February 24, 2008
Where in the world do you use Firefox?
When talking about Mozilla usage worldwide we have often talked about which locale of the browser people are using. We are quite proud of the fact that Firefox is available in 50 languages and the fact that the growth of other locales is outpacing en-US. The dedication of Mozilla localization communities worldwide are a very big part of Firefox's success.
Since I knew I was coming to FOSDEM this weekend with many Mozilla localizers I wanted to know not just which language of Firefox people use but where in the world people use Firefox. John Lilly blogged earlier about how we use AUS data to get an aggregate view of Firefox usage. We looked at AUS data for December (comparing it against a Geo IP database) - the results were surprising:
Some details of note:
- As near as we can tell there are active Firefox users in every country on the planet. This includes Norfolk Island(Population < 2000), Vatican City, and the atolls of Tokelau
- People from the United States account for less that 30% of Firefox users worldwide
- China is the fastest growing locale in relative share. Between November and December it overtook Australia in active users
The combination of locale growth and worldwide usage growth are an amazing reminder of how Firefox and Mozilla are truly worldwide projects.
Posted by schrep at February 24, 2008 1:03 AM
Comments
This is impressive indeed! One note about the Vatican: The last Pope (John Paul II) was allegedly very much into modern media and thus, the Vatican now has a lot of websites in many languages, as well as several radio stations etc.; it's only fair to assume then that some of the people who make all this happen (like the ones who maintain the vatican.va website content) also use Firefox.
Posted by: Fred Wenzel at February 24, 2008 6:45 AM
Unfortunately the number of downloads can't be used as the user count. But if we do this for research purposes we get something like: 65 million people of Germany's 80 million user Firefox... What a worthwile idea :P
Posted by: Twe4k at February 25, 2008 3:08 AM
Germany loves Firefox. *hugs*
Posted by: peter5678 at February 25, 2008 6:39 AM
The Other slice is a a bit large. Can you provide us deeper details about that? Personally I'm interested in the he-IL section.
Posted by: Tomer Cohen at February 25, 2008 3:42 PM
Excellent data. I would like to see a comparison between that, and the distribution of Firefox locales. I bet there still a majority of en-US users.
BTW, the Tokelau link is broken (see " character).
Posted by: Jorge at February 25, 2008 4:47 PM