Submitted by OneStat reported that Mozilla’s browsers have a total global usage share of 11.51 percent. The total usage share of Mozilla increased 2.82 percent since April 2005. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer still dominates the global browser market with a global usage share of 85.45 percent which is 1.18 percent less as at the end of April.
“The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated” Internet Explorer.
It seems obvious that the voices of the Mozilla/Firefox zealots who predicted that the usage of Firefox would soar to new hights, and perhaps even challenge the dominance of IE were – at best – premature. And with IE7 just around the corner, its clear that Mozilla isnt going to revolutionize the web, but it surely caused Microsoft to seriously reconsider halting the development of IE.
It seems obvious that the voices of the Mozilla/Firefox zealots who predicted that the usage of Firefox would soar to new hights, and perhaps even challenge the dominance of IE were – at best – premature.
1. I consider 10% (and likely growing still) to be pretty successful. It’s not 50%, but it isn’t 2%, either.
2. The “premature” part is dismissing Firefox/Mozilla as quickly as you appeard to. The browser market is a long-term thing, and cannot be measured in terms of years (or even decades, it might appear).
(edit for spacing/italics reason to separate quote from new post)
Edited 2005-11-04 20:33
Thank you for saying what you edited
Every time I see those edit-notes, I wish there was a way to see a diff of the post.
. I consider 10% (and likely growing still) to be pretty successful. It’s not 50%, but it isn’t 2%, either.
11.5% is nice, but to me it seems like 20% would be a nice, weighty percentage where Microsoft has to accept certain realities. They might be doing it already at http://www.live.com
It seems obvious that the voices of the Mozilla/Firefox zealots who predicted that the usage of Firefox would soar to new hights …
I am delirious with joy that Mozilla Firefox usage here in Canada has already reached 17% (I believe it is even higher in Germany). It has surpassed my best expectations.
The hope always was if the usage went over 10% it would force web designers to produce standards compliant browser independant sites. It seems to a large part that this objective has been achieved. I very rarely if ever encounter a site that does not work with Firefox or for that matter renders any worse on Firefox than it does on IE6
what is incredible that people* that are supposedly informed or interested on IT, still defend the 6 years old, unsecure, unstable sw IE6SP1 is … it looks like they don’t realice how bad has IE made to the WEB … just think for a moment … IE went in no time from 1.0 to 6.0, while they where the underdogs, then, they stalled for ever, just after killing Nestcape … can you see it?
* i suppose that if you read this type of web pages, you do are interested at least on technolog.
1. IE7 runs only on Vista
2. IE is now Windows only
3. IE on mac is dying (funy how this makes me think of BSD
)
4. IE6 is old and geting older
5. Opera macarades as IE
People that are inclined to use IE are still using it but don’t asume all those switchers are just temporary.
P.S. Who are you calling a zealot? Look in the miror!
There will be xp-version of IE7.
Notice also that the UK users are the most IE fanatics using it 93% of the times which is actually more than the US (85%). In the neighboring Canada the usage of IE is actually less (78%). I would be very curious to see statistics in Germany (and Europe in general) where open source is taken more seriously.
PS: These numbers have nothing to do with the education or the IQ of the users of each country, this is not what I say. They are related to how well open source is marketed.
I would be very curious to see statistics in Germany (and Europe in general) where open source is taken more seriously.
Finland 31,03 %, Germany 24,5 %, Czech Republic 22,4 %, Croatia 20,48 %, Poland 20,34 %, Hungary 19,31 %, etc.
More:
http://www.xitimonitor.com/etudes/equipement10.asp
Well Onestat is saying bullshit about UK.
For Xiti, UK is around 12% of fx marketshare last september :
http://www.xitimonitor.com/etudes/equipement11.asp
Finland 34,05%
Germany 25,07%
Czech Republic 23,23%
[…]
Greece 16,16%
France 15,98%
Autriche 15,7%
Croatia 15,45%
[…]
United Kingdom 12,19%
[…]
And so on. Around 15% for European Union.
Whoa! Way to go, Finland!
Now, is it safe to say that the OS choice is also skewed the same across the countries? Not necessarily the same percentages, but I bet Finland computer users more often use an alternative OS (aka linux, or something else).
What do you think?
