OneStat.com today reported that Mozilla’s browsers (all Gecko-based browsers except Netscape) have a total global usage share of 8.69 percent. The total usage share of Mozilla increased 0.24 percent since February 2005. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer still dominates the global browser market with a global usage share of 86,63 percent which is 0.65 percent less as at the end of February.
Mozilla’s browsers global usage share is 8.69 percent
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Eugenia Loli
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This is good news. Everyone should download this browser and try it out. 🙂
Shouldn’t we add in Netscape, don’t they use Gecko? Realistically, the rendering/parsing engine is the important part for statistics (as they determine how you make your webpage).
who have their browsers set to be identified as IE6, that’s at least six off the top of my head. And I can’t imagine I’m an isolated or uncommon example either, I’m sure there are many many more who spoof their identity and giving probably as much as 2-3% market share to IE unintentionally.
But I’ve been off IE since Firefox 4 and I havn’t looked back since. Highly recommended.
This is amazing considering that it’s competing against a broswer that comes preinstalled on a computer that the majority of people use AND gaining ground, however slowly.
The higher the % of usage Mozilla-based browsers get, the more pressure web developers will feel from their Firefox-using customers to shape up their code. How will it look to your boss if he sees that your code is designed to not work with almost 10% of all potential customers’ web browsers?
Just because something gains numbers does not
mean it will be so compelling in the future.
In the Enterprise IE is still the standard
browser for Internel written apps and tools
like ‘people soft’ ect……
Firefox works well in Linux, but Windows still
needs work, on plugin’s, form ect…
steve
I’ve started to see Firefox support crop up in pleasing places (even the grocery store I shop at explicitly supports Firefox on their website). This momentum needs to keep going!
I use Firefox only in Linux, but the latest upgrade
I performed ‘apt-get’ which is 1.0.3 is very
unstable at best sometimes. It crashes without
reason or cause. The preview release seemed to
be more stable than the latest version. I hope
they work on a stable release in the future.
“Firefox works well in Linux, but Windows still
needs work, on plugin’s, form ect…”
I use FF in both, *nix and Windows… could you please elaborate on the windows problems, I am yet to find a problem related to plugins or form.
Excellent news. Pundits try to spin this as Firefox’s momentum is slowing, but the first several percentage points are always the easiest. The point is that it’s growing, and that growth is at the expense of IE. I don’t think that Firefox can ever really get over 50%, if for only that it is not installed by default in either Windows or OS X. I can hope though, that there are enough people that know the difference.
And if you haven’t tried the Adblock extension for Firefox, get it. It is truly amazing.
It runs quite stable on windows and linux for me and ALL of the people I know. Those who dont share my experience should spend some time looking into it. Its a shame you are not enjoying the FF experience. I started using windows so much more after I installed Firefox and OOo. 🙂
As far as share is concerned, I hope no single browser ever reaches a 50% share. When there are 5 browsers each with 20% share, standards will HAVE to be enforced.
mozilla has to focus on innovating the browser experience beyond promises of better security. the vast majority won’t switch just because it’s “more secure” — it has to have a compelling feature set.
Here is the new mantra.
“Don’t use windows without the Firefox”.
It didn’t work for Opera — Opera has speed, functionality, security, and stability as solid benefits over Mozilla and IE, yet Opera has a miniscule market share. You need *hype*.
I am a Linux newbie and just trying out Mozilla Firefox. This browser blows away IE on my identical windows PC. Especially all the features like pop-up blocking, tabbed browsing, etc. really impress me. I can’t believe I became a Linux chick and a Firefox fan within two days. Scary!
i wonder how they can measure opera usage, when it defaults to a Internet Explorer User agent string? Is it still possible to differentiate between Opera and IE?
Simple: opera is in the user agent string. Opera’s IE user agent string isn’t exactly the same as the standard IE string, but since most sniffers only look for the Internet Explorer x.x in the user agent not an exact user agent string Opera fools most sniffers. A good sniffer can tell that it is actually Opera by looking for Opera. An exact search for IE’s default string and rejecting others won’t work because some toolbars add themselves into the user agent string and hence you would be rejecting real IE users.
SO… does that one percent includes those opera IE string?
I personally changes it to OPera string.
