I'm a bit confused about the latest stats from WebSideStory. A big part of the reason I'm confused is that their report, apparently issued today, isn't available.
I go to their front page and see this nifty Firefox logo and headline "Firefox�s Adoption Rate Soars - Adoption rate of upstart browser triples over the last month. Read more." but the link for "read more" doesn't point to any real story.
Then there was the comment (now changed) in the business week article saying that Firefox gained 4.6%.
So, if we ignore the second hand reporting and just look at what WebSideStory says today, we tripled the Firefox adoption rate in December (assuming that means as compared to November) and the Novemeber growth was 34% over the previous month (from here.) so that would suggest that the rate of adoption was 100% in December (tree times 34%)? If so, that would suggest about a 4 point gain in December which would put Firefox at roughly 8%.
That doesn't seem to make a lot of sense either, given that the WebSideStory guy was quoted as saying "It's an emotional number. When Microsoft drops to 90%, it's big news,". If Firefox really was up to slightly more than 8% then Microsoft would have to have dropped below 90%, not just to 90% (because safari plus netscape and mozilla was just over 4% last month.) Now, I guess it's possible that Firefox took two percent from mozilla+netscape (and maybe even a bit more from safari+opera) and so IE at 90% could work out.
Well, I guess we have to wait and see the actual WebSideStory story. I wonder where the BusinessWeek guy saw it. I've sent them email about the bogus link. We'll see.
update One other way to guess at the report is to look at the WSS IE metrics from December, 91.80%. The BW article quotes WSS January 12 results as saying MS now has 90.6%. At a bare minimum, it sounds like Firefox grabbed another 1.2 percentage points from IE. Add that to Firefox's 4.06 number from the December report and Firefox should be up to 5.66%. As I mentioned above, it's also possible that Firefox took some more market away from the "other" browsers, Mozilla+Nescape+Opera+Safari.
