Interesting Firefox statistics

If you are a fan of Firefox (or just an Internet Explorer hater), I thought you might find this interesting. I was looking through some of the stats for Snapzilla for December this morning, and I noticed something interesting. For the first time, there were more people viewing the site with Firefox than with IE, by a small margin (45% Firefox vs 43% IE). It has been steadily growing over this year, and has doubled since last summer. Safari made a showing with 6% also, with about 8% of the site viewers being on Macs (nearly all of the Mac users were using Safari, with a couple using Firefox).



One other thing that surprised me is that more than 60% of the Firefox users are using an older version of the browser - only 40% are using 1.5. I am curious why there is such a slow upgrade rate. Of those who have not upgraded, 25% are not even using the 1.0.7 version - they are using 1.0.6 or earlier (all the way back to 0.10). I am one of those people who keeps everything updated and beta-ed all to hell, so the amount of users with older versions surprised me.

Y'know, BoingBoing found very similar stats:


http://www.boingboing.net/2005/12/23/more_boing_boing_rea.html




Vedy vedy eenterestink.


Edit: On the upgrade rate, the little red "update" tag was broken for me for a while. I suspect others had a similar problem until late.

Since I saw 1.5 posted on the Firefox/Google default homepage, that's why I'm fully updated.

Interesting post Cristiano, thanks ! I'm a huge Firefox fan myself, so I'm glad to see ppl are wising up finally
Curious indeed that a lot of Firefox users do not update, but maybe that's a preference thing ?
I mean I don't keep the software I hardly use updated, only the software I use every day or very frequently..
IE for instance is only present on my HD because I have to use it for some sites that haven't been updated for Firefox yet.. Maybe that's the case with those users as well..

Just my 0.02

I was waiting for the inbuild updater to tell me when, and asumed that they where waiting on bug reports after the initial release and that when 1.5.1 appears it would tell me or something. And really didn't thought about it anymore.
Didn't consider the updater could be broken.

I suspect that Cristiano's site might have a technically more savvy audience than websites in general, same for boingboing, which might increase the percentage of Firefox and other non-IE users

Sites that would be read by casual users or people with no special interest in computers, electronics, etc. might give a better idea of Firefox popularity, something like USA Today or some page of jokes, something like that.

I started using Opera because of it's nice text to speech capability. I wish Firefox would add that in a convenient extension.

I have yet to upgrade my internet explorer to the new tabbed browsing version, since I have two tabbed browsers that work pretty well, why bother? Firefox and Opera both call bookmarks bookmarks, while IE calls bookmarks favorites. Just because I felt it necessary to bookmark the IRS site, for example, doesn't mean it is one of my favorites. Calling bookmarks favorites is sufficient reason for me to ignore IE unless it offers some major advantage.

I'd be willing to bet the count for the average porn site is still predominantly IE.


But then, with all the malware that jump through and utilize IE, perhaps those numbers are artificially high.

Now that would be a fun study.

On my pc i use both firefox 1.5 and ie, only really use ie for stuff that requires activex, on my mac, i have safari and firefox 1.5, and on my linux machine i have firefox that came as part of the os, the latest build they have made available so far is 1.07 via the os autoupdater

It doesn't surprise me that much, nor does the fact that there's a higher than average proportion of Mac users - SL is still fairly esoteric, it's not got the exposure and popularity of something like WoW, and it attracts developers, explorers, early adopters.

This isn't an advocacy post, it's not like using Firefox means you're more creative or whatever than IE users, but when you have a group of people who are more likely to have an explorative attitude to technology, they're more likely to end up using a wider selection of programs and systems than average simply because they've tried more of them.

Out of all of the people whom I've asked what systems they're using, 100% have been on Macs so far. (That's not a very broad sample though.)

N.B. Firefox 1.5 on OS X 10.4, Powerbook 1.5Ghz

Why does it list Firefox as a separate thing from Mozilla? I thought I was using both at once, and that they are the same thing.

coco

Nah, Firefox is the bastard child of the Mozilla project. It 'forked' and parted with the main Mozilla project's codebase a while back. Since that time, they have seperated enough that they are effectively two different browsers.

IMO, Firefox is rubbish compared to say Mozilla 1.8 - but all the advertising is going towards firefox; so the main Mozilla branch is pretty much doomed.

OK, thanks Adam. It's confusing because at the top of my screen, it says: "Second Life Forums - Reply to Topic - Mozilla Firefox."

Does that mean I'm actually really Firefox or really Mozilla?

coco

That's actually just plain Firefox. Mozilla has just 'Second Life Forums - Mozilla'. Help->About should also tell you exactly what you have.

-Adam

Whoa, coco uses Firefox! Cool
<3 coco

OK, thanks! I guess it's a good thing I've got Firefox, then, from what you said earlier.

coco

Yep, I'm very technologically challenged (always have been), but I try to learn!

coco

I like firefox, I too had no ide the updater was broken, I assumed I would be notified of any need to update. I still use IE though, because for some websites Firefox does not deal well with streaming video. But my default browser is Firefox.

~Ulrika~

It's neat to have other choices, but Firefox sometimes runs funky.

Funkily?

Cris' Numbers add up to 100.01%

And yes I'm bored..

Blame Google Analytics

As far as Firefox being funky, I agree. I like it, but I actually have more problems with it than I do with Maxthon, which I still use as my primary browser. I go back and forth between the two - there are some things I do really like about Firefox, but I still have problems with certain sites so I switch back to Maxthon. I don't have any strong preference either way. It is nice to have choices though.

Lol...

I love my Silver Skin in Firefox!

That theme is too hard on the eyes for me - I use Qute , which is nice and understated - the UI does not detract from the pages.

Well! In order to see those, I had to update Firefox! All those themes to choose from!

coco

Yeah? Any real benefits to Mozilla 1.8 to speak of? Like, the fact Firefox is a huge resource hog.


I used to use Mozilla, but I just happened across Firefox and liked the "look n' feel" more than Mozilla and IE both. That's why I use it.