My Firefox vs. IE stats

At Pubcon in Vegas, the speakers did a bit of 10-second market research on 1000+ site owners and webmasters. The questions were: “How many of you use IE as your primary browsers? Now, how many of you use Firefox as your primary browsers?” By my count, among the savvy webmasters who go to Pubcon, Firefox users outnumbered IE users 2 to 1 or 3 to 1.

So I was interested to learn (via The Inquirer) that one metrics company recently claimed Firefox use is growing in Europe. In Finland, over 39% of people reportedly used Firefox! Finland! Land of beautiful koivu! (That’s birch to us English speakers.)

My stats run closer to 50/50. Here’s a snapshot from last month, for example:
Browser share in November 2006 for mattcutts.com

Frankly, I’m a little surprised IE has that much share for my visitors. This past week my “How Google deals with hacked sites” post showed up on digg/Slashdot/reddit. How does that crowd stack up? IE was only 22.5% of browsers that day, with more Safari users and many more Firefox users:
Browser share on December 4th 2006 for mattcutts.com

Now I have a couple questions. First, do any other metrics companies break down browser market share? Bill Tancer or Compete, do you have any Firefox vs. IE data? OneStat, StatCounter, or eXTReMe Tracking, whaddaya got for us? Second question: how does Firefox vs. IE break down for your websites?

Added: I use Google Analytics for my stats, just because it is easy and I am lazy. And now I really am going to try to get outside or exercise and not just blog all weekend. 🙂

98 Responses to My Firefox vs. IE stats (Leave a comment)

  1. I see the same ratio on my site. Firefox 4tw

  2. But…we have 88% IE (80% 6 and 20% 7) and only 7% Firefox (2nd place).

    I think that the skewed stats you are seeing with web developers are those same skewed stats that you see with early adopters of technology. Good stats, but the public that they are designing websites for need to be kept in mind. The majority of users still use IE and until that changes, their functionality is what we need to keep at the top of the list…if we want to be seen widely, and since we run an e-commerce site I happily cater to the masses. 🙂

  3. I just looked and less than 15% of my visitors use FF.
    One surprise was 7% using Opera!

  4. 51% of our visitors use IE, 45% use Firefox and 3% use Safari.

  5. wow, I’ve never cared about these stats before (as all of my sites degrade nicely in both browsers, so users see the same thign either way)

    Feedbutton.com (mostly visited by people who use RSS or own blogs) is 78% firefox

    Conversely, Txt2day.com (a free text message site, mostly visited by teens) is 78% internet explorer.

    It’s amazing how these are exactly opposite.

    NoSlang.com (mostly visited by parents)… is right about where i’d expect: 67% IE.

    Looks like I have all markets covered.

  6. Hi Matt,

    I just looked on my Analytics results (this is not a paramater I usually look at). My stats are:

    59.5% Firefox
    36.5 % Internet Explorer
    3.17% Safari
    0.79 Mozzila

    On another major (student) web site I run the stats are:

    73.10 % Internet Explorer
    23.43 % Firefox
    2.66 % Opera

    The rest is insignificantly low.

    Hope that helps.

    Thanks,

    Jason
    http://www.flexewebs.com

  7. Generally, for non-tech stuff, i usually see 15-20% FF, 5-10% Safari

    Digg/tech-savvy focused site stats are very different, with 60+% FF. (Details here: http://blog.auinteractive.com/64-of-you-use-firefox )

    One surprise for me is Opera’s relatively small share for the tech crowd

  8. Firefox is one of the worst-designed browsers I have ever had to suffer with. You can’t even scroll down a page in the default mode, and if there is a way to tell it to honor the arrow and PageUp/PageDown keys, it’s not intuitively obvious.

    And then it HANGS on some Web sites. What’s up with that?

    And then it takes so long to start up. And it takes so long to…..

    Ooooo….don’t get me started!

  9. Are you sure you comply with Analytics’ terms of service?

    “You must post a privacy policy and that policy must provide notice of your use of a cookie that collects anonymous traffic data.”

    Seems like Analytics isn’t meant for lazy people. I hope Measure Map’s ToS will be a bit more flexible on this one…

  10. Hmmm! You do a browser comparison and in all tests, IE blue scores over FF orange conclusively. The small print whispers in 5 pt type that it’s actually the other way around. Wonder how ole Bill paid off the the lead graphics designer in the analytics team to make the primary color (the biggest number) a nice Microsoft blue. HAS GOOGLE BEEN INFILITRATED???

