Firefox Surges to 16% Market Share in U.S.
by Michael Arrington on July 11, 2006

Amsterdam based analytics firm OneStat is reporting that Firefox has captured a worldwide market share of nearly 13%, up from 8.7% in April 2005.

There are some surprising country-by-country statistics included in the report as well. Firefox usage in the U.S. stands at 16%. Australia, 24%. And in Germany Firefox commands a whopping 39% market share.

OneStat is an analytics service for 50,000 websites in 100 countries - the statistics on Firefox are based on aggregate data from visitors to those websites. In the past, statistics from competitor WebSideStory have roughly tracked those from OneStat, although WebSideStory has not released Firefox data since January 2006.

Flock, another Mozilla based browser (and also the browser that I personally use) that recently beta launched publicly and is starting to put distribution deals in place, is aggregated into total “Firefox” usage.

As a non-statistically relevant aside, about 60% of TechCrunch readers use Mozilla based browsers.

Comments

It was only matter of time, I say watch this space..!!

 

IE7 beta 3 is not bad.
But I am used to Flock now…
del.icio.us + flickr + blogging == Flock

 

The slow……slow………..slow decline of IE usage.

 

Wow! I love the fact that the whole “this site doesn’t work in firefox” has virtually disappeared with the rise in popularity. Unfortunately it is persistent for Opera…

 
 

Keep wandering why no study shows how many people use Firefox AND IE… Am I the only one?

 

Why would anyone want to use IE? Unless you “have” to.

“Microsoft — Yesterday’s technology, today.”

 

Mike,

Of the 60% do you know home Flock users you have?

 
 

Lee - no, I don’t. MeasureMap doesn’t break it down.

 

still the browser of choice for me. switched over more than a year ago and never looked back…

 

Currently using Firefox and Flock. Almost one in the same but not quite. By the way…TechCrunch rocks! Part of my morning coffee routine. Keep up the good work!

 

Tony - It’s great to hear that. Drink more coffee, read more TechCrunch. :-)

 

Flock is nice but is still too bugy for me - couldn’t everything that Flock offers be done with extensions in Firefox anyway?

 

Justin: Pretty much, but I think they’re banking on people wanting it in an all-in-one install. I think it’s dumb, personally, and I don’t like Flock, but to each his own.

Anyway, go Firefox! I’m really becoming a fan, and it’s nice to have some hard numbers so I can explain to my boss why we need to be dual-browser when we build things.

 

I’ve been using Firefox for about a year and a half now, sometimes
I encountered web pages that won’t let Firefox to render them, but
it’s OK I use “IE tab” extension.

 

I am just wondering, why they can’t fix the bug of memory leakge in their tabs. After couple of hours I am getting 200-300 Mb of unreleased RAM…

 

I believe Opera is underrated in most web stats. In fact a little while after Opera became free, instead of a surge in my Opera site-readers, I saw an increase in IE, while Opera stayed where it was. Guess what: The default setting in Opera is to present itself as IE6…. Btw, I am also using Firefox :-)

 

Can someone who uses flock answer the following question for me.

Are they building integration to specific websites like flickr or building on api that other sites could implement as well?

To explain my question better flock integrates with flickr for the user. So, a new photosharing site comes along, can they implement the same api functionality so that users can simply change their photosharing preferences to now point to new photo sharing site.

If flock is writing it so they are locked to specific sites then it seems pretty pointless to me, if they are implementing api’s any site can accept and a user can change preferences to point to another site flock really is a good web 2.0 browser.

Sorry for the long winded kind of off topic question.

 

Last winter Fx was predicted to be at 10% by summer. Awesome!

I’ve been using Flock for quite a while (6 months–when did PocketFlock come out?) and if it was a rockin’ browser before the Beta, it’s thrashin’ metal now. Flock isn’t Fx with extensions. It’s just not. If you think you can make Fx into Flock that way, you’ve never really put Flock through the paces. (We need some boilerplate for these kinds of questions.)

 

Any idea why Microsoft is do unpopular in Germany (39.02% )?
For example, in IM market ICQ is also much stronger than MSN messenger?

 

I will continue to say simply this:

Download Opera 9 and try it.

 

I have been using Firefox for few years now, and the majority of past year it has been on my desktop integration as a browser for most of the time, roughly 95% of the time. The recent version of IE 7. beta 3 is not as great as I expected. Too heavy on the system.

Firefox has improved vastly over the course of past year and has not become a majorly used browser for me. Ironically, I’ve just reverted back to IE 6.1 from 7beta 3, it is useless. How sad, that Microsoft with all of their resources and brain power can’t even produce a decent product even at the beta stage.

 

Correct me if I’m wrong, but 50,000 websites as the sample size isn’t that great. Granted, I don’t know who these websites are, but i’d assume that they aren’t in the top 50 of the web. Sites like google and MSN could have vastly different numbers.

