The popularity of Mozilla Firefox has been on the rise continuously, courtesy its rich features and a rich set of more than 7000 add-ons that further enhance its features. However, it has always lagged behind the Internet Explorer in market share. Now, the latest data released by StatCounter, widely-used web-analytics site, shows that for the week from 14 to 20 December, 2009, Firefox 3.5 browser has become the most popular browser in the world surpassing the Internet Explorer 7 that is now pushed to the second position.
Source: StatCounter
However, let me point out that the market position of the browsers has been calculated separately for different versions of the same browser. This means that for Internet Explorer, the market shares for versions 6, 7 and 8 have been calculated separately. Likewise, for Firefox, the market shares for versions 3.5, 3.0 and 2.0 have been calculated separately. It is in this context that Firefox 3.5 version is now the most popular browser (with 21.93% market share) leaving behind IE 7 (with 21.2% market share). The market share of top 8 browsers for the week from 14 to 20 December, 2009, as per the data released by StatCounter is shown below:
However, if you consider all versions of a browser together, then Internet Explorer continues to be the market leader in the browsers. Considering versions 6, 7 and 8 of IE together, the market share of Internet Explorer is 55.42%. On the other hand, considering versions 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5 of Firefox together, the market share of Firefox is 31.95%. Thus, in that sense, Internet Explorer is still far ahead of Firefox.
It may be pointed out that recently Google Chrome has enabled extensions and in a short span of time (less than 2 weeks), it has already got about 1000 extensions (at the time of this writing – 984, to be exact). Chrome is likely to take away some market share from other browsers; and, in this regard, Firefox is likely to lose more share to Chrome than other browsers. However, the real impact of all this will have to be seen in future. For the time being, at least, Firefox can celebrate.
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This is great news for us Firefox users. Let’s hope that the numbers keep rising so that the old fashioned surfers who insist on using IE and other browsers that make our customized WordPress sites look crappy start getting 100% instead of dodgy formatting.
Great news for all ff lovers.