I use Firefox only in Linux, but the latest upgrade
I performed ‘apt-get’ which is 1.0.3 is very
unstable at best sometimes. It crashes without
reason or cause. The preview release seemed to
be more stable than the latest version. I hope
they work on a stable release in the future.
I’ve found the same. 0.2 was bad, the latest 0.3 is terrible. This is on XP. I’m not sure how much of this is to do with XP, but I know that IE is yet to crash on me (though to be fair, it’s only used on about 2 websites which are IE-only) so it isn’t in use half as much, but still, I’ve certainly noticed stability getting worse and worse since the 1.0.
Opera has a user agent string that contains “MSIE 6.0” for trashy browser sniffers and “opera” for smart browser sniffers. Here is the user agent string for Opera 8 Beta 1 for Mac OS X:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Mac_PowerPC Mac OS X; en) Opera 8.0
A good test can tell the difference. Try http://www.dsk.gv.at/browser.htm
Somebody needs to modify the user agent extension so that you can have it automatically set as IE6 on whatever site you want. That way, those of us who WANT to be identified as Firefox can auto set the string to IE6 on the handful of sites that require it, instead of having to be set as IE6 all the time or having to switch when we hit those IE-only sites.
Welcome to a better world, babe!
actually, I’m one of them believers who would disagree to this. I think the mozille/firefox share, as well as the opera and konqueror/safari share is bigger as well.
either way it doesn’t really matter, because what “most” people use is seldom interesting, as you have a set userbase with a set type of users to whom you wish to attract.
if we would look at how people who wish to see browser statistics and webpage codings etc have theirs lined up:
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
Some time ago the Register pointed out that the Marks and Spencer web site blocked all browsers apart from IE and NN using their catalogue for on line shopping. This continued for quite some time in spite of the ridicule in the Reg.
I just checked to see if this is still so. It now works seemlessly in Firefox 1.03 on Linux. Just shows the power of market share.
My site gets between 400 and 500 thousand page views per month, and surprisingly, here are the percentage breakdowns:
1 47.48% MSIE 6.0
2 41.30% Mozilla/5.0
4 1.68% Opera 7.2
6 1.36% Opera 7.5
8 0.59% MSIE 5.0
9 0.59% Opera 8.0
11 0.48% MSIE 5.5
12 0.26% MSIE 5.2
13 0.25% Mozilla/3.01 (compatible;)
I left out search engine bots and such. But I was completely surprised by the stats because the is based on an old WINDOWS ONLY game. After seeing this, it makes me question the stats in the original article here.
I would use it if their MacOS X integration didn’t royally suck. Each release MacOS X integration is put back further and further – why not just give up and accept that no one at Mozilla HQ has any intention of getting Firefox running properly, as a first class browser.
If you’re not a troll, your problems could be in some esoteric extension or could be hardware problems. Firefox 1.0.3 is rock solid.
But I’ve been off IE since Firefox 4 and I havn’t looked back since. Highly recommended.
Firefox 4? Welcome from the future, Montana Dan. How is it over there?
I do use both IE6 and Firefox for web developments both at work and at home for my hobby projects. Firefox is a truly amazing piece of software especially for web developers with its featureful ‘developer tool’. yay~
i wish browsers other than IE would get more and more market share… and one true web standard!
> because the is based on an old WINDOWS ONLY game.
> After seeing this, it makes me question the stats
> in the original article here
Your measurements have a selection bias. People interested in old games are more likely to be technologically oriented, and therefore more likely to use Firefox.
> because the is based on an old WINDOWS ONLY game.
> After seeing this, it makes me question the stats
> in the original article here
Your measurements have a selection bias. People interested in old games are more likely to be technologically oriented, and therefore more likely to use Firefox.
Yes, that’s probably true. In todays issue of Computer Sweden they claimed that 24% of their website visits was by firefox, 68% IE.
Computer Sweden is a tabloid format newspaper with 3 issus/week. It provides business oriented information on development and trends in the computer industry.
A subscription is rather pricy, so its not likely to be read by 13 year old computer geeks, but rather by CIOs, consultants and such.
A more technically oriented Swedish magazin (DatorMagazin) claimed a while ago that about half of their visits was by mozillabased browsers.
