I pretty much never use caps in my blog titles, but this one seems to call for it.
According to Business Week's quoting of WebSideStory, Firefox has gained 4.6% in the two months since its release!
It's Godzilla vs. Mozilla, and Mozilla is a midget. Yet the pipsqueak is pulling off a feat that would have seemed preposterous a year ago. It's taking chunks of share from Microsoft in the Internet browsing market. According to a survey released Jan. 12 by research firm WebSideStory, Mozilla's free Firefox browser has grabbed a 4.6% share in the two months since it was released and seems well on the way to its stated goal of 10%.Microsoft's Internet Explorer has slipped 4.9 percentage points over the past six months, to 90.6%, the lowest in three years. "It's an emotional number. When Microsoft drops to 90%, it's big news," says Jeffrey W. Lunsford, WebSideStory's chairman.
That's amazing. Go read the rest of the article. It's good.
It might also give us some rough estimation metrics for comparing downloads to marketshare. If we got 16 million downloads during the two months WSS noted a 4.6% gain for Firefox, then that translates to about 1 percentage point for every additional 3.5 million downloads. It'll take more data to really nail this down, and there's always a mess around upgrades versus new users, but it seems like this should be a somewhat useful estimation tool.
Then again, as Blake pointed out to me, it's possible that this is confused reporting and that Firefox total is at 4.6% (from the beginning of time, not since the release) which would be up about half a point from the WSS stats from a month ago.
Either way, this means that OneStat and WebSideStory are mostly in agreement that Microsoft is down around 90%, off from significantly higher highs.
edited after blake quelled my initial excitement
Also, you need to factor in that one download can be used many times.
As I layed out on http://www.spreadfirefox.com/?q=node/view/9853, Firefox went from a 4.4% to 8.8% from oct to dec in pagehits on the german news site focus.de. That is a plain no-tech political weekly news magazine. On the computer magazine site of that publisher (chip.de), FF has a share of ~25%. Sweet german numbers :-).
Have you considered adding a "phone home" feature that contacts the mozilla.org servers the first time Firefox is run? Daniel Glazman has added something like that to Nvu to help monitor uptake.
Or could you use the update.mozilla.org pings as a measure of current usage?
Obviously this will set the privacy advocates off on a rant...
"It's taking chunks of share from Microsoft in the Internet browsing market."
Internet and Web are not interchangable.
@ Andrew Smith: Please, no "phone home" feature. Only E.T. is allowed to phone home.
Besides, a "phone home" feature would only tell us thta FF has been installed, not how much it is used (unless you want to transfer surf logs as well...)
Instead, we should promote good browser detection software that recognizes Firefox and tells it apart form other -zillas.
The real-world number of non-IE browsers is offcourse slightly better than what OneStat and WebSideStory can report.
A fraction of the non-IE browsers use useragentswitching to access those cursed IE-only sites.
The opposite offcourse doesn't happen , IE-users pretending to use Mozilla/Opera.
"It might also give us some rough estimation metrics for comparing downloads to marketshare. If we got 16 million downloads during the two months WSS noted a 4.6% gain for Firefox, then that translates to about 1 percentage point for every additional 3.5 million downloads. It'll take more data to really nail this down, and there's always a mess around upgrades versus new users, but it seems like this should be a somewhat useful estimation tool."
It think the truth must be that the 4.6 % have been added since the 1.0 release. See my guessing work (based on OneStat numbers) in the comments to this post:
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/006799.html
Based on the rough calculation 3.5 million downloads per percentage point, we could swap the title of the counter graphic on sfx. What about 'The March to Total World Domination (350 million downlaods)'?
:-)
article since has been corrected and now reads
"Mozilla's free Firefox browser has grabbed a 4.6% share over the past six months and seems well on the way to its stated goal of 10%. "
There are around 1.000.000.000 users of the web, not 350.000.000.
Anyway, I was always interested, do they count page hits, or unique users (to the degree they are able to identify them). If the latter is true, then 4.6% is a real good value, as it is likely that it transalates into 10-20% of page hits (more active users use Firefox).
Asa, don't your download figures only include downloads from mozilla.org? I'll grant you that mozilla.org is certainly the most popular download point, but other sites like download.com are surely getting traffic, aren't they?