And so Firefox continues its march into Europe. It is no secret that alternative browsers are much more popular in Europe than they are in North America, and recent statistics by StatCounter confirm that Firefox 3.0 has actually surpassed Internet Explorer 7, making it the most popular browser in Europe.
StatCounter gathers its statistics from its own network of users, which encompasses 3 million web pages, leading to 4 billion page views per month. As always, statistics are statistics, so I wouldn’t bet your life on them.
As the graph shows, Firefox 3 has surpassed Internet Explorer 7 as the most popular browser in Europe. Of course, if we add Internet Explorer 6 and 8 figures into the mix, IE is still more popular.
Firefox holds a share of 35%, edging out Internet Explorer 7, who sticks at 34%. Internet Explorer 6 still sits at 11%, with IE8 having a share of 2.3%. This puts Internet Explorer’s total share at about 48%, and Firefox’ at 38% (thanks to Firefox 2.0 users). Opera also does very well in Europe, with a share of 7%. Chrome and Safari are both stuck below 3%.
The figures for Europe differ a great deal from those of the rest of the world. StatCounter’s statistics for worldwide browser usage put IE at 62%, Firefox at 29%, and Opera, Chrome, and Safari at less than 3% each. North America has figures very similar to the worldwide ones, but with Safari at 5%, and Opera at less than 1%.
Diving deeper into the European figures, it’s pretty clear that my country (The Netherlands) is a bit behind the times, with Firefox at 21%, and IE at 73% – the others barely make a blip on the radar (except for Safari at 3%). It seems like other European countries are the ones doing all the hard work: in Poland, for instance, Firefox’ share is at 51%. Opera is doing very well in Russia, with a share of 37% (!).
The figures for operating systems are also fun. In Europe, Windows XP does 69%, Vista 24%, Mac OS X 3.5%, and Linux 1%, which happens to be similar to the worldwide figures. North America is the different one here, with only 0.5% using Linux, and 7.8% using Mac OS X.
As always, these are just statistics, so be cautious.
Mixed feelings about statistics. Good to hear FF is doing well. But to hear it on 1 Apr. is not as funny as it could be on any other day of the year
Same here. And switching to bar view doesn’t make me feel better … 😉
In bar view, Firefox is still behind IE. Hmm, did I miss something ….?
Did you notice that Firefox (all versions) is about 10 % behind IE (all versions)?
Probably reflecting the fact that Firefox users are more likely to be running the current version than IE users. Going by that chart, IE6 still makes up nearly a third of the total IE userbase. It’s unkillable, that piece of junk…
The news was featured on arstechnica on March 31, so I believe it’s got nothing to do with today’s madness
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/03/firefox-3-marketsha…
Edited 2009-04-01 11:44 UTC
Indeed. I don’t want the April Fool’s nonsense on OSNews. Have you ever seen a website make an actually funny April Fool’s joke?
Thought so.
The slashdot OMG!!! Ponies!!! skin was a fairly good joke (or so I think).
Google “slashdot omg ponies” for screenshots.
As much as I’m not a Firefox user myself (preferring Opera), it’s great to see that many Windows users are coming to realise that there is a choice out there and that they’re not stuck with the shipped browser.
Next mission is to get offices on board as many users are tied into Internet Explorer (and often older versions of IE too) by their businesses IT department.
I’m happy to see Opera has 7% market shares around here
The problem I have with Opera is that it still has a hellish load of bugs in its 9.0 revisions regarding CSS all of them are fixed in the 10.0 alpha. But the bugs were severe enough that I had to limit a site ones to the features IE6 got, because a load of extended DHTML/Web2.0 features triggered exactly those bugs. As much as I love Opera, I cannot wait until version 10 is finally here, which is really good, even in its alpha stage!
Actually it is not the IT departments for the most part. It is normally the marketing department or accounting department who use specialized software. The IT department, contrary to popular belief, usually just recommends things and then the management makes the decision on it. The management being usually Operations, of which accounting falls under, and then the Sales/Marketing department. Sad, but true.
… and is likely to be a decent part of the “Other” category along with Mozilla/Netscape and IE 5.x and earlier.
The main thing is that IE no longer has a browser monopoly meaning that if you ignore other browsers you are chucking away a considerable part of the market, something no businesses can afford.
Actually, the lost business might be even worse than the statistical differences in browser usage may imply.
This might be especially true if your business is IT related. The users that are willing to spend time and effort to switch browser may also likely be more willing thant the average user to spend time/maoney on other IT related products.
In the real worl, the world out there and not this of numbers says that firefox is *really* growing and so does linux.
Let me explain: no so long ago, say 2-3 years I never saw a single computer/laptop with firefox and/or linux installed on it and everyone that knew I wasn’t using Microsoft but Linux/FreeBSD thought I was a complete geek. They still think I am although the trend has changed: I see people in college with linux, home computers using firefox as browser (even with linux!) and, the *really* good news is that I’ve seen some companies/shops working with linux (usually Red Hat based distros).
I’m not claiming for the Opensource dominance but to free choice! Once the world has realised that there’s not only Microsoft on software products things will improve a lot!
Just my two cents…
Damnshock
same can be extended to Macs
In the mid 1990s when I was at school there was me and 1 Girl in the entire school that had a mac at home!!!
Now they are becoming incredibly popular! (I know as being known as the mac user for all those years has also made me the point of support calls no.1)
As you say, linux is getting through, my mum is now using ubuntu 🙂
And fat people.
When I was at school (early 90s) there was one large kid in the whole school, and even then he wasn’t obese, or unfit.