    But seriously, browsers, like any other consumer product are also influenced by demographic behavior. A site like this blog would have a much younger, with-it following, who in my humble opinion would have a propensity to use Firefox vis a vis an older (age wise), uncomfortable with change, market that would tend to stick with IE.

    Dunno if that made any sense? My 2 cents worth is that a site like Amazon, which cuts across demographics, would yield a better insight into browser market shares.

  11. I do alot of work on web apps and various other things for a major private college in chicago. Ours look more like IE – 66%, FF 17%, Safari 14.5%, then everything else.

  12. Sitemeter, also, has Browser great stats

    http://sitemeter.com/?a=s&s=s10searchengines&r=13

    REALLY GOOD!!!!

  13. Michael Martinez, tell me how you really feel. 🙂 I wouldn’t claim FF is perfect. The memory footprint is what annoys me. But I loooove extensions.

  14. My guess (and web analytics only tell us what, not why) is that the very techie SEO crowd already subscribes to your blog in their feeds and your GA doesn’t pick them up unless they click through to the blogpost. When you did that post on Google and hacked posts, you had 132 comments (very high) and you know that people have to click through to the actual blogsite to comment, hence the high GA data collection on Firefox.

    You may be obsessed with your FeedBurner stats (like I am with mine.) If not, it’s worth going to their dashboard and looking at the various feedreaders people use. If you see lots of your subscribers using readers like Thunderbird, it makes sense (they can read the whole post without ever checking out the site.) If they are using readers that require clicking through, maybe you have a title problem (titles that aren’t intriguing enough for people to want to click.)

  15. Stay inside Matt. If you stop blogging, I’ll feel like I should stop working as well.

    Search Engine Land:
    54% Firefox
    39% IE (IE6, 68 percent of that, IE7, 31 percent)
    4% Safari

    Daggle:
    65% IE (IE6, 68 percent of that, IE7, 31 percent – yep, the same as SEL)
    30% Firefox
    4% Safari

  16. Firefox only has ~8% while MSIE has ~75% for my site…

  17. I’m always dubious about these ‘Firefox vs MSIE’ races – actually, there’s a wealth of difference depending on the site you look at.

    I thought I’d pop along and look at some of the websites I run… and the difference between them is staggering. I can’t post images here, so try… http://james.cridland.net/blog/2006/12/10/firefox-vs-ie-stats/

    The moral of the story? Corporates hate Firefox. Home users love it. Possibly.

  18. James, I wouldn’t say corporates hate firefox. Of the 11 people in my team at work, only 2 use IE.

    Of course, down in the sales department, only 2 of them use firefox too…

    It depends on the corporation. I use FF because our network people like to do stupid stuff like have logon scripts that reset our IE homepages to the company website and stuff. I don’t like that. I prefer to have my localhost as my homepage (as everything I’m working on at work is there anyway)

    I’d say for tech companies, FF is more widely used. For companies that like to control their employee computer usage, IE is the de facto standard.

  19. Usually, the geekier the audience of the site, the more Firefox users you’ll see.

  20. I typically receive more Opera hits than IE, and 75%+ Firefox.

    Likely due to the fact that most of my visitors know me personally, and as such there is a very good change that I have either repaired their computer (and took the liberty of installing Firefox) or they are tech-savvy (and wouldn’t use IE).

  21. Your statistics is skrewed. Remember your Alexa rank? More popular than Ask.com?

    Because webmaster and SEOs read your blog and they mostly use Firefox.

    BTW, statistic for online-utility.org shows :
    MSIE 51.9%
    Firefox 39%
    Opera 2.7%
    Safari 2.3%
    Netscape 0.9%
    Mozilla 0.9%

    I think in reality MSIE has 55% of market and Firefox 33%, since my site is also techy.

    But, best data has Google about it, the only issues are :
    – would Google like to publish it
    – who will ask Google to publish it

  22. We’re at:

    77.55% – FireFox
    16.33% – IE
    4.08% – Safari
    1.02% – Netscape?
    1.02% – Camino

  23. I see 61% IE, 22% Firefox, per Awstats.

  24. It also partly depends on the extension.

    Extensions such as the StumbleUpon toolbar can really throw your browser stats off. I’ve got one site in particular that has had the FF usage go as high as 89.3% because of the users of the toolbar (now it’s at a much more reasonable 67.4%.)

