Recently both Websidestory and Onestat released their findings that although Firefox usage was still growing, it’s uptake was slowing down a little. I don’t believe that is the full story and I’m about to tell you why. The first thing to keep in mind, is that Onestat collect their statistics from users of their various online counter offerings. Websidestory apparently get their statistics from several big sites like Disney, Sony, Best Buy and Liz Claiborne.
The problem is is that both of these methods miss a crucial (vast) and growing Internet population, namely the power users. In the case of Onestat with their online counter systems, the problem is that generally only two types of clients use this type of service, newbies and occasionally businesses. In the case of Websidestory, the big sites they monitor are not those likely to be those visited by power Internet users, if you are one yourself, do you remember the last time you visited Disney or Liz Clairborne?
That skips a vast portion of the Internet’s users, namely the techies and power users. These guys know what they want online, they know where to go, and a vastly higher number of them use the Firefox web browser. The Internet’s users are slowly becoming more knowledgeable then they once were, and this group of power users are growing all the time. Experienced Web developers are likely to be using their own log file analysers for statistics and for those without log file access, counters like our own statistical counter that serve the same purpose. The only places I really see remote hit counters is on newbie web pages and free blog services (the exact places where one expects people to be using the default browser that came with their computer.)
To get a real idea of the number of people using Firefox and other alternative browsers, companies like Websidestory and Onestat need to do deals with sites like Groklaw, Slashdot, TheRegister, Wired, W3schools and other such sites and combine their results with their existing figures. Then perhaps we’d get a real picture of the browser landscape.
Don’t let the 25 million Firefox downloads limit your thinking either, because there are many Firefox users that won’t be in that list. Most of the big Linux distro’s now include Firefox by default and in some it is THE default browser. Thus, they don’t download it from Mozilla, they get it with their favourite distro.
I’ve actually added a Onestat counter to HTMLfixIT for two reasons. One is that I was curious, and two is that we show an average of 35% of our visitors as Firefox users. (and we are not even a hardcore tech site), so I figured if a few tech related sites added Onestat counters, we could help give people a real indication of what the overall Internet population is using.