Either way, I am glad that Firefox is having this success and that it further spurs on Microsoft and other companies to improve their own browsers!! I am also grateful to projects like Camino… my preferred browser.
These numbers have nothing to do with the education or the IQ of the users of each country…
Curiously enough, I (an American) never thought you were trying to imply anything about IQ, until you said you weren’t. 🙂
Anyway, the OneStat numbers are quite interesting, putting the USA’s usage of Internet Explorer at a lower rate than the rest of the world. The XiTi numbers appear to be different (at least as regards the UK), so they are not really comparable.
When more people own computers, one might think that more people who are less computer-savvy will be using computers, and thus using the internet. It would be interesting to see if there’s any correlation between percentage of households that use a computer, and percentage of computer users that use a non-IE browser.
“Households most likely to own computers are large and have younger and highly educated occupants”
http://www.sltrib.com/search/ci_3163385
Not even all households that have computers have internet access.
I can’t understand why IE is so popular still. It is such an antiquated piece of software. I think mainly its due to people’s browsing habits though. Most people haven’t experienced that joy of tabs.
Think about gvernment buildings, librarys, schools, and buisness’s.
Hell I am posting from a iMAC w/OS9 running IE 5 here! At school !
Even the OSX computers here, have IE on them, and they lock safari and are moving on to not camino but Firefox 1.04.
Retarted…but I guess thats what you get.
Also at home I still use IE for specific sites, because firefox just handles them so poorly. Also, IE has tabs too these days. It is an optional install with the MSN search bar which is a pretty good imo.
Generally, most users don’t actually know what a ‘web browser’ is. Most they refer to it as ‘The Internet’.
In the same way, most users don’t actually know what an ‘operating system’ is. For most microsoft windows is ‘a computer’
This won’t change much, therefore firefox probably won’t increase it’s market share much more than this.
– Jesse McNelis
Believe it or not, but most of average-joes don’t that there are alternatives to Internet Explorer. I worked as tech support for an ISP company and most people who called me don’t know what Firefox is.
Because tabs suck. I already have a task bar at the bottom of my screen, why do I need one at the top too? XP’s taskbar grouping obsoleted tabs long before they were invented, anyways.
> its clear that Mozilla isnt going to revolutionize the web
Obviously open to discussion… I think it did already ! But I guess you will tag me firefox zealot just because I did not praise the same MS god than you do.
I don’t think Firefox will replace IE. But as long as it has a significant part of market, the effect it has on web page coding will be for the best.
Before the browser wars, Netscape was invaluable to the portion of the population who had internet access at the time. After the browser wars, computers became a commodity and internet access became widespread (not necessarily due to the browser wars). After the browser wars, IE was on so many computers that to many people the little blue “e” represented the internet.
Before Firefox, few people knew what Mozilla was, and MS was complacent with letting IE stagnate. After Firefox, many people have realized that the internet can be accessed in more ways than one, and MS has finally realized that it has some competition in what could become another browser war.
There are a lot of things that can be said about both IE and Firefox. IE has a large install base. Firefox has momentum. Practically all websites are written for and tested against IE. Firefox renders most websites correctly anyway, and more webmasters are testing with Firefox. IE7 will be released within the year. Firefox 1.5 might be realeased within the month, and 2.0 shouldn’t be far behind IE7. IE6/7 is a huge, monolithic, very capable browser that only runs on Windows (XP or later). Firefox is a much lighter browser with the possibility of adding capability through extensions (even ActiveX if you want that), and it can be run on many different systems. I can’t wait until after the dust has settled.
Hell, I used Mosaic long before Netscape and IE. It was a solid browser and the basis for both IE and Netscape if I remember correctly? (Good chance I am not remembering correctly, of course
)
I was told by a computer science professor that Mozilla (the development codename for Netscape, and now the name of the Netscape spinoff) came from “Mosaic Killer”.
I like Firefox a lot but I decided to switch to Opera about a couple of weeks ago. I love to surf the net with Opera + you can read your email too since the mail program is integrated with the Opera browser.
…and now it is free! give it a try!
-2501
Thom or Eugenia I think now would be a good time to publish the latest browser statistics for OSNews. Maybe with some historic data to show trends.
osnews browser stats would of course be very unrepresentive of the browser market. like looking at the stats of apple.com. could be interesting anyway.