The interesting thing is that this type of knowlegable users is the ones that likely will influence decisions on IT strategy for their company (Computer Sweden readers) or for their familly at home (DatorMagazin).
Just out of curiosity I broke down the browser usage of my last 1000 visitors. My site deals with graphics design (print) and web design. Most of my visitors are owners of small businesses who don’t know the first thing about the web, but they do want a website for their business. This shows from the search keywords they use to get to my site. The numbers:
MSIE: 51.6%
Netscape/Gecko-based: 34.1%
Konqueror is a very distant third with 0.8% and I’ve only had a single hit from Opera.
Forget those people saying that Firefox has problems in Linux or Windows. That’s FUD. I’m not saying, at all, that the software doesn’t have problems: as any other software, it has bugs.
But is incredibly better than IE, so don’t lose your chance to try it right away: http://www.getfirefox.com
Friends who have claimed instability in their systems suprisingly often had bad memory [settings] when investigated further. One friend said Windows XP was crashing all the time and I suggested he should try memtest:
http://memtest86.com/
It appeared he had mixed cl-2 and cl-3 memories.
I guess this is a forum where it is completely redundant to point out? 🙂
It’s good to see that the IE dominance is cracking, and that new freash blood is flowing into the browser market. I use Firefox myself but Opera 8 is also one of best browsers out there.
http://bitsofnews.com & http://tech.bitsofnews.com
It would be interesting if, theoretically speaking of course, if MS released XP with mozilla as the default browser, how many people would still prefer to use IE, and what sort of increase in market share gecko based browsers would have?
I think that there may be other users like me out there that keep 2 or even 3 browsers on their computers to accomplish certain tasks. On Windows, I tend to use IE if I want to see site that relies on Active X or if the developers wrote the site exclusively for IE compatibility and the page doesn’t render correctly in other browsers. For all other browsing tasks, I use Firefox.
Where I work, the company site is developed mostly for IE6 compatibility, but since we are starting to get more visits from Mozilla and Safari users (and complaints about design incompatibilities with those browsers) we are slowly starting to stop programming for one specific browser type.
It’s easy to attack, and if it has the majority there won’t be much motivation to start attacking Firefox/Gecko based engines.
Let the ignorant fend for themselves!
Keeps those in the IT industry employeed
How many people can make a living cleaning up the IE messes?
The other day I was did a demo for my boss and some fancy pants DHTML navbar didn’t work so hot on his MSIE 5.5 browser. I explained to him how the box model in CSS is fuged-up and I didn’t bother supporting it because the market share of MSIE 5.5 was only 3% and falling. I spent more effort on FF and MSIE 6 support. He didn’t like this and argued that our customer might use the app from home and they possibly could be using MSIE 5.5. I explained that was doubtable since they all had office issued laptops with WinXP.. To further my claims. I asked a friend working at one of the largest news organizations on internet to send me a snap shot of browser stats from 6 months ago and one for the day before I asked..
Sure enough, MSIE 5.5 was at 3% and falling off the radar.
That coupled with stats from 9 other sources was convincing enough to make my boss back off.. Actually, he finally upgraded his damn browser.
Mozilla gains 0.13% market share
Come on, this is getting ridiculous. I can understand when the market share reaches certain milestones, like 5%, 10%, etc. But do we need a god damn update every week or every other week on how much market share it has gained, or how many downloads Firefox has?
You know what this would called if it were a corporate product? Hype.
Nothing wrong with a little hype, but at a point it gets excessive. And to constantly report at a tech site where the users probably know about firefox, seems pretty pointless for useful hype.
> “i wonder how they can measure opera usage, when it defaults to a Internet Explorer User agent string?”
Easy: They don’t. The fact that it is possible doesn’t change anything.
Read this:
http://j3e.de/statistics_lie.html
http://www.mywebsite.force9.co.uk/
http://www.searchengineworld.com/misc/stats.htm
> “Somebody needs to modify the user agent extension so that you can have it automatically set as IE6 on whatever site you want.”
Opera is able to do that.
Use FireFox/ Throw the aging ie6.
When you use “apt-get” you are getting a “package” that someone has put together for you. It is problably a Debian package, from wherever you have apt set to look for packages.