Now kids are right chunkamunkas with a packet of crisps surgically attached to the left hand.
Obviously, using alternative OSes makes you fat.
correlation is not causation
correlation is not causation
===
Agreed. We must base our hypotheses upon evidence.
Let’s start here:
http://www.fsf.org/photos/ted-tso-free-software-award-2006
Edited 2009-04-01 23:04 UTC
[/sarcasm]
I’m surprised we Europeans aren’t up there with the Yanks using IE7, as we seem to be closely imitating them with regards to obesity, bad manners and listening to shite music these days!
And a mobile phone to the other. 🙁
Edited 2009-04-01 20:23 UTC
In which country? I live in the Netherlands and know nobody with a mac. I am also tech-support for everybody I know. It’s all windows.
it also depends on the city you live in and the people you know. if you go to any hip coffeehouse in the center of berlin, you’ll get the very wrong impression that a majority of the inhabitants of germany uses macbooks. if you go the library of the law school, you’ll still see about a quarter of these rather conservative students using macs. but in the library of the law school of leipzig, you’ll hardly see a single mac.
Edited 2009-04-02 08:39 UTC
I live in Austria, and i see a hellish number of people in the trains using macs (mostly students with macbooks)
and in the office where I work, given the option of buying new workplace pcs and notebooks a lot of people have shifted towards macs. I think there are about 2-3 pc users left, the rest uses macs 🙂
The same page tells me that Firefox currently holds 100% of the market in Antarctica:
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-an-weekly-200904-200913
Moreover, those guys claim Opera holds 44% of the market in Ukraine:
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-UA-weekly-200904-200913
which I find utterly ridiculous.
Edited 2009-04-01 15:53 UTC
LOL….This is what a marketer would call “unrepresentative”. When you don’t have enough people, figures aren’t reliable.
What browsers do the friends you have in Ukraine use?
What makes you so sure the Ukraine stats are so uttely ridiculous?
Because there’s obviously something wrong with the stats. How many people were counted in Ukraine? 1? 2? Probably no more than that to have such results.
You can’t have 44% with 1 or 2 people counted, you can only have 0%, 50% or 100%.
I don’t find that ridiculous at all, I find it quite possible. It’s not because in your country everybody talk english that it is not possible that there are only 1 or 2% in Ukraine who do. What is so ridiculous?
Look at that:
http://www.google.fr/trends?q=opera%2C+firefox%2C+internet+…
Google trends says the same thing as the article.
I believe it to be very close to the truth.
Edited 2009-04-02 13:28 UTC
While Opera may be slightly overrepresented in this survey, it seems very clear that they do have a very strong market share in Russia and the Ukraine.
Look at these:
http://index.bigmir.net/users?&d=0&y=1
http://www.liveinternet.ru/stat/ru/browsers.html?period=month
Maybe Opera simply has very good Russian and Ukrainian language versions?
IE 7 would be tying Firefox 3.0 for the lead if the increased number of IE 8 users were using IE 7. If Firefox 3.1 were released tomorrow, half of the Firefox users would be using it in a week, which would make the figures for 3.0 and 3.1 look pretty low.
What is more interesting, IMHO, is how slight the uptake of IE 8 has been since it’s official release this week. I suppose next week might show a slightly higher uptake.
I’m not complaining though, it is nice to see so many people using ‘alternative’/’minority’ browsers – could be very useful for beating the banking websites (and similar) round the head with.
BTW the reason that IE is in the lead in the bar chart is that the bar chart shows an aggregate figure for the last 9 weeks – in the line chart the figures for each week are separate.
Even world wide Firefox 3.0 surpasses IE 6. So all the arguments saying we have to support IE 6 fully for site visitors also should be saying the same for FireFox!.
… and that’s the thing – REALLY there is NO good reason NOT to be able to support all of them, IE6 and newer with minimal effort, apart from the fact that nobody has been coding web pages CORRECTLY the past decade. Tables for layout, non-semantic markup, presentation in the markup, lack of understanding the box model, over-reliance on content sizes, lack of testing…
Worst part is, 90% of the books on shelves are complete outdated trash, and don’t even get me STARTED on the education aspect of web development.
Like most other statistics you are going to see people trying to use it to justify taking sleazeball shortcuts that will do nothing but cost them in the long run… remember at the end of the day the numbers may be real, but you can spin them to say anything through omission…
Take the headline itself “FF outpaces IE7” people aren’t going to pay much attention to the 7 part and assume you mean IE as a whole…
Which is funny since if you look down the graph you’ll notice that IE8 went up the exact same amount 7 went down… So IE7+IE8 is still greater than FF3. Wait, the number of IE7 users dipped when IE8 was released? Who’d have thunk it?
I ran google analytics on a programmers centric site I have out there and the result was amazing:
70% firefox, all of them on various incarnations of Firefox3
20% on IE around a little bit less than half of them still on IE6 and.
The rest is other browsers (Dominated by Safari, Opera and Chrome)
Ok this is a german site and programmers centric. But it is a nice indicator of where things are heading!
The best number is the number of IE6 users which soon will be under the you can finally ignore them border of around 5-7%!
In about a years time at least for programmer centric sites you can finally start to ignore the browser.
My personally guess is all of the IE6 users are from corporations and are forced to use it. Most private users nowadays either have shifted to fox or use already ie7, but corporations are the biggest problem!
The weekend numbers will probably show almost no IE6 users if any IE numbers but that will take a little bit longer to gather (the site is relatively new)