    Ryan’s not totally right about the tech company thing. Primus, for example, requires IE to be used not because they like to control computer usage but because many of their web-based portals (e.g. their TalkBroadband VoIP portal) require IE. So I’d say it’s more a case of corporation and circumstance than just corporation.

  25. I would die without FF. It is the coolest browser for an SEO. IE has been nothing but problems for me no matter what version I have used. No wonder why the tables are turning.

  26. Using google analytics probably introduces a pro-IE-bias: I block the google analytics script using Adblock Plus because of privacy concerns, and I am sure I’m not the only one to do so (some popular filter lists for Adblock Plus contain a rule filtering urchin.js too).

    I am just uneasy about a single third party gaining statistics about quite a big part of my web browsing. Sure, simple logfile analysis can do that too, but this creates no domain-spanning data.

  27. firefox: 44.93%
    internet explorer: 44.72%
    opera: 6.19

  28. Google Analytics statistics for internetmarketing-news.de:
    50,41 % Firefox
    40,74 % IE
    4,11 % Opera
    2,32 % Safari

    Interesting: From the Firefox-Users 58,08 % are using Firefox 2 and 33,70% are using Firefox 1.5.0.8

  29. From the last six months (which includes a digging), these are my stats:

    57.20% Firefox
    29.63% IE
    06.49% Safari
    03.81% Opera

    Go Safari!

    I agree with Mladen, bring back the browser stats! I was so sad when you guys dropped those from the zeitgeist.

  30. Hi!

    And then it HANGS on some Web sites. What’s up with that?

    asked Martinez and my answer is a backquestion:

    do you checked how valide the HANGS-site where?

    it gives a tool for FF which does this easy
    https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/249/

    IE it is relative regardless how many bugs a site has,
    FF wants correct sorce code, otherwise it may shows curios things.

    my stats with it’s little basis shows

    IE 49%
    FF 33%
    Netscape (compatible) 11%
    Opera 5%
    Safari 2%
    done with analog 6.0, time last month

    Greetings Karl

  31. For a computer science student community I run, it’s about 49% IE, 46% FF, 2.8% Opera. Though I suspect that the large IE percent has to do with the default browser installed at schools.

    As my blog on the same subject shows 58% FF, 33% IE, 3.3% Safari, 2.5% Opera

    So the breakdowns fluctuate greatly based on site’s target audience.

  32. On our network of sites (double digit million users) we vary from 9% to 17% Mozilla users for the month of November. Interestingly enough, every single site shows a marked increase in the use of Mozilla browsers since the start of the year (Eg. 7->9%, 14->17%). More obviously, the ‘older’ the site audience’s age, the lower the proportion of Mozilla usage.

  33. Mladen Adamovic, I agree my site skews heavily toward tech-heavy folks that would use FF. Or Finns, maybe.

  34. I’m using SiteMeter on Webmetricsguru.com – which has a highly technical audience but only gives me stats for the last 100 visitors – andt it’s Sunday. Having said that – here’s how my last 100 visitor pan out.

    IE 7 – 18%
    IE 6 – 47%
    Firefox 1 – 17%
    Firefox 2 – 8%
    Konqueror – 2%
    Netscape 8 – 1%
    Netscape 7 – 1%
    Safari 2x – 3%
    Safari 1x – 1%

    I heard that Digg readers are highly into FireFox though.

  35. The question I wish you would have asked at PubCon was: Treo or Blackberry? I thought that Blackberry was gaining in market share, but at PubCon it seemed I kept seeing people with Treos. I was just curious. :-/

  36. Here are stats from some of my sites:

    Site #1
    76% IE
    21% FF

    Site #2
    70% IE
    30% FF

    Site #3
    79% IE
    17% FF

    Site #4
    68% IE
    30% FF

    Site #5 (my personal blog)
    19% IE
    80% FF

    Looks like Firefox is growing steadily – but they still have quite a bit to go before they out-weigh IE over-all.

    But according to BoingBoing ( http://www.boingboing.net/2006/12/08/firefox_ascendant_in.html ) – “50.4% of Boing Boing readers use Firefox, compared to only 26.1% on Exploder.”

