stats from tall buildings
Following up on my Wakoopa Firefox metrics post, I should definitely mention the latest from Forrester Research, as excerpted by Larry Dignan:
Firefox is the browser of choice for 19.4 percent of enterprise users surveyed up from 16.8 percent in January. It’s also notable that IE 6.0 is top dog with 63.5 percent share. IE 7.0 is 36.5 percent. Overall, the message is clear. Browsers are diverse within the enterprise and you can’t develop for just one.Now, I'm assuming those IE 6 and 7 numbers aren't relative to the whole since combining them would put the Firefox and IE total at about 119.4% so I'm guessing it's a simple breakdown of IE's share. If that's the case,
That really does hit home Larry's point that the enterprise really is a diverse space and there's just no good excuse for most enterprises to develop for just one rendering engine.
Even more exciting than that, though, is how much progress Firefox is making and how quickly. Not long ago, analysts at companies like Forrester were saying that Firefox just couldn't make it in the enterprise. At nearly 20% and growing almost half a point per month, I don't think anyone can discount Firefox's potential to succeed in the enterprise as well as it is with consumers.
Go Firefox!
update: IE numbers updated based on better data from here.
update2: With Macs making up 4.5% of the machines surveyed and Safari accounting for only 2.4% of the browsers, is it reasonable to assume that nearly half the Mac users are opting for Firefox rather than Safari?
reactions, thoughts, comments, etc.
I just want to add that IE-only products are unacceptable, especially in this day and age. For example, my own company is about to launch a new web product that is IE-only, shame I don't have any say on this matter... (By the way, we're in a little office in Paris, and 3/4 of us are Firefox users)
Posted by: Stifu | July 25, 2008 6:15 AM
Our company is the same: IE 7 only in spite of the fact that most of us are FF users.
Posted by: James | July 25, 2008 8:16 AM
I consider myself lucky - my job is writing webpages to standards, then patching them to work for IE6/7. You can guess which takes more time though.
Posted by: ant | July 25, 2008 6:05 PM
That's what we do, too, since I'm in charge of that. Everything done by us is cross-browser compatible, I just enforced that rule since day one (that other IE-only web app is an exception, as it's not done by our branch but by colleagues in Denmark).
Besides, we've now got around 30% of non-IE visitors (~23% Firefox, ~6% Safari, ~1% Opera), so ignoring them isn't an option. Although I worked toward that goal, I'm still surprised we've got that many alternative browsers on our site, considering we have a Java app (not made by us) on all of our pages that tends to crash non-IE browsers frequently.
Posted by: Stifu | July 25, 2008 11:14 PM
It's probably far more reasonable to assume that Mac users don't surf the web as much. Given the plethora of browsers available for Mac — all of which better than Firefox for Mac — you'd have to make a lot of ridiculous assumptions and lose any grip on reality to assume Firefox is used on nearly half of all Macs.
Posted by: Steven Fisher | July 27, 2008 8:45 AM
Steven Fisher: last time I checked, the popularity of browsers wasn't proportional or even related to their quality. Same for everything, it's not always the best products that sell the most. (That's not to say I don't like Firefox, and I enjoy seeing it spreading)
Anyway, I can't see why Mac users wouldn't surf the web as much as Windows or Linux users. I guess the average Mac user is more aware of alternatives than the average Windows user, so fewer Mac users stay with the default browser.
Posted by: Stifu | July 27, 2008 11:50 PM
@Steven Fisher: your argument doesn't seem to have too strong a grip on reality either. ;)
We use Firefox almost exclusively on Mac. Partly because we like Firefox, partly due to inertia, and in no small part due to also working on Windows quite often - thus using the same browser on both platforms.
I know quite a few Mac users, I'd be hard-pressed based on that anecdotal evidence to make any claim that Mac users surf either more or less than other users. Despite that, I'd probably be willing to be you money that Mac users don't "surf the web as much". If anything, in general Mac users seem to be more savvy and more connected to web services. And hello, iPhone?
There was a good point buried in your comment though: there are a good number of browsers for the Mac, and it is a stretch to assume that *all* market-share besides Safari belongs to Firefox - though not a surprising stretch, given whose blog we're on. :)
Posted by: Step | July 28, 2008 7:24 AM