Also, the statistics are heavily dependent on the audience of the given sites. So if the sample isn’t carefully taken from a broad range of sites, you could end up with loads of tech users, who will all be using firefox.

Just my 2 cents, what do you think?

 

Eric C: We are building an API for but it’s not stable and without complete documentation yet, but we hope to resolve that for our next major release. So theoretically you can support new photo services through Flock extensions, but as a practical matter you will probably have to rewrite it more than once.

 

I’m a proud Firefox user. Have been since the fall of 2004. I occasionally use Opera for surfing and IE only when checking new site layouts for cross browser compatibility.

BTW, here’s a screenshot of the browser share for one of my sites for this month, so the sample size is now 50,001 ;-)

http://www.gomaud.com/util/gad.....july11.png

 

Will,

Thanks for the reply. Once the API are more documented do you plan on making setting your default blog, photo sharing, etc. as easy as setting a homepage is in current browsers?

If extensions are required for each site this really does not offer any benefit over firefox which sites can currently develop extensions in.

I am actually pretty interested in this even if it is a far way off. If you’d prefer not to discuss it here feel free to e-mail me: eric at grepr dot com

Thanks

 

I’ve been using Firefox for a few years. It’s faster and less prone to crashes and Spyware, IMHO.

 

“Research is based on a sample of 2 million visitors divided into 20,000 visitors of 100 countries each day.”

Based on unknown websites, I don’t think these statistics are very robust. The methodology disclosed isn’t very detailed either, for example, it states they measure results over 50,000 websites using their technology, and as stated above they are only measuring 20,000 visitors per country each day over 50,000 (I am assuming..maybe/maybe not since they don’t disclose) sites. Over only a one week timeframe as well, the numbers could skew easily.

 

I don’t know about the usefulness of these stats, but my site will receive 5-7k unique visitors per day, and around 15% are using FF.

This is not a tech related site at all.

Btw, I’d like to vouch for the fact that TC rocks. Daily reading.

 

OneStat and WebSideStory are regularly cited by journalists, and beyond that what’s interesting is the trend, not the hard number. If they have bias, it should stay roughly static as time goes on. The trends are clear.

 

Eric C,

Yes, we would love to make it as easy to setup all your social web services as simple as it is now to change your homepage. We’re not there yet, but we are spending a significant amount of brainpower on the first run experience and user experience in general, and we’re making progress.

We’d love to have our browser work with every service by default, but realistically that may not be practical for the short term. We have a finite number of people, and each service has their own API and way of doing things. I think it makes sense to pick the most popular ones and let people from smaller communities develop Flock extensions that their community members can use. But hey, I’ve been wrong before :)

Are there any specific services you would like to see Flock support? We’re always open to suggestions.

 

Will,

See I see this as a chicken and egg issue.

It seems from the little I read (I really do need to download it at some point) that you’re chasing web 2.0 trends and implementing integration with the popular services. I guess the way I see it is, to really be main stream you need to be able to do what each user wants and writing code for specific sites won’t accomplish that for the majority as most of these spaces are crowded.

So, for flock to work all the sites in a category need to implement standard api. The problem is obviously you need enough market share to give sites a reason to implement the standard flock uses. So, I guess the best solution is to write a general api that is published (or adapt a standard where applicable) and then write custom code for the main players in that space. From my understanding currently only the latter exists, which means new sites won’t work with flock no matter what. If you give the open api and grab a decent early adapter market share you will give new sites who want to grow a reason to implement the api.

In return new sites will already work with flock and as such will allow flock to stay up to date and have diminishing need to recreate interaction with the same type of site and work on expanding the different spaces flock integrates with adding more value.

 

Will, I am pretty confused about the rationale behind Flock’s branded distribution deal with PhotoBucket, can you please explan it?

Thanks!

Alex

 

Interestingly Firefox’s share in Finland is 31%!
I also covered the story yesterday..
Have look..

 

50,000 is more than enough sites. Heck, 100 random sites from each country will get you an accurate stat within 1% or so.

It’s just one data-point, but my own non-tech-related blog is visited by about 40% Firefox users (compared to 30% IE and 15% Safari).

 

Alex, did you read the blog posts announcing the Photobucket version and about partners and choice? Was there something specific you were wondering about that was no addressed there?

 

Firefox is also better than Safari on OS X. Lot’s of sites, including Banking, don’t work so well on Safari. Apple should drop Safari.

 

Amit, you have no idea what your talking about. WebKit (the core of Safari) is one of the most advanced web rendering kits out there. It does a much better job than Firefox at rendering web pages. (Safari passed the Acid2 test before any other browser. Firefox still has a bit to go). When banking sites don’t design their pages to meet web standards it causes problems on safari, sure. But, that’s usually the web designer’s fault. Not Safari’s.

 

i use flock even though its buggy its awesome. firefox on a mac is buggy with the scroll arrows never displaying right

 
 

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