I didn’t remember that IE was so bad
Because of the current weakness of IE (in terms of security and usability), I always install Firefox on my Windows box. However, if Microsoft is able to close the gap with the next release of IE, I will probably just stick with IE on my Windows boxes. Nothing wrong with Firefox, but why bother when it’s just another great browser. OTOH, even if Microsoft releases IE for Unix/Linux, I will probably just keep using Firefox or whichever browser is included by default. A browser is a browser and unless one does a horrible job at being a browser (like IE currently does), it seems pointless to switch.
This makes me quite happy (seeing IE down to 60%). Of course my site is tech-centric so it’s pretty skewed…but I felt it was worth mentioning nonetheless:
58.92% MSIE 6.0
9.66% Firefox 1.0.6
8.88% Mozilla 4.0
5.29% Firefox 1.0.4
4.88% Firefox 1.0.7
2.41% Mozilla 5.0
1.85% Mozilla 3.01
1.30% MSIE 7.0
0.86% Firefox 1.4.1
0.77% Firefox 1.0
0.61% Safari 1.2
0.55% Firefox 1.0.5
0.31% Firefox 1.0+
0.28% Firefox 1.4
0.27% Firefox 1.0.3
0.19% Opera 8.50
0.19% Firefox 1.0.1
0.18% MSIE 5.5
0.18% Firefox 1.0.2
0.17% Firefox 1.5
Recently I measured the market share of different browsers on my PC and Opera came out with 100%. Other browsers didn’t have a single hit, just as they wouldn’t exist anymore. So what you say now?
Maybe that Webbrowser statistics lie and just don’t say anything (http://j3e.de/statistics_lie.html)? Or that people already posted 10 years ago about how web usage statistics are nothing more than making up random numbers (http://www.goldmark.org/netrants/webstats/)?
Heck, there are even webpages with multiple counters on them which all show completely different numbers, not counting in the fact that no sites) is/are representative for the whole WWW, and also no banner server is.
Still for unknown reasons to me those statistics continue to get quoted and so I continue to show mine.
My stats don’t lie! At least not more than all the others.
Opera could be a major spoiler when the next round of statistics comes out next month. Now that it’s free, I and a lot of other people I know have downloaded it and I use it occasionally. But unless you dig deep into the settings and change it, Opera still identifies itself as Internet Explorer. If the IE stats suddenly jump up a few tenths of a percent next time around, that’s probably why.
As far as waiting to see if IE7 is a better browser, do we really need to at this point? Look at this company’s track record with regard to browsers and operating systems. They’re always hyped up as “The most secure version EVER!”, but that’s only for the first few weeks. A Microsoft product is only secure until people start using it.
are absolutely insane.
Internet Explorer is included in every Windows operating system. People who don’t know how to download and install their own software use IE. People who don’t think IE leaves anything to be desired use IE.
People don’t choose IE. It chooses them. It’s only when a user becomes frustrated or craves something better that he chooses an alternative, and it seems 10% of the web population has done that. That’s remarkable, it is significant. If OSes didn’t come with web browsers, people would almost certainly choose Firefox over IE.
the problem is the vast majority of users don’t know what a browser is. they just call it “the internet” – or internet explorer. often they could be using firefox and not know. and forget about explain an alternative to the built in browser.
So where’s those OSNews browser usage statistics? I’d really like to know what the makeup of this site is.
Ever Since OSnews 3.0 Stats havent been kept on OSNews due to lack of resources to carry on monitoring stats of the site.
I was told by a computer science professor that Mozilla (the development codename for Netscape, and now the name of the Netscape spinoff) came from “Mosaic Killer”.
Wasn’t that rather Mozaic Godzilla? As always it is always wise to take statements made by CS professors with a bit of suspicion
No, your teacher was right. Mosaic killer is where the word mozilla comes form “moz” is mosaic and “illa” is from killer. Godzilla is a movie where puppets battle each other.
I became very nostalgic when I heard the name Mosaic. It was the first web browser I used 10 years ago, and I still remember the fun times I had browsing the net and using Webcrawler as my primary search engine. Now I use Opera and Google and I’m loving it.
How could this be? In such a short time? With hardly a profitable concern behind it spending millions on publicity?
Didn’t Microsoft leverage its monopoly illegally into the Internet browser market? How could there be a viable competitor? How? This makes no sense, at all! Shouldn’t antitrust laws and the strict enforcement of it be doing something like this as opposed to, I don’t know, competent competitors?
