One of the more interesting dynamics on Web that I've been following is the difference between users and usage on weekdays and weekends. We only understand part of this because we don't know user counts for other browsers, but I think we could have some interesting discussions and maybe even make some guesses at other browsers based on what we do know about Firefox.
Here's what we know:
From our own update ping metrics, we know that the total number of active Firefox browsers drops about 19% on weekends.
From Net Applications we see that Firefox usage goes up by about 10% on weekends. (Other usage tracking sites confirm the trend, though they differ in degree.)
So what's going on here? The number of active Firefox installs drops pretty seriously on weekends, but Firefox usage goes way up.
There's only one simple explanation, and that is that the total number of active users on the Web drops precipitously on weekends, but that decline isn't as steep for Firefox as it is for IE.
There are two reasons for this, I believe. First, I think that there are a lot of people who only (or mostly) access the Web from work and those work machines are locked down in terms of browser choice, heavily favoring IE. When those people go home on the weekend, the total number of people active on the Web drops dramatically and negatively impacts IE's active user number and IE's usage share.
The second reason, I think, is that people who access the Web from both work and home, while they may be stuck with IE at work, have made the choice to move to Firefox at home. So when those people go home, IE again loses users and share, but Firefox picks up some users and share.
I think it's probably more the former than the latter, but I wouldn't discount those home choice-makers completely. Are there other explanations for this dynamic?
Now, I'm just not good at math, but I'll bet some of you all are. Maybe one of you could help me take this a bit further.
As I said above, on weekends Firefox users drop by 19% while usage grows by 10%. We also know that IE usage drops 7% on weekends. If we just look at Firefox and IE for a moment, is it possible to work backwards and figure out how much IE's active users drops off on weekends?
