Firefox global market share reaches 21.1%
XiTi Monitor has released the latest web browser utilization figures updated to December 2007 based on a sample of 112,000+ sites.
Little change can be observed for Europe except Finland showing the highest market share with 45.4%, surpassing Slovenia which becomes second with 44.6%. In general, Europe saw an increase in Firefox usageof about 0.7% compared to November but just 0.3% compared to the previous high of 27.7% reached last July.
The rest of the world saw a much higher increase with South America growing from 11.1% to 20.2% during 2007, North America from 14.5 to 21%, Asia from 11.8% to 16.5%, Africa from 12.4% to 16.6% and Europe from 23.2% to 28% in the same period.
For an idea of what the global Firefox market share is I factorized the continental market shares with the number of Internet users in each continent as provided by Internet World Stats updated to November 2007.
I added Middle East and Asia regions to match XiTi’s configuration.
So, based on XiTi and IWS’s statistics, roughly 1 in 5 Internet users prefer Firefox, assuming Internet and web usage are correlated.
This would also mean the usual estimate of 120 - 150 million Firefox users could be greatly undercounted. I think only a tiny percentage of Internet users aren’t web browser users, so that 21.2% would translate into more than 266 million users and growing at a rate of 40 million new Firefox users a year if market share would remain the same.
Full XiTi Monitor report (fr-FR).
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January 24th, 2008 at 5:52 pm
Happy to read this :)
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January 24th, 2008 at 6:13 pm
Nice calculation! Could well be true! :)
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January 24th, 2008 at 6:25 pm
Percy, I think the big discrepancy you see as an undercount in Mozilla users is actually that what these market share studies (like XiTi and WebSideStory, etc) are showing is not “users” but rather “usage”. A Firefox user may visit more pages and more often than a not-Firefox user and so could give Firefox more “usage” than an average IE user gives IE usage. Does that make sense?
Now, I don’t think that Firefox users use the Web fully twice as much as IE users, so I think it’s reasonable to put the number of Firefox users at well over half of your 266 million figure. Based on our Active Daily Users now hitting 50 million, I’d wager that our total users is somewhere over 150 million though still somewhat below your optimistic 266 million.
Measuring is hard. The one thing we do know from all of the various attempts at measuring users and usage is that we’re growing at the expense of IE, have been for more than 3 years, and that’s a good thing.
- A
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January 25th, 2008 at 8:21 am
Asa, I would think that the ratio of Firefox to IE usage per user is a known metric or not too hard to get. That would certainly help clear things up.
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January 31st, 2008 at 1:25 pm
Considering these graphs would appear to be based on traffic for MozillaLinks.org, I’d say barely breaking the 20% mark is pretty embarrassing.
I’ll wait to hear from the BBC what their useragent stats are before getting too excited.
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January 31st, 2008 at 1:41 pm
what about kmeleon??
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January 31st, 2008 at 4:36 pm
Pete, from the article: “So, based on XiTi and IWS’s statistics, roughly 1 in 5 Internet users prefer Firefox, assuming Internet and web usage are correlated.”
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January 31st, 2008 at 7:27 pm
What about the share in Australia?
There is abysmal ignorance in Australia regarding alternatives to MS. mention FF, and people think you are an unbalanced geek from another planet.
Mention Thunderbird, OO, or Lotus Symphony, and they will consign you to the psycho ward.
Even the Government wants submissions in MSWord, and refuses pdf files!
What do we do to help reverse this!!!!!!
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July 22nd, 2008 at 1:53 pm
I looked at this page http://mozillalinks.org/wp/2008/01/firefox-global-market-share-reaches-211/ with Firefox 3 and half of the first chart did not show. So I tried with IE - shambolic. Went back to Firefox and refreshed. This time the first chart didn’t appear at all.
Not sure what it proves but it wasn’t impressive!
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