Lots of commentary around about how Internet Explorer continues to lose market share against Firefox. The numbers, though, have seemed to me to be rather minuscule.
For instance, earlier this month, an Internetnews.com article said that IE usage has declined by 2.62% whereas usage of Netscape/Mozilla browsers (including Firefox) went up by 2.48%.
Big deal, I thought. IE still has about 94% of the overall market. So what does it mean to the Average Joe like me?
Last night, I took a close look at the visitor stats for my blog. For some months, I’ve been using an excellent free service provided by Statcounter.com which gives me all sorts of useful information about the visitors to my blog including which browser they use.
So take a look at this simple graph (click on the image for a more legible view):
It shows that a whopping 47% of visitors in the snapshot window yesterday were using Firefox (and of that percentage, incidentally, well over 90% had the new version 1.0 released only last week). If you add Firefox together with all the Netscape/Mozilla visitors, the number comes to 56%. Just over 44% use IE (39% with version 6.0). None using Opera, I noticed.
Does this mean that Firefox (in particular) is making amazing strides in capturing big market share? Well, clearly my little blog doesn’t represent the market! But, nevertheless, I think it’s a good indicator of which way it’s going right now.
(As an aside, read this interesting blog post IE Market Share… and Why It Matters by John Galloway a few months ago.)
Another interesting stat from my blog – 86% of yesterday’s visitors use Windows XP, 4% use Mac OS X, 3% Linux, combined 6% on earlier Windows (2000, ME and 98), 1% on Windows 2003 Server and 1% on PPC.
What does your blog look like?
38% here, Neville; most using 1.0.
I converted over the weekend, and when I say converted, I’m talking Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus.
Interesting, Allan. The trouble with snapshot views, though, is that it’s simply that: a snapshot. So when I looked at the stats again just now, they show visitors with IE at 55%. I suppose if I really needed to have an accurate picture, I’d monitor all this over, say, a week to get a more meaningful view.
That road to Damascus can be a long way!
I meant that I converted — Firefox just works better.
Sure, you can’t look at a narrow sample. And I suspect that PR blog readers are first-adopters, anyway. But… IE is looking distinctly unhealthy.