Tadaa! This is so great! /me dances

Woohoo!! This is amazing news! It should be posted on Mozillazine, because it means that the user votes were right, and even with some time to spare :).

In their tables, they do list Firefox as having those shares. But if you read the text of the report and their previous two reports, it's clear that the shares listed for Firefox are actually for all Mozilla browsers combined, including Netscape 6/7/8 and the Mozilla Application Suite. It's still not clear if Firefox really has grabbed 10% usage share.

Even so, 14% Gecko is quite an accomplishment!

The market share of Mozilla & Co in Germany hit 19% a few days ago on Webhits.de. I did not want to report this before I could tell that this was a real development, not just a statistical fluke. Right now, the share is at 19.1%, and appears to be stable.

marketshare.hitslink.com reports 8.59% for Firefox alone.

Looking good. Congratulations all around!

Gecko rocks

Who cares what browser it is as long as it's not IE. Once you get closer to 25% usage for anything other than IE - businesses have to make serious decisions about - do we go ASP.NET, or perhaps something more standards friendly like PHP? (n.b: any argument that the server language is independent of the standards compliance of the HTML should install ASP.NET and learn that it is indeed - almost impossible to write conforming HTML with it)

IBM are in the web apps businnes, the reason they want Firefox compatibility is because businesses are going to hear this Firefox buzz-word and start asking about compatibility when it comes to assessing a new CRM / CMS / DMS etc.

Misleading if that figure is infact inclusive of all Mozilla browsers, the suite, Netscape etc, infact just plain incorrect, they should correct that.

The UK is higher than 5% though, more like 14+% now I saw somewhere. Most stats put the UK ahead of USA and Canada which this stat also doesnt suggest. Even this stat from ages ago shows the UK at over 12%; http://www.xitimonitor.com/etudes/equipement10.asp

"Amsterdam - November 2 2005 - OneStat.com"

why does this article have tomorrow's date?

OneStat's services and reports always did suck.

Very exciting news indeed. I dispute that it will take 25% of the market to get businesses to pay attention; I think we're already there. When a U.S. business realizes that they will be shutting out almost 1/5 of their potential market by coding only to IE, I don't think they have a choice any more.

It will be interesting to see how IE7 changes things. From reading the IE blog, many sites (especially XHTML-based) which rely on the current bugs and quirks in IE6 will break under IE7. It looks like they're actually paying a lot more attention to becoming standards-compliant. Yet another reason businesses will have to build standards-compliant websites.

So once we see more standards-compliant websites, people should have less of a reason to stick with IE and be more willing to try something else. Of course if IE7 has all the features people switch to Firefox for in the first place, it won't matter which one came first; people may again decide to stick with IE since it's what they've already got.

I don't know which one of these links have the most accurate information, but all of them show firefox's market share increasing by 8% or more. Whatever the real statistics are, firefox is changing the way we see the web browser for better and that's what counts.

http://extremetracking.com/open;sys?login=kwstats
http://www.onestat.com/html/aboutus_pressbox40_browser_market_firefox_growing.html
http://my4.statcounter.com/project/standard/browser.php?project_id=234043&PHPSESSID=5c28d9353e53fed0334afcfbecf02571
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=0

From reading the IE blog, many sites (especially XHTML-based) which rely on the current bugs and quirks in IE6 will break under IE7.

Nope. Assuming they aren't using valid DOCTYPEs (and frankly, who does), nothing will change at all for existing sites.

- Chris

That's excellent news. Now Firefox needs to continue to build on that momentum and convert more enterprise users: business, government, K-12, universities, etc. And something really needs to be done about the UK market share! Less than five percent?! Oh, for shame... ;)

It is time for an all-out assault.

Mozilla Firefox 1.5 is coming. It will be a good product, and quite able to claim more market share. It will bring things such as SVG support that MS cannot match.

Microsoft will not offer MSIE7 for Windows 2000 and older. According to Webhits.de, Windows 2000 still has 19.6% market share, and Win98 has 8.4%. marketshare.hitslink.com places Windows 2000 at 10.03% market share, and Win98 at 5.13% . This means plenty of people who will be left out in the cold unless they adopt Firefox (or Opera). Most Win2000 installations will be big organisations (corporations, governments, etc.). We need that MSI installer, and a serious marketing effort. Most Win98 installations will be private users. How do we reach them?

Microsoft will offer only incomplete CSS support in MSIE7, again. Forget ACID2. Many webmasters who are fed up with Microsofts cavalier attitude might contribute.

Firefox Mozilla can easily make 20% in the USA and Europe as well as 15% worldwide.

Hi Asa,

I just did a "check for updates" on my Firefox 1.5 Beta 2, and was surprised that it installed what appears to be the release:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051025 Firefox/1.5

My window caption also doesn't say beta anymore.

This is a surprise, because...
1. I expected a release candidate.
2. There was no announcement in this blog or elsewhere.

One more thing: after restarting Firefox, it checked for updates, and notified me that two of my extensions are not compatible with the new version. It then offered to check for updates -- and found one. What updates did it look for earlier? Why didn't it find the one that was found later?
I also think it should check for extension updates BEFORE installing the new version.

Noam.

^ same problem, only I didn't update. this is a tad bit confusing on mozillas part.

Noam, this is the release candidate. It's being rolled out to beta users today and tomorrow. There will be announcements shortly.

- A

Yes, it is all Gecko browsers combined, but it is still quite a jump. Now if we can just convince WebSideStory to update their old April numbers, I can update the chart:
http://johnhaller.com/jh/useful_stuff/browser_statistics/

Nope. Assuming they aren't using valid DOCTYPEs (and frankly, who does), nothing will change at all for existing sites.

The IE dev team is certainly concerned enough about it to issue a "call to arms" to fix existing CSS tricks in IE:
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/10/12/480242.aspx

Plenty of sites use DOCTYPES. And plenty of them depend on existing hacks and quirks in IE.

The page you'd linked to is where I got my information in the first place. Those are all being fixed only when IE is in strict mode. Groups using valid DOCTYPEs alongside quirky IE CSS are going to be affected: those who don't currently bother with standards aren't. Most sites which have valid DOCTYPEs are written for standards first and then have IE hacks added in. They don't "rely" on these quirks.

- Chris

".... But if you read the text of the report and their previous two reports, it's clear that the shares listed for Firefox are actually for all Mozilla browsers combined, including Netscape 6/7/8 and the Mozilla Application Suite."

Not Netscape. It includes all Mozilla browsers but not Netscape. Netscape is listed separately in the tables, and not considered a Mozilla browser.