Browser Blog

Firefox 3.5 can, according to one tracking poll, now claim to be the world’s most popular browser.  There’s a chart floating around from StatCounter.com (figure 1 below)  that shows a nearly 1.5% lead for Firefox 3.5 above Internet Explorer 7.0.  This is all a bit silly of course, because Internet Explorer 7.0 (the previous champion in the single-version browser race) is already something of a dated browser and is only losing numbers because people are upgrading to IE8.  Even IE6, which is nearly a decade old, only lags 6 points behind the top spot.  Still though, it’s good to be on top, even if both vendors can claim it in one way, shape or form.  Mozilla now makes the world’s most popular browser, but the same poll shows that the next three spots all go to Microsoft for a combined-version victory of 55.27% to Mozilla’s 30.85%.  Given that most people don’t really differentiate between what version they’re using and prefer to compare allegiance to a particular brand, our take is that Mozilla still has a lot of work to do (although we’ll gladly tell everybody and celebrate with them).

StatCounter says that it’s stats are based on tracking software installed on 3 million websites and that they have a sample size of 5 billion page views a month.  I’ll post the latest snapshot from their site here as well (figure 2), and give you the breakdown of each browser’s current market share according to them.  All of these numbers will change at the link above, as I used the latest week to get these numbers and StatCounter updates them every 4 hours.

Firefox 3.5 [ 21.74%]
IE 7 [20.26%]
IE 8 [19.25%]
IE6 [15.76%]
Firefox 3.0 [9.11%]
Chrome 3.0 [4.76%]
Safari 4.0 [3.32%]
Opera 10 [1.23%]

figure 1

figure 2

Tags: browser wars, Firefox, Internet Explorer, market share, microsoft, mozilla

This entry was posted on Monday, December 21st, 2009 at 5:56 am and is filed under Firefox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.