  37. This is the stats for our last week stats via Analytics, its for the brazilian portuguese site http://copacabana.com so it´s probrably a completely different audience than yours

    Internet Explorer 88,43%
    Firefox 9,64%
    Safari 1,06%
    Opera 0,39%
    Netscape 0,23%
    Mozilla 0,14%
    Mozilla Compatible Agent 0,08%
    Konqueror 0,02%
    NCSA Mosaic 0,01%

    note this interesting NCSA Mosaic access, it used to be my own browser in the late 1996/1997 season!

  38. Main music-making-based site with a fairly broad demographic.:

    IE = ~72%

    FF = ~22%

    … etal

    I share Martinez’ experiences (plus some!). Maxthon is what FF wants to be… and it’s IE 😉

    (PS… Google should show them some love Matt. My Google visits would undoubtedly drop significantly if it weren’t for Maxthon: The convenience of just dragging a word off the page and having G SERP’s for it, open in the next tab, is just so handy for querying stuff I’m reading in the forums (or wherever), is responsible for nigh-on 99% of my G visits. A “can’t live without” feature.

    The possible vested interests are abound 😉

    PPS… Incidentally allied to this feature – I’ve found myself, at times, wishing that G “knew” the context of my search, from the page I dragged the word off. For instance, if I dragged a word from a page that was a perl tutorial, G returns a more Perl-focussed set of results… or somesuch variance on that feature anyway.

    Just an idea… no chance of a cut in the patent I suppose?!)

  39. I have some condensed stats from Mapstats. We only track traffic to blogs, and since day 1 (September 4 2005) we have tracked a total of 130 million unique visitors and 218 million pageviews. You can see our last 31 days: http://mapstats.blogflux.com/overall.php

    You can see our monthly stats breakdown at http://mapstats.blogflux.com/showstats.html

    For browser statistics: http://mapstats.blogflux.com/browserstats.html

  40. Haha, yeah we finns kick ass 😉 The land of the thousand lakes and .. koivu’s, apparently.

    Anyway, my site has about 65% Firefox, 30% IE

    What about Google.com, FF vs IE? 🙂

  41. My company is number one automotive website in australia has stats as follow: IE holds 90% of the visitors meanwhile firefox only has 5% share. The stats are tracked by nielsen rating.

    I reckon most of the sites with firefox leading the stats normally technology related websites. That’s my guess… Or perhaps Australian are considered as late adopters.

  42. For the past couple of months, our Firefox % is dropping steadily, while the IE % is on the rise.

  43. Interesting. D Sarathy, do you mind if I ask which industry you’re in?

  44. For a small faith-based ministry site, with mostly non-tech non-SEO visitors, since the Firefox 2.0 release on 24 Oct:

    IE 84%, Firefox 13%, with all others sharing the remainder

    Without detailing the numbers, Firefox initially gained share with its 2.0 release but IE is rebounding as IE 7.0 gains momentum.

  45. Karl,

    You cannot seriously say you think all people should be using a browser that hangs on broken code? Please tell me you were only joking.

    I have no love for IE in any version, but a tolerant browser is much, much preferable to a browser that crashes. That’s why I stopped using Netscape 4.x. That’s why everyone stopped using Netscape 4.x. It wasn’t because IE was a better browser. It was because we were all tired of seeing the beloved old warhorse hang its head in defeat.

    Firefox may be the lovedove of the unwashed masses, but I have to be productive at work. And in my spare time I really don’t care to put up with all the short-sighted nonsense in FireFox.

    Matt — you’re right about the extensions. It would be nice if we could have universal extensions that work in most browsers.

  46. In Finland, like everywhere, the situation is highly related to site audience.

    For geek/tech sites the 50/50 ratio is pretty accurate, but in general FF is slightly more popular.

    For educational sites, FF is highly popular. This is mainly because lots of schools and gov. institutions have shifted to FF.

    But as for home users, the IE still rules with approx. 25/75 ratio.

  47. Matt,

    One question; why is the link to statcounter a nofollow link ?

