September 2009 Archives

Looking at a rolling 1 week average, Firefox has been above 24% global usage share for for several days now. We probably won't break 24% for the month of September but we're going to come pretty close and I think this puts us on track to easily reach 25% of global usage by the end of the year.

That's going to be pretty amazing. This year, Firefox will account for a full quarter of all browsing on the planet. Statistically, if you approach a group of 4 people, one of them is a Firefox user.

Mozilla's global community of contributors sure does have a lot to be proud of. A special thanks to all of localizers who have built amazing communities on top of an amazing product. With more than half of our users and our usage coming from outside of the US, you all really did make this possible.

w00t

Theora 1.1 has been released. This release includes huge updates to the encoder and some pretty solid updates to the decoder.

Read all about it over at the Mozilla Hacks blog.

If you didn't see tonight's Dancing With the Stars, you missed a magical moment.

Actually, several moments.

The first was Macy Grey's waltz. It was genuine and engaging, if not perfect.

The second was Macy's green room commentary. Brilliant!

The third was Kelly Osbourne's waltz. Kelly just about brought tears to my eyes. She really does have the most to gain from this and she obviously put her everything into it.

Check out Vlad's blog. WebGL has just landed in the Firefox nightly builds. OpenGL for Web pages!!!

InfoWorld is reporting on stats from exo.performance.network that Firefox is now on more consumer computers that not.

It finally happened. After years of building momentum -- and more than a few false starts -- Mozilla's Firefox Web browser has finally reached critical mass. There are now more users running some variant of Firefox (50.6 percent) than not running it, according to the latest statistics from the exo.performance.network, which tracks the actual usage and configurations of thousands of PCs globally, providing a real-world snapshot.

In an interview with Reuters, Chrome Engineering Director Linus Upson went on record with some usage share targets for Chrome, stating "If at the two-year birthday we're not at least 5 percent (market share), I will be exceptionally disappointed."

Chrome launched just over a year ago and jumped immediately up to 1% global share. In the year since, they've added 2 points to that total and it sounds like they're shooting for another two points in their second year.

This would put Chrome in the second best growth position behind Firefox which is gaining about 5 points per year. Safari is in third place gaining about 1 point each year. Opera follows Safari with about a quarter point growth per year.

Here's what that looks like for the last year, according to Net Applications.

The good news for Firefox and the feisty gang of niche browsers (and the entire Web) is that IE is the big loser here. In the last year, the ~8.75 points gained by Firefox and the others all came at the expense of Internet Explorer which went from owning almost 3/4ths of all web traffic to less than 2/3rds. That's a pretty positive year of change.

update: A couple complaints about the graph so here's an alternate view on the same data that might be easier to digest.

I learned this week that Sparky, beloved member of the Hofmann family, Mozilla icon, and all around good dog, has passed away.

He's seen as much of Mozilla as any one, from the Netscape campus, to our space on Villa Street, to the Landings buildings, and most recently, downtown Mountain View.

He was with us for the first Mozilla releases, for Firefox 1.0, and up through the most recent Firefox 3.5 release. He was known to many at Mozilla as a tenacious, and scrappy but fun terrier with a fiery (as in Firefox) personality.

We miss you Sparky, and we're thinking a lot about your human family and their loss. We love you all.

Rest in peace, Sparky.

Sparky, covering my duties at Mozilla while I take a break.

A big thanks to Sam Sidler for stepping up to update the Planet Mozilla theme.

The update moves Planet Mozilla forward to the style of the recently updated mozilla.org website. I really like this new look for mozilla.org. It seems to me just the right mixture of the classic Mozilla call to action style and the contemporary feel that represents of Mozilla's amazing global reach.

Net Applications has released their August update.

Firefox gained half a point to land a hair shy of 23%. IE dropped 7/10ths of a point to a hair shy of 67%. Chrome grew a quarter point to achieve 2.84% global share on its one year anniversary. Everything else was pretty much flat.

It looks like the summer slowdown is ending for Firefox. For as long as we've been tracking users and usage trends, summer has always been slow for Firefox. I attribute some of it to many of our European users taking their nice long summer breaks and to school being out. Once Europe returns from vacation and students return to class, we start to see solid gains.

The other interesting bit is the 1 year anniversary of Chrome. Chrome jumped right up to 1 point immediately on launch, and in the 11.5 months since then has added less than two points to their overall share. They're getting close to Safari levels and pushed Opera into fifth place so that's gotta make the Chrome folks happy, but I think that most people expected more than 2.84% share a year after the big release.

Finally, on the browser versions front, for the average of the month of August, IE was splitting its users three ways, with ~25% on 6, 21~ on 7, and 15% on 8. Firefox usage was split with about 12.5% on 3 and 8.9% on 3. Firefox 2 usage is well under 1.5% and it's probably time for Web developers to consider whether or not it makes sense to continue supporting Firefox 2.