I mean, it is not as if Firefox is on every new PC’s hard disk, preinstalled thanks to the antitrust settlement with Microsoft…
If you look at top ten search requests stats at Google, it is very easy to figure out most active audience/userbase image.
Just that strate makes main statistics.
So, conclusion should be like that (2 years ago, didn’t look at top 10 now):
“Majority of people interested in Kurnikoffa and Britney Spears naked images use IE”
IE is only so popular because from Windows 95 onwards it’s been the default browser and new computer users dont know anything else. Now people are waking up and smelling the monopoly and MSIE has only become more usable because of SP2 not because it’as a good web browser. MSIE users have suffered from popups, no tabbed browsing, no RSS, countless security flaws all because micosoft of it’s domonation and monopoly.
Pre SP2 firefox/mozilla is a MSIE killer full stop, SP2 stops the popups and helps with virus’s but still it not a patch on firefox/mozilla. It’s amazing how people like to tone down 11% share, it’s not easy when all computers come with IE, thats a fact.
SP2 stops the popups? You haven’t used it lately, have you? It stopped popups for about a week after its release, then all the sites figured out ways around it. And unlike Firefox, which continually fixes issues like these when they “pop-up”, Microsoft has left IE on SP2 stagnate since its release, which was a LONG time ago.
True story: I was browsing the web looking for a quicktime 7 serial with Firefox and the “View in IE” extension installed. This was on Windows XP SP2. I came across a page that didn’t load properly, so I right-clicked and chose “view in IE”. IE popped open, and instantly my machine was infected with more than 300 pieces of spyware. And this was just from opening a page in IE, I haden’t even clicked on anything yet! And this was in their super-duper-extra-rock-solid-secure IE on SP2!
Lesson learned, I no longer bother with the View in IE firefox extension. If the page doesn’t display properly in Firefox, I move on.
Free, cross-platform (multiple operating system) browsers like Opera and Mozilla are real threats to Microsoft. It can be seen in actions such as this:
http://news.com.com/Microsoft+behind+$12+million+payment+to+Opera/2…
…which still continue to this day.
The more you use IE-specific tags in development, the more reliant you are on them, the more they are needed, and the easier it is for Microsoft to lock you in to their platform (ie. sell you Windows/IE upgrades, since they only develop IE for Windows – the Mac has long since been abandoned).
Mozilla (and Opera) have no such OS-lock-in interests. They focus on making cutting-edge browsers on many platforms (even mobiles) with a lot more than just usability and features for Average Joe – these browsers are actually very good ‘under the hood’; they both support modern web standards, and support them well. This is something I rarely see discussed. Most users (even here) tend to focus on GUI and user-features only (which blitz IE).
But…
Modern web standards make it far faster for developers to make killer websites utilising the latest tech on browsers that simply support standards – no matter what flavour. IE7 is currently nowhere near the level of Opera and Mozilla’s support for web standards – let alone user-customisability and features AND security.
Cross-platform browsers (like Mozilla and Opera) that really deliver on the standards promise are a real threat to Microsoft. Microsoft left IE stagnant for so long to undermine the effectiveness of any W3C standards because they know they have a virtual monopoly on the OS and what they say will be used by default anyway.
It’s only when their IE market share started eroding when they decided to bring out IE7 a bit sooner than expected – because it affects their Windows monopoly when web developers actually code to standards rather than IE-specific tags and headaches to get around the voluminous IE bugs.
http://www.positioniseverything.net/ie-primer.html
http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer.html
http://www.positioniseverything.net/op-omnibus.html
http://www.positioniseverything.net/gecko.html
But you can bet the changes in IE7 will never comprehensively support a wide range of modern (and not so modern) standards; that would be suicide for them, commercially speaking. They have to be selective in what they’ll support to undermine the whole standards effort – and they can afford to be, in a virtual monopoly. In other words, they will do the minimum they need to to get users (and current developers) to not stray from the IE platform.
IE-specifics and an IE-only web would just help them do that so easily. You’ll be forced to use Windows to get into that site because now you’re paying the cost for vendor-specific enhancements. To run your apps properly or migrate them properly to new versions, you’ll also need to upgrade to the next version.
But who wants to be locked in?