  48. From the netherlands some IE vs Firefox info.

    We’ve got a website with a very wide range of visitors…

    Our IE vs FF stats:

    86,68 % vs. 11,26%

    So in the Netherlands IE is still winning from FF…

    (stats of entire month November, total visitors 5.159, total views 19.188)

  49. UK Contact Lens company, with a wide range of user types (including e.g. Win95 users):
    Internet Explorer 84.73%
    Firefox 11.15%
    Safari 2.75%
    Opera 0.53%
    Mozilla 0.51%
    Netscape 0.26%
    Camino 0.06%
    SonyEricssonW850iv 0.01%
    gzip 0.01%

  50. For a Mac-specific german site:
    30% IE (most of it IE6)
    40% Firefox
    20% Safari

    Another german Site about Volkswagen Beetle (the old one):
    63% IE
    24% Firefox
    4% Safari

  51. Come on Matt, you must have access the best firefox statistics availiable on the internet at Google (save Yahoo, possibly). Does Google uber secrecy not let you share? Would your results be too useful to MS (who must have skewed IE usage on their sites)?

    Go on, whats the percentage of the trillions of visitors you get that are using firefox?

  52. Interesting. If I rember it correctly, in Germany FF has a marketshare which is similar to their share in Finland.

    BTW, is their a reason for why you’ve nofollowed the StatCounter link? It lights up in pretty pink with my (FF!) SearchStatus extention

  53. 81% IE, 14% firefox, 3% safari, plus a few others not worth mentioning.

    Quite a different picture from the tech savvy crowd!

    (Stats from Webabacus)

  54. Matt, I’d (we’d all!) absolutely LOVE Google to give us a Zeitgeist/breakdown of Google stats by browsers/rendering engines and by operating systems, ideally for both Google itself and for Google Analytics.

    Google is in a nearly unique position of being able to provide this sort of information, there’s only a few other big sites (Msn and Yahoo!, though they have a negative tech bias, Amazon, eBay) that are in a position to do this.

    We would all love to know how many people use Firefox, Opera, or how many are using Linux this year. How else will we know if this is the year of the Linux desktop? 🙂

  55. By the way, OneStat has been collecting statistics for many months now, it’s interesting to see them one after another (I plan to make an animated GIF out of it sometime).

  56. (sorry, I meant XitiMonitor not OneStat)

  57. HI!

    2 Martinez: this was only a discription of my expierience with IE and FF,
    and IE7 disappointed me when I installed it, not to ask me if I want to export my favorites from IE6. I think also it’s a con for FF beeing not so tolerant as IE. But I think the people should see it as a challenge to write more sites in valid source codes.
    Because there are more people and more content types around the world than just americas. The I-net should connect people from different cultures, and therefore the connectors should play with the correct rules, or we would landing in a language-babel (I hope you may understand this, in german: babylonische Sprachverwirrung). And therefore I think, the time will comes Searchengines will prefer valid sites.

    Greetings Karl

  58. Hello,
    The reason you have higher FF traffic is because it’s mostly webmaster traffic.

    Surfer traffic is IE strong, webmaster traffic is FF strong. 🙂

  59. My web stats.

    Internet Explorer = 46.75%
    Firefox = 44.91%

  60. Karl, technically there are no “correct rules” for Web design. The standards that have been proposed by the W3C are accepted and followed on a voluntary basis. Most people who create Web site content are completely unaware that those proposed standards even exist, and given how stupid that people like me consider many of those standards to be, you can be sure that you’ll never get the entire informed Webmastering community to help promote the full set of standards.

    Tolerance needs to cut both ways in an international community, something that critics of American attitudes often pay less attention to than we do.

  61. Looks like he nofollowed that particular site because they appear to be selling text link ads. In case you were still wondering.

  62. It’s IE i’m afraid, a massive 89% to a very low 9% firefox.

    I have also switched back to IE now the new browser has arrived and that’s where i’m staying.

    Too many problems with firefox, also here in Spain people have been worrying about safety / security of firefox. I also picked up a virus and lots of the technicians have been having their doubts about the fox….

  63. Karl, technically there are no “correct rules” for Web design.

    And with that single proclamation, young Mr. Martinez doth unleashed the holy fury of both the Armies of Nielsen and Web Standards. He impaled himself upon their mighty spears, arrows, swords and keyboards, never to be heard from again.

    Dude, there are a lot of people sitting on whoopass, and you just gave them all can openers. It’s gonna suck to be you real soon.

    POPCORN MAN! Over here!!!

