November 30, 2008
firefox market share up in november
NetApplications has just released their monthly report Browser Market Share which shows Firefox hitting 20.72% of the global market in November.
(Data from NetApplications)
This is a pretty solid jump over October, but also fairly consistent with the kind of growth Firefox has seen in the third quarter of previous years.
This month, the browsing world hit another major milestone, Internet Explorer fell below 70% market share for the first time, landing at 69.88% for the month of November.
(Data from NetApplications)
As you can see when comparing the two graphs, IE is falling at a slightly faster rate than Firefox is growing. Pretty much all of the difference can be accounted for in the slow decline of the Windows desktop, which has this month fallen under the 90% mark for the first time. (Will the I.E. team get back into the game on Macs?)
And finally, so I'm not accused of leaving off the niche browsers, Chrome has pulled solidly ahead of Opera, making it the new king of the sub-1%ers with about 0.83% usage.
All in all, a great month for browser competition on the Web. Who could ask for anything more.
reactions, thoughts, comments, etc.
Posted by: Stifu | December 1, 2008 2:13 AM
Stifu, well, you could put it that way. If I had said that Safari is eating into IE's market share, which is what it sounds like you're advocating, I think it would be sort of confusing and misleading.
Yes, that Mac is growing, where there is no IE, is the other (than Firefox just kicking the crap out of it,) major reasons that IE usage is slipping. But it's really Mac beating Windows, not Safari beating IE and I think that's a reasonable way to look at things.
On Windows, where Microsoft is in the game, they're losing to Firefox (and not really to anyone else -- all of the browsers behind Firefox account for barely 2 percent of the Windows browser market.) On Mac, Microsoft isn't even in the game and so it's the default bundled browser, Safari, that's slowly but surely losing to Firefox :-)
- A
Posted by: Asa Dotzler | December 1, 2008 2:28 AM
Oh, you're right... I filtered the stats by only showing Windows users, and was surprised Safari only accounted for 0.35%. :|
That's not even half of Opera's marketshare.
Posted by: Stifu | December 1, 2008 2:43 AM
Yeah, there's really not much competition for IE on Windows except Firefox. The same could be said of competition for Safari on Mac. It's basically "the default" for 70-80 percent of users and Firefox for nearly all of the remainder.
It turns out that, contrary to the opinions of lots of bloggers and tech pundits, taking market share from the bundled browser isn't really that easy and it doesn't happen overnight.
- A
Posted by: Asa Dotzler | December 1, 2008 3:02 AM
Safari on Windows is CRAP, no one should ever install or use it and we all know about their software update shenanigans and bs. But now with Chrome/Chromium nightly builds, you have a very good Webkit based browser if you need to test your pages for.
Firefox needs to eat up another 20% more marketshare off IE. Once standards based browsers have 50% or more market share than IE, then it's a victory for standards based development and rejection of closed proprietary vendor lock-in IE only bs.
And for those companies that locked themselves into IE6 and still haven't begun development of replacement internal intranet apps, it will bite you in the behind soon. Even Microsoft won't support IE6 forever, how much longer can you procratinate?
Posted by: Anon | December 1, 2008 3:30 AM
Yeah, I guess Chrome pretty much killed Safari on Windows, most developers won't bother getting it anymore... Unless Safari 4 turns out to be great and that the Windows port gets better, I can't see things looking any better for its Windows marketshare.
I still remember Steve Jobs announcing Safari on Windows with great fanfare, last year... :p
Posted by: Stifu | December 1, 2008 3:55 AM
Fantastic news!
There's no doubt that when given the choice or even being aware that there is a choice, Windows users will/are choosing to use Firefox.
Posted by: Ken Saunders | December 1, 2008 8:31 AM
Asa Dotzler is right: Safari eats into the marketshare of IE because Mac is eating Windows. This also means an advantage for multi-platform browsers, of which Firefox is number one. I believe we shall see another leap once Firefox 3.1 comes out.
The iPhone is also doing quite nicely (from 0.19% in July 2008 to 0.37% in November 2008!) The iPhone does not run Firefox, but it really hurts Windows Mobile, which helps to undermine the market position of Microsoft even more.
Posted by: ADAXL | December 1, 2008 11:26 AM
PS: I almost forgot: Congratulations for hitting 20% market share. Lets hope it stays that way and goes even higher.
Posted by: ADAXL | December 1, 2008 1:02 PM
I just wanted to inform you that the Austrian newspaper "Der Standard" published an article today about the usage share of browsers on their website (http://derstandard.at/?url=/?id=1227287477633). Here are the numbers:
Internet Explorer 50,31 %
Firefox 38,11 %
Safari / Google Chrome 8,22 %
Opera 2,45 %
Mozilla-Suite / Seamonkey 0,69 %
Netscape 0,09 %
Konqueror 0,05 %
A second article has the OS share of visitors to the website of "Der Standard" (http://derstandard.at/?url=/?id=1227287573723). It says Mac OS X has 12,04% and Linux 2,56% share.
"Der Standard" is a daily paper, politically slightly "left", but attracts a normal (non-techie) audience.
Posted by: ADAXL | December 2, 2008 11:05 AM
Asa, I'm am appalled that you would steal 0.06% of Firefox's market share. Who did you give it to? That's just mean!
(The Net Applications link says Firefox had 20.78% market share, not 20.72%.)
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/firefox-market-share.aspx?qprid=0&sample=28
Posted by: Samuel Sidler | December 2, 2008 11:46 AM
I guess the fact IE is falling slightly faster than Firefox is growing is quite simply due to the fact browsers other than Firefox are also growing.