the last 5 weeks or so.

Do you think that's a bad sign that the Firefox userbase won't grow much further? I'm hopin' it's just meaning there was a fast start from all the hype of the release...but still, when will it level off and stop dropping?

Posted by: Devon on February 26, 2005 09:35 PM

I'd like to quote a comment from MozillaZine:

They're clearly assuming compounded growth, while there's no reason to believe that's realistic.
To illustrate: if we added one user per month, the percentage growth in the second month would be 100% (from one to two users), in the third month it would be 50% (from two to three users), in the fourth month it would be 33.3% (from three to four users), etc. So growth would be constant in linear terms, but decreasing if you assumed compounded (ie. exponential) growth.
It should be clear from the outset that there's no way compounded growth figures could be sustained. A more likely model is slow (perhaps linear) growth for a long time, until a certain critical mass is attained. Then a period of exponential growth, leveling off at some equilibrium value that will be very hard to surpass. This model, at least, is consistent with the theory on network effects.
In this case I think the period of exponential growth will begint when IT departments start adopting Firefox en mass. That will expose a lot of new users to the product who will then also install it at home.

Posted by: minghong on February 27, 2005 03:35 AM

I've done some number-crunching based on their figures, and: yes, they're assuming exponential growth. What I see looks much more like a surge around the 1.0 release, which then settled back to a lower (but steady) level of linear growth. *IF* that steady linear growth continues, Firefox will hit 10% sometime in September 2005. That's a very big "if", of course.

Details of my calculations are at http://www.livejournal.com/community/stats_weenie/2005/02/27/

Posted by: blufive on February 27, 2005 04:05 AM

The Firefox project needs a new push, and that will come with the MSI installer that will make FF rollout in companies, universities and governmental agencies easier. Firefox is also included in many Linux distributions now. The city of Vienna, Austria, decided to migrate part of its desktops to a special Debian Linux called "Wienux" (http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/55470), which will include Firefox as the standard web browser.

If Firefox makes inroads in companies and governmentss, the adoption rate should go up dramatically.

Posted by: adaxl on February 27, 2005 06:01 AM

"If" the steady linear growth continues? Personally, I think it would grow linearly if nothing else changed. As we've got a 1.1 release coming up a bit before then, I expect we'll see 10% some time before September due to the 1.1 press we'll get.

Posted by: Jeff Walden on February 27, 2005 10:53 AM

"I think it would grow linearly if nothing else changed"

I don't, because the numbers they are looking at are the relative numbers. So if you expect the linear growth to continue, you would expect to see Firefox usage over 100%. That is perhaps a little to optimistic (no offence, Asa :) ).

Therefore, I find the conclusions from WebSideStory a little shaky at best. But hey, they just do this kind of "statistics" for a living.

Posted by: AndersH on February 27, 2005 11:50 AM