Browser Stats: The State of Firefox

Filed under: — 10:08 pm

Nick at Digital Web posted his latest browser statistics, showing a dramatic rise for Firefox—45%, the same result as Kottke posted yesterday. Both showed Internet Explorer at about 30%. Before you get too excited by those numbers, Nick notes that they came from a developer site and do not reflect mainstream usage.

Well, I happen to have a popular site that does approximately reflect mainstream web usage, so I thought some browser statistics might be interesting. The following are February 2005’s browser percentages for The Quotations Page, along with those from February 2004 for comparison.

BrowserFebruary 2004February 2005
Internet Explorer89.93%76.47%
Mozilla5.29%14.11%
Netscape 4.x0.82%0.45%
Opera0.10%0.12%

Definitely an increase for Firefox/Mozilla, mostly at the expense of Internet Explorer, but Firefox has a long way to go before it beats IE on a mainstream site. On the other hand, 14% is very impressive, and Microsoft has a very good reason to get to work on IE 7.0.

[Fine print: Data based on approximately 11 million page views in February 2005 and 9 million in February 2004. Percentages do not add up to 100% because I didn’t include site crawlers, search engines, or RSS readers. Safari, Konqueror, and Camino were all below the measured margin for this site’s statistics, so all I can tell you is that their usage was less than .05% for both periods.]

5 responses to “Browser Stats: The State of Firefox”

  1. Chrispian says:

    Interesting trend. One of my sites (lit.org) has a pretty broad audience also. About 2000 uniques a day. Here is the break down for Jan/Feb just for comparison.

    Broswser / jan / feb IE 87% / 84.9% Firefox 4.5% / 5.6% Unknown 2.3% / 3.9% Safari 2% / 1.6% Opera 1.5% / 1.2% Netscape 1% / 1.2% Mozilla 1% / 1%

    IE is starting to slip on my site as well, but not nearly as much as on yours, though I bet QP gets way more traffic so you probably have a better slice of the different demographics.

  2. Tim says:

    Why was my comment deleted?

  3. Tim says:

    That is very interesting, The sooner FireFox grabs marketshare, the safer the internet will be, IMHO. :)

  4. Apparently you got your comment in on the old server before the DNS switched over. I copied it to the new server. Sorry about that.

  5. Razvan says:

    Hi,

      The statistics on my web site have closely followed the statistics from www.w3schools.com. Currently (June 2, 2005) FF has around 25 % of the browser market share:
    

    http://www.mihaiu.name/websitestatistics.html

      Please keep in mind that my site is for software developers.
    

    Regards, Razvan

(c) 2001-2007 Michael Moncur. All rights reserved, but feel free to quote me.
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