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

Fennec introduces mobile browser extensions

Are browser extensions possible on mobile platforms?  Will they be usable?  Probably.  And probably not.  I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s going to depend on a variety of factors.  For starters, mobile browsers are harder to use than their desktop equivalents out of the box.  Often times core browser functionality can be confusing enough for the majority of users out there, let alone bogging the interface down further with third party add-ons.  Then there’s the issue of screen real estate.  Some of the most popular browser extensions available on desktops come in the form of toolbars.  I don’t expect we’ll be seeing any of those integrated into the mobile market anytime soon.  Throw memory issues and resistance from many popular browser makers onto the fire and you’ve got yourself a real mess to clean up.

But then again, there are a lot of extensions that probably would translate to the mobile platforms well.  We can look at one example that’s already more or less usable today on millions of devices (albeit, not necessarily in a pure “extension” form).  The Delicious bookmarking service has a whole bevy of applications available on all of the major mobile app stores.  On the IPhone, saving a bookmark to delicious involves clicking a bookmarklet saved in the safari browser.  When clicked, it closes the browser and opens the delicious app, with the URL already filled in for you.  On android, the app gets added to the browser’s list of ways you can “share” a link with someone.  It then minimizes the browser and opens the delicious app.

These are examples of ways you can change your browser right now, and they aren’t terribly intrusive, but they’re far from perfect.  It’s not hard to imagine how seamless an app like this could be if mobile browsers opened themselves up a little more to third party development.  You could simply install an add-on that would replace (or complement) the browser’s core bookmarking feature.  Nobody wants to close their browser and open an app to handle bookmarking.  We want to be able to do it blind, just like we do on our desktops.

At any rate, love them or hate them, browser extensions are coming to mobile devices.  Fennec, the working title for Mozilla’s mobile version of Firefox, is shipping with add-on functionality out of the box.  It’s only available on a select few devices for the moment, but both a Windows Mobile and an Android version are slated for release in 2010.  Firefox may seem slow to enter the mobile browsing race, but they weren’t exactly an early contender on the desktop either.  The thing that has allowed them to stand out time and time again is the sheer volume of add-ons available for their products.  The IPhone app store is consistently stated as the real reason that Apple has managed to pick up so much steam in the past year, and the release of quality add-ons in the mobile browsing market is absolutely going to turn some heads.

You can browse available Fennec add-ons already over on the Mozilla website.  And you can even download a desktop version of the mobile browser if you’d like to test it out (Windows, OSX and Linux).  Already available for download are the popular ad-block and no-script add-ons, as well as some that are extremely well-suited for the mobile crowd such as weave-sync (seamless sync of opened tabs, bookmarks and more from your PC to your phone).

And as for the add-ons that may seem hard to recreate in a mobile environment?  They just have to be repackaged a little.  The address bar seems especially well suited for some tasks.  In what almost seems like the first hints of a mobile ubiquity port (which would be amazing, btw), there’s an add-on that let’s you tweet right from the address bar.  No need to close your browser, open a twitter app and wait for it to refresh before typing.  You. Just. Type.  We don’t know if we’re on board with an app-less phone environment, but we’re pretty sure this is part of what Jay Sullivan, vice president of mobile at Mozilla, was talking about when he told PC Pro that developers were likely to move out of app stores and onto the web (He was largely talking about building traditional javascript web-apps, but I don’t see how tweeting from the address bar doesn’t apply either).