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.
Posted by: Cameron | September 27, 2009 9:37 AM
Cameron, how do you define standards compliant? Which standards? How complaint?
My first take would be that almost 60% of usage comes from browsers with decent support for standards. In that group I include Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome, and IE 8. Firefox is by far the biggest piece of that.
I predict that by the end of the year, approximately 2/3rds of browser usage will come from "standards compliant" browsers.
- A
Posted by: Asa Dotzler | September 27, 2009 9:48 AM
Good stuff. A related post I made the other day:
http://davidnaylor.org/blog/2009/09/one-year-in-europe.html
Posted by: David Naylor | September 27, 2009 9:56 AM
David, great post. I'm seeing something in both your graphs and the graphs I'm watching from Net Applications that worries me. I had assumed that IE 7 to IE 8 migration would be swift. I understand that lots of folks couldn't upgrade from 6 to 7, but 7 to 8 was supposed to be much easier because many of these people had already shown a willingness to update at all and because IE 8 has a 7 compatibility mode.
Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case. What I'm seeing is IE 7 and 8 both leveling off at about the same place, around 20%.
The only think I can think of is that in the two and a half years between the release of IE 7 and IE 8, a couple hundred million new PCs came online, all with IE 7, and those are not the same people who made the jump from 6 to 7. They're an entirely new cohort that doesn't know how or care to upgrade.
That's really unfortunate because it means that Web developers will have to contend with not only IE 6's slow decline but IE 7's slow decline as well.
What do you think? Will IE 7 slow to IE 6's rate of decline? Will we be stuck with those two for another couple of years?
- A
Posted by: Asa Dotzler | September 27, 2009 10:06 AM
Heh. When I reinstalled the older teen's XP box (true love is installing Windows for your loved one's daughter) I took care to (a) set Firefox as default everything (b) upgrade IE to IE8 (c) remove all links to IE from everywhere. I didn't actually delete the iexplore.exe binary, but I'm thinking I should have.
Oh, and (d) she runs as a non-admin user and her mother has the admin user on the box, because this was the wipe-and-reinstall after she picked up a virus >:-(
Posted by: David Gerard | September 27, 2009 10:31 AM
Yes, your theory could well be true, it must be at least to some extent. I still think it is strange that not more people are upgrading to IE8. As far as I can see, it has no downsides compared to IE7.
Posted by: David Naylor | September 27, 2009 11:04 AM
"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."
If you take 4 random people that are living now on the world, only 0.5 of them will be using firefox, 1.5 will be using another browser. The ohter 2 will be living in countries that are not having access to a computer/internet.
(Maybe the 2 is overrated/underrated...)
+ Your stats are probably about traffic, not about users + that you don't account for people that are using a browser at home (being IE7+, firefox, opera, safari, ...) and IE6 at work.
(Ok, maybe I shouldn't have taken the 1/4 people to literally)
Posted by: Nathan Samson | September 27, 2009 11:32 AM
Umm ... Nathan. So what's your point? That you are a pedantic anal so and so?
Posted by: David Naylor | September 28, 2009 7:57 AM
According to StatCounter, Net Applications or both?
Posted by: Daniel Hendrycks | September 28, 2009 6:49 PM
A quick anecdote.
I'm kind of the "computer doctor" of my little town. Last week, a neighbour of mine brought me his computer, because he had troubles viewing web pages. IE7 on Windows Vista. It was a mess.
I upgraded to IE8, but I recommended and installed Firefox too. My neighbour was next to me, with his little kid (9 or 10 years old). When I started Firefox, my neighbour said: "What's this!? Is it the same as the regular Internet?"; but the kid promptly aswered: "Dad, It's Mozilla. Everybody's using it".
Posted by: Drugo | September 30, 2009 4:58 AM
"but the kid promptly aswered: "Dad, It's Mozilla. Everybody's using it"."
The intelligence of children today. *shakes head*
Posted by: Dobber | September 30, 2009 5:48 PM
"What do you think? Will IE 7 slow to IE 6's rate of decline? Will we be stuck with those two for another couple of years?"
According to the SharePoint blog ( http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/05/07/announcing-sharepoint-server-2010-preliminary-system-requirements.aspx ):
"Q: What about Internet Explorer 6 and SharePoint 2010 publishing sites?
A: ... A standards based browser such as Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8 or Firefox 3.x will be required to author content."
So even MS is not planning to extend full support to IE6 in a major upcoming application. I think this will become the norm in enterprise development - that going forward web applications will not be designed to fully support IE6.
Posted by: Will Peavy | October 2, 2009 9:04 PM
I am more interested in knowing what percentage of people are using standards compliant browsers. Firefox is a great browser, but i am still more concerned about standards.