  64. It’s still 70/30 for IE at the moment for me

  65. Stats for my site: http://www.DynamicAJAX.com
    FireFox IE 5.x IE 6.0 IE 7.0 Opera Safari
    Hits: 7159 Hits: 88 Hits: 4296 Hits: 1089 Hits: 434 Hits: 277
    Percent: 53.65% Percent: 0.66% Percent: 32.20% Percent: 8.16% Percent: 3.25% Percent: 2.08%

  66. Hi!

    This all begans with YOUR question, and I only want to help you.

    That the most of the people think, the main point is that it is now running
    and all other is never mind, is’nt new to me. But a professional should work without faults. This industry is a new one and the time will comes in which valid will be a target of all, than people like you had to work back all they missed in the past years.

    from: http://www.netmechanic.com

    Invalid HTML code can cause display problems that turn away visitors and hurt search engine promotion efforts.Search engine spiders are also basic text browsers. While an advanced browser like Explorer 6 may not care if you forget to close some quotation marks inside a tag, a search engine spider does!

    now I want to apologize me by all because my cautinory texts and want to ask Matt whether this obtains today? My only invalid page is Favoriten.html and this only because I can’t find a way to display Serp-URLs valid.

    2 Adam: my English is’nt as good as I can really understood what you wrote, but it seemed to me, you are willing to tell us that Martinez statemant was contraproductive. Thank you therefor.

    Greetings Karl Heinz

  67. I wanna see Google’s stats as well. I bet that they have a firefox bias what with the home page and search tools in various firefox versions. But are probably close enough to “the truth”.

    I run enough websites to have my own ideas. It isn’t “tech savvyness” that draws FF. Chess players are more likely to use Firefox, than the average punter, I think it is probably correlated with IQ (Can install firefox, does realise IE will probably get their PC owned sooner). Rich people are more likely to use Safari. But this is all man bites dog stuff.

    Sites with RSS feeds will favour firefox (as it pulls RSS even in the old versions). You must measure per visitor since per hit is biased towards Firefox (favicons anyone?).

    However our biggest and broadest web server still resolution clocks up IE as the overwhelmingly dominant browser. It is installed by default, that is hard to trump, given the average ability of the home PC owner.

  68. Our Catholic Church website, with a mostly non-technical audience, is getting:
    80% IE
    12% Firefox
    3% Safari

  69. IE 78 %
    FF 16%

  70. Karl: I wasn’t agreeing, nor was I disagreeing, with Michael’s statement. I tend to believe that the truth is somewhere between yours and Michael’s point of view.

    All I was saying is that there are web design factions who can and will rip Michael to shreds as soon as they get a hold of what he just said, and I’m going to get some entertainment value out of it since I have a fetish for online explosions and fights. 🙂

  71. I think it is probably correlated with IQ (Can install firefox, does realise IE will probably get their PC owned sooner).

    You might want to avoid that stance, Simon. I’m one of the high-IQ-types (contrary to the way I write…I intentionally try to scale down my vernacular to suit my target audience), and I choose to use IE. My PC has never been “owned” since I bought it in May…the worst thing I’ve ever had is an advertiser cookie. Wow, big deal. Baleeted!

    I prefer IE because I find it easier to work with and more aesthetically pleasing than FF (although 7 has taken some large steps backward in that regard.) I also hate tabbed browsing…I don’t care what anyone says, it’s annoying and I’m one of the users who has his taskbar on the left side of the screen so I’d rather see a series of windows open anyway (thank you, 1440 x 900 widescreen.)

    I also prefer IE because there is a rather large security hole that has not and cannot be addressed if FF continues its present development: open source = code access to those who would choose to manipulate the browser for malicious purposes. It hasn’t happened yet, but it’s only a matter of time…if FF grows more popular, it will get targeted. I’m not of the belief that an army of volunteers is going to fix any problems that occurred. Close the source, close the hole.

    Richie mentioned that a lot of techs in Spain see this sort of thing happening. There are high-level Canadian techs that see it as well.

  72. I heard that Opera often ‘pretends’ to be IE6. Is this a common enough practice with browser agents that the IE figures are unreliable?

