At various times when I’ve given talks, I’ve spoken about the adoption of the open source Mozilla Firefox web browser. It’s hard to keep up with the latest numbers, so I always feel that while impressive, my numbers are a bit out of date. There’s an article on CNet today that gives some recent numbers:
Firefox accounted for more than 17 percent of all browsers used last month, while IE accounted for nearly 75 percent, according to research conducted by Net Applications, a Web measurement company. However, IE’s share stood at more than 79 percent a year ago, and use has been dropping steadily over the past eight months, the company said.
I think the increase in Mac users has also led to a decrease in the IE numbers, though I use Firefox on my Mac. At the moment, I’m using Firefox on a Red Hat Linux client on my Thinkpad laptop.
The exact Net Applications numbers for February, 2008, for the top 5 browsers are: Microsoft Internet Explorer – 74.88%, Firefox – 17.27%, Safari – 5.70%, Opera – 0.69%, Netscape – 0.68%. (Warning: I suspect that link gets used for the latest numbers, no matter what the month is.)
To compare with their numbers for February, 2007: Microsoft Internet Explorer – 79.35%, Firefox – 14.22%, Safari – 4.86%, Opera – 0.51%, Netscape – 0.76%.
So of these, Microsoft Internet Explorer showed a big decline and Netscape dropped a bit as well, but that is, shall we say, a historic browser. The trend for the decrease for Microsoft and the increase for Firefox seems to have picked up speed last October.
Here is a statistically silly extrapolation based on only two data points: if Microsoft Internet Explorer continues to lose marketshare at the constant rate of 4.47% a year (as it did last year), it will drop below 50% in a little bit more than 5 and 1/2 years. Could it happen? Who knows? Who would have predicted it would get this low when the 2004 marketshare for IE was at 91.27%? The trend could slow down or even reverse itself, to be sure.
Anyone who predicts that any particular software product is dominant and thus always will be hasn’t been around the software business very long.
Free Software adoption-watchers are correct to focus on browser penetration.
In a certain way, it is a more realistic or pure reflection of interest in Web standards and Software Freedom. This is simply because browser-change is less impeded than OS-change by complexity or outside influences, and browser software has less differentiation by functionality.
Firefox penetration is the truest reflection of the waning of Microsoft’s influence on our budgets, tools and lives.
It is a metric Microsoft are certainly watching closely and its deterioration explains a few things. It explains not only the re-entry of Microsoft into browser development with a dual-mode IE8 (dual so as to accommodate W3C Web standards alongside Microsoft’s own bastard MS-.Net-HTML) but also a PDF-killer (XPS), a Flash-killer (Silverlight), and an ODF-killer (OOXML) which is trying to insert a new Microsoft standard for all relevant W3C standards.
I wish I could sense more widespread alarm about this. It is the manifestation of what Steve Ballmer meant when he said, “We will win the Web!” What he meant is that the Web will not be friendly to any other software. While Microsoft is doing a full-court PR press about its passion for interoperability, their actions speak volumes about what they really mean.
Firefox, anti-trust actions & mandates need company: more-aggressive market alternatives to stop Microsoft from leveraging their desktop and document monopolies into the Internet and cloud services.
Are those worldwide or US statistics? I remember reading before that in the EU the average usage of Firefox was higher.
And I’d imagine that in the far east (China for example) usage of Firefox should be higher as well.
Pedro, I presume worldwide since I see no mention that it is US only.
Not sure if this was the site I’ve seen last time, but the numbers ring a bell.
http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2008/01/firefox-made-wo.html
Numbers in some European countries go up to 40+ %. The article also mentions that in Oceania the average is more than 30%