I know it's completely silly to mix and match studies, polls, and other datapoints but since I don't have any comprehensive statistics about Mozilla and Firefox market share, I dig through what I can find and try to find the places they all agree. I use Google's zeitgeist graph as one data point. My thechnique there, hackish as it is, is to open that image in photoshop, sample it up and try to get some measurements from it. Another datapoint I look at is the semi-regular Onestat press release on market share. I also follow W3Schools for a peek into what web developers and aspiring web developers are using. The good news is that in all of these datasets, we're moving up. The bad news is that it's hard to tell by how much or how many users that represents.
Given that difficulty, it's nice to have additional datapoints and this week we got one more from WebSideStory which says that we've moved from 3.21% to 4.05% at the same time that IE lost exactly one percentage point. It's not clear to me if they're taking about worldwide, English speaking, or US market share. If it's just the English speaking Web (about 290 million users), which I suspect it is, then that works out to a gain of something like 2.5 million new Gecko-based browser users in one month. If it's just US internet population, then it's about 2 million new users. Not bad for 1 month :-) If it's worldwide (which I don't think WebSiedStory tracks) then it could be as many as 6 million new users in one month. That seems just too high to me, though.
I assume I'm not alone in trying to divine some stats from a lot of incomplete data. What sources do you use?