I also use Firefox 1.0.3. and I also got it from a “package”, but mine was a Slackware package.
It works perfectly. Flawlessly.
This is not a flame of Debian vs. Slackware, I love both Distro’s.
Please do not judge the Application, because of the package you recieved may have been flawed.
I like to use “packages” because they are easy to install and in Debian’s case dependencies are taken care of.
Whenever I find something in Linux not working up to snuff I will get the source and compile it myself. That usually cures it.
Try uninstalling Firefox and getting a package from Mozilla’s site and see if that one is any better.
Yesterday browser usage poll results from one local (.ee) computer related forum (first number is votes, second percentage, sorry for underscores):
142 (64.55%) Firefox
_34 (15.45%) Internet Explorer
_22 (10.00%) Opera
_18 (_8.18%) Mozilla
__2 (_0.91%) Netscape
__2 (_0.91%) Others
Not bad IMHO.
I have been using mozilla/gecko since Moz at version 0.92. It has always worked fine for me in rendereing pages. I can count 4 occassions of minor inconsistencies with Mozilla, non with Firefox and 3 with Camino. No loss of time or content from my perspective. I scoop a nightly build approx three times a week for each browser.
What I haven’t had to put up with in terms of intrusive, distracting, highjacking, and other aggravating initiatives cannot be talked about because they didn’t exist.
“If you’re not a troll, your problems could be in some esoteric extension or could be hardware problems. Firefox 1.0.3 is rock solid.”
I have had 5 FF 1.0.3 crashes on Win XP since 4/18. In all probability, these are related to some extension I have installed, but I have definitely seen more instability in 1.0.2 and 1.0.3 (on WinXP). I have not had the same problems with 1.0.3 on Fedora Core 3.
(I have been using FF since 0.6).
In Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X, the only time I’ve seen stability problems is when a user account is saved between several upgrades. Try renaming your profile and start a fresh one. I bet you’ll notice a big difference.
Firefox is a good browser but the hype is almost rediculous. In the stats of the article you see it says “Mozilla Firefox”, while actually it should be “mozilla based browsers” or “gecko browsers”. There are other good gecko browsers and other types of browsers as well…
Get firefox adds on websites are simply annoying.
I can only laugh with the false claim on their site that firefox is the FASTEST browser in the world. To compete with MS they act similar to it?
It doesn’t surprise me that Google is a big funder of it.
”
I would use it if their MacOS X integration didn’t royally suck. Each release MacOS X integration is put back further and further – why not just give up and accept that no one at Mozilla HQ has any intention of getting Firefox running properly, as a first class browser.
”
Regarding Apple’s Safari, I would use it if their Windows and Linux integration didn’t royally suck. Each release Windows and Linux integration is put back further and further – why not just give up and accept that no one at Apple HQ has any intention of getting Safari running properly, as a first class browser.
See how stupid I sound?
Considering Windows, Linux, FreeBSD et al put together account for way way way more marketshare than Apple. I doubt the tiny little dent of marketshare Apple has is going to make a difference (never mind the fact that many people on OS X use Firefox).
I have had 5 FF 1.0.3 crashes on Win XP since 4/18
When I decided to upgrade from Mozilla 1.2 in my laptop, I thought I’d give FF a try. After a few days, I quit. I had at least 1 unexplainable crash per day. Have been with Moz 1.8b1 since then (early March) and not one single crash.
No, it isn’t Gecko’s fault. Nor mine. It’s really FF’s.
See how stupid I sound?
You do. So, since Apple is a small market, FF shouldn’t care about it??
The same could be said of anyhting other than Windows. Oh, wait, but there isn’t any other major browser for Linux. Linux has no Safari (Konqueror, anyone?). So let’s pay them some attention.
And in fact, FF on Windows behaves better than on Linux.
By emagius (IP: —.conversent.net) – Posted on 2005-04-27 00:48:08
It didn’t work for Opera — Opera has speed, functionality, security, and stability as solid benefits over Mozilla and IE, yet Opera has a miniscule market share. You need *hype*.
—-
Opera has ads by default and still has (at version 8.0) an (arguably) ‘busy’ interface that I think turns many newbies off it. I agree it has solid benefits, but they are hard to discover when people don’t give it a chance afaer being put off by certain things early on.