According to the latest update to w3schools browser statistics, Firefox has climbed to 25% of the browser market and Internet Explorer 5/6 has dropped to 64.8%. W3schools is a very popular site with web developers and has shown Firefox increasing and Internet Explorer decreasing since before Firefox hit version 1.0 (although they classed it as just Mozilla back then). If you add the full Mozilla suite’s market share to that of Firefox, then the Mozilla browsers are just under 30% market share now. We’ve been following W3schools statistics for some time now and the Firefox trend has been continuing at a more or less stable rate since before Firefox was added to their statistics.
Not a bad effort considering that in January last year IE accounted for 84.1% of the browsers. The amazing thing about Firefox’s market share isn’t just that it keeps on growing, it is that it is still growing despite competing against a web browser that comes included with Windows. People don’t have to “get” Internet Explorer, it is the default browser for Windows. To use Firefox, they have to get, install and most importantly use it, and the fact that so many are doing so is nothing short of amazing. It is one thing to hear that 60 million people have downloaded Firefox, it sounds impressive and looks good in news articles, but it’s quite another to see popular sites the world over reporting that Firefox is actually being used by a large number of those people. The Mozilla organization is non-profit, they give their products away for free and they don’t have an advertising budget as such and any efforts in that regard are based on user donations and word of mouth. To compete against a company that spends as much on Marketing as Microsoft is quite an achievement also.
Sites like W3schools (and HTMLfixIT as well for that matter) are tech sites, meaning most of their visitors are interested in or work for the tech industry in some capacity. Internet Explorer has much higher market share overall, but the tech users are good early warning indicators for what the rest of the users will be doing in a year so so. HTMLfixIT’s own statistics (which you can see in the box to the right of this article.) are showing even higher Firefox usage (nearly 40%) and past experience has shown that our statistics are at least a year ahead of the non tech users trend wise. It is good to know that ordinary people can still make a difference on the Internet.
