There’s been a lot of talk about Firefox turning 5 years old today. Seems like a good time to take a look at web browser market share. One place for this data is the Global Stats page for StatCounter.com.
Top 5 Browers
Internet Explorer has 57.15%, Firefox 32.03% and then a virtual three way tie between Chrome (4.46%), Safari (3.58%), and Opera (2%). Here’s the bart chart version of this graph:
Browser Versions
IE 7 at 22.73%, IE 8 at 19.46%, Firefox 3.5 at 19.32%, IE 6 at 14.94% (Ug!), Firefox 3.0 at 11.22%, Safari 4.0 at 3% and Firefox 2.0 at 1.28%. Everything else is below 1%. Here’s the bar chart version:
The good news is that IE 7, IE 8 and Firefox 3.0+ accounts for 72% of the browser market. The bad news is that IE 6 is still holding on at nearly 15%.
It would be great it other stats services like Google Analytics and Quantcast offered this view on the global browser market. Matt posted some browser stats for WordPress.com, which gets a pretty wide audience.
The only real browser stats that matter of course are the ones for your own site. Here’s the browser stats for josephscott.org (from Google Analytics):
Firefox at 58.34%, IE at 19.86%, Safari at 10.70%, and Chrome at 6.92%. The really good news is that IE 6 accounts for less than 4%. Here’s the breakdown for operating systems:
Windows at 70.75%, Mac at 20.94%, and Linux at 7%. Out of the Windows users XP accounts for 65.33%, Vista 27.59%, NT (Seriously?) 4.84%, and Server 2003 at 1.52%. That’s a lot higher percentage for Mac and Linux than StatCounter Global Stats, which isn’t too surprising considering my blog posts skew more towards Mac and open source topics.
4 replies on “Browser Stats and Five Years of Firefox”
Firefox is my favourite browser for a number of reasons. The main two are: the open source community and the number of plugins. The plugins are great. They help so much in doing different things. I noticed that Google recently launched a big advertising campaign for their Chrome browser but I have my reservations with Google as they seem to have similar goal to Microsoft. So, well done Firefox.
I’ve been using a combination of Firefox and Safari for awhile. Now I’m swapping Safari for Chrome to see how that does. I still use Firebug so much I don’t see giving up Firefox as something that would happen anytime soon.
Chrome is a nice browser. I must say I do like it despite the fact that Google is probably recording the web history. Seems quite quick. The developer options are useful but cannot be compared to Firebug.
There is one thing in Firefox that is a bit annoying (possibly a bug). When on a website with flash content the Ctrl + T option does not work.
Btw, nice blog.
I’ve sniffed network traffic while using Google Chrome and have found no evidence that Google is recording what it is doing. I think if anyone where to find out other wise there would be a huge outcry over it, and rightly so.
I think the problem with opening a new tab with Flash is that the Flash app gets all the key board events when it has focus, you need to click on part of the browser to give FF focus again, then Ctrl + T will open a new tab again, even with flash content on the page.