  73. Here are the stats for my blog site (written in Japanese).
    http://www.design-spot.net/blog/

    November 1- November 30

    IE – 82.09%
    Safari – 8.53%
    Firefox – 6.89%
    Opera – 1.71%
    Netscape – 0.71%
    Mozilla – 0.07%

  74. I don’t see how adding a nofollow to http://www.statcounter.com/ is going to hurt/help them any.. they have a 10/10 pagerank and been around forever 😀

  75. Retail and Info Sites… both at about…

    IE 80%
    Firefox 13%
    Dogs n Cats 7%

  76. For http://www.solestruck.com/ our numbers for Firefox are low but I’m actually surprised they’re not quite a bit lower because our customer base is almost entirely female and is probably a good representation of the least technically-apt Internet users. The numbers come in 78/15/5 for IE/Firefox/Safari according to Google Analytics. Taking a random week from each of the last 5 months, IE has come from 81% in the second week of August to 78% last week while Firefox has come from 12% the same week to 15% last week. Given our client base, I thought Firefox would be an insignificant figure but apparently it is reaching the masses to some extent.

    Internally, we (the programming and IT departments) have converted the entire office to Firefox.

  77. This question to me always came down to the answer of what my visitors use… not what I liked. My audience tends to lean female, older, and English speaking… as such, their browser choice is over-whelmingly IE… to the magnitude of 80% for IE to only 7% using FireFox. So I personally also use IE…

  78. This is off topic but I had to mention it. http://www.crazyegg.com has heat maps ( for my site we’ll call them – “Cold Maps” 🙂 ).

    Clicks show on the heat map reagardless of where the visitor clicks; even on areas of your pages where there is no anchor tag. Awesome! would like to see this in my Google Analytics.

  79. You can find some european wide survey results from Xiti.com (another hosted web analystics firm) http://www.xitimonitor.com/en-US/Technicals/index-1-2-3-52.html

    You can also look at more local French Stats from another analytics vendor, http://www.wysistat.com , their last report is there http://www.wysistat.com/v6/pages/fr/firefox_atteint_les_20_de_part_de_marche_121.html (french)

    You can also find comparisons of the penetration of IE7 and FF2 http://www.wysistat.com/v6/pages/fr/ie7_vs_firefox2_128.html or http://www.xitimonitor.com/en-US/Technicals/index-1-2-3-63.html

    Regards

  80. I have my stats on my front page. Updated automatically every time I blog write something more.

    http://www.noteme.com/pic/browser-stats.jpg

    – ØØ –

  81. Im running analytics on about 20 major hotel websites in the asia pacific and firefox rarely gets over 10% of browser share.

  82. Cameron’s stats are interesting, if only because I’ve built a site on behalf of a client for a similar market (brides) at http://www.hibiscusflorals.com .

    According to the stats, it’s 8:1 in favour of IE over Firefox. Safari gets 1 or 2 users per month, but by far it’s either IE or FF (over 99%).

    Cameron: what I’m wondering is how much of your traffic comes from obvious businesses. You may be getting an artificially inflated FF figure as the result of women surfing at work in offices similar to your own. (Just something I’ve noticed from the Hibiscus site.)

  83. How is Googlebot a browser? I thought the bots out there didn’t activate traffic counters, like Google Analytics. Or are you using the Urchin / GA interface to mine your personal server logs?

  84. Adam: It’s possible, but I don’t know that you could say that many offices use Firefox. According to Analytics’ “Connection Speed” report, 17% of our web traffic is on a “Corporate” connection speed. I’m not sure how reliably that determines whether or not someone is in an office, though, and I don’t know what percentage of businesses use Firefox.

  85. Do you get a lot of government employees? (Schools, obvious agencies, things like that.) That might explain at least some of it.

    I’m not sure that all THAT many businesses are using FF either, but I know quite a few that are, and 15% wouldn’t be all that unreasonable given the circumstances.

  86. Hi!

    some one looked at the new Editor in IE7?

    I think this new formatting is a good example for worst-bettering
    (german verschlimm-bessern). On this term FF is much better, I knew that normal people don’t use such options but if MS work forward in this direction
    FF will become a wider distribution.

    Greetings Karl Heinz

  87. IMHO, I think that such web sites as yours is a target of enough advanced users. This sort of users can choose Firefox as more stable, fast etc. At least they read and think about that. But most of people don’t think out something exotical but use what Windows offers by default.

