browser usage for february

We're one week away from the NetApplications February browser usage report, and as I've been doing lately, I'm posting my predictions a week early based on analysis of the daily and weekly data.

February is wrapping up to be one of the more interesting months in a while because of how flat everything looks.

From least to most interesting, here's what I see happening in February.

Opera is going to turn in a pretty flat month, wrapping February at either 0.70% or 0.71%. The long-term trends for Opera lend confidence to this prediction.

Opera's had some modest ups and downs but year over year growth is pretty much negligible. The Web is growing very quickly and Opera's just not able to outpace the Web's overall growth, so while they're surely adding users, they're not able to get a larger piece of the pie.

Chrome appears to be set also for a pretty flat month in February. February will mark the 6th month of Chrome availability. Ending the month with a predicted 1.15% usage share will make clear a nearly horizontal line going back to late December.

From these numbers, it looks like Chrome had a pretty flat first two months, modest growth for the middle two months with the 0.3, 0.4, and 1.0 releases and has fallen back to mostly flat again for the last two months.

Firefox will again post modest gains in February, likely adding about a quarter point to end February with 21.75% usage. It's obviously too early to make 2009 predictions, but I think there's little doubt that Firefox will break 25% this year and may end up closer to 30%.

Internet Explorer will lose more share again in February, but not quite as bad as it's been for the last few months. I'm predicting that IE6 and IE7 combined will net a negative one quarter to one third of a point to close out February at 67.3% usage. I've discussed IE6's rapid decline in recent posts, but another interesting trend is emerging.

IE7 obviously benefited immensely from Windows Update. You can see that from the first big boost after release and then another growth spurt when Microsoft removed the WGA anti-piracy requirement. What I'm more interested in, though, are the flatness of the line over the last 8 months or so and that IE7 never broke 50% usage. With IE 8 just around the corner, it doesn't look like IE7 will ever break 50%. That's pretty amazing.

Finally, the most surprising move of February comes from Safari which I predict will fall back a full quarter point. It's not so much Safari, though, as Mac OS X. I'm predicting that Mac usage overall will take a hit of almost three tenths of a point and that's going to cost Safari for February.

Safari has benefited a lot from Mac's positive holiday season in 2008 and with less Web browsing going on there, Firefox and Safari are both losing some usage. Safari's got the lions share of Mac so it's taking a bigger hit there and it doesn't have any life at all on Windows where Firefox was more than able to make up that loss.

As I said in the opening, these are all just predictions. It'll be a week more before the February numbers are out. I'll revisit the numbers and any analysis that's impacted by the final numbers in a week.