Browser Stats: The State of Firefox
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.
| Browser | February 2004 | February 2005 |
|---|---|---|
| Internet Explorer | 89.93% | 76.47% |
| Mozilla | 5.29% | 14.11% |
| Netscape 4.x | 0.82% | 0.45% |
| Opera | 0.10% | 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.]
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.
Why was my comment deleted?
That is very interesting, The sooner FireFox grabs marketshare, the safer the internet will be, IMHO. :)
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.
Hi,
http://www.mihaiu.name/websitestatistics.html
Regards, Razvan