  88. I have my stats on my front page. Updated automatically every time I blog write something more.

  89. In our company roughly 90% of the employees are using Firefox, the others are either for browser compatibility checks, sites incompatible with Firefox (Really hate those) or simply incredibly stubborn people who refuse to even go near anything other then the product which is shipped with Windows and thus *must* be the best product out there. (We call these ‘techno-retards’.

  90. Multi-WordedAdam,

    Closed source software has never and will never be any less vulnerable than well funded, well managed OSS projects. MSIE has been caught with its pants down many times–not just because of its ubiquity but because it is insanely easy to decompile C. FF has a distinct andvantage of not being tied to the Operating System and therefore is not likely to render your whole system at risk. MS has insisted in maintaining IE as a portion of the operating system. This seems far less secure than an application that runs within an environment than one that is tied to it. FF has a fast responding developer community who can react quickly and deploy changes and updates within hours and it usually doesn’t make things broken.

    I agree with many of the posters that FF is not a perfect browser and users shouldn’t be told what browser to use. If you like IE, use it. If you like FF or Opera, use them. It is a matter of preference. The new interface in IE7 is horrible–why relocate the menu and the button bar? It took me a week to figure out where the refresh and stop button were moved to. (Yes, I know I can F5–it is for clients and live edits)

    BTW, you can customize FF to disable tabbed browsing, FF will scroll and Page Down/Up works on install.

    I do agree though that FF has a bad time with memory leaks and there are countless stability issues on the new Intel Macs including a Flash bug and major issues with the Google toolbar.

    Don’t turn the browser wars into a civil war. Just make it a choice between flavours of ice cream.

  91. Hmm. Based on data of our hosting network with millions of visits a month, looking at comparison between browsers, stats are clear. And I mean clear as they’re based on thousands of different niche sties. Here’s a roundup:

    MS Internet Explorer 70%
    Firefox 22%
    Netscape 5 %
    Opera 2 %

    Conclusion: Considering this is coming from most countries in the world, Firefox has a long way to go. Perhaps those webmaster got stats from 1st world countries only. But failed to consider countries in the Middle East, Africa, South America and China.

    Just like it’s easy to get high Alexa in niches where most of those visitors already have the toolbar. IE: Internet Marketing for eg.

    ==

    As for StatCounter, ExtremeTracking or OneStat; 1st choice Stat, 2nd: Exterme. (Don’t recommend GAnalytics since they’re limited in tracking unless Adsense is used). Eitherway I’ve done tons of comparisons online, only to find StatCounter has always been the mass endorsed over G and others.

  92. I prefer IE, firefox is a little slower in loading up pages.

  93. I find firefox too crowded, but i still use it for web developping

  94. I find that depending upon your target market, the older generation use IE6 as they dont know how to upgrade, while the younger and more “internet savy” use IE7, Firefox and Safari.

    By default i use IE7 and Firefox.

  95. These stats are insane. I’ve never seen anything come close to that on any of our server logs (150 across different, allbeit, commercial websites).

    blogs would have way more firefox users than commercial sites I would assume. But perhaps you guys forget omit your own IP from your stats which would be one explanation for the massive bias?

    On average, my stats read:
    48% MS IE6 (- 16% PA projected)
    37% MS IE7 (+ 16% PA projected)
    11% Mozilla Firefox (stablized)

    From other stats I’ve read – these seem to be a more accurate reflection of the general public’s usage of browsers on commercial sites.

  96. Reading this a year and a half after the last post, I still find it very interesting… I would almost want to see a reiteration of this after Pubcon in March, especially with FF3 and Chrome on the “Battlefield.”

  97. A year has gone by and here are our stats. Obviously it depends on the site, but for our site Firefox only takes about 25% (march 2010)
    Netscape 5 789
    MSIE 8 687
    MSIE 6 629
    MSIE 7 368
    Chrome 325
    Unknown Browser 196
    Opera 97
    Safari 42

  98. Fresh stats from my site in Sweden, I can see that Firefox and Chrome are more popular now compared to a year ago, but IE is still popular. Can’t understand why :S

    1. Internet Explorer 52,58 % (9.0 = 1%, 8.0 = 80%, 7.0 = 17%, 6.0 = 2%)
    2. Firefox 24,47 %
    3. Chrome 12,29 %
    4. Safari 9,02 %
    5. Opera 1,38 %

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