Mozilla's Firefox is gaining popularity at the expense of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. We assess the figures and explore the implications.
How are the figures produced?
The figures come from Net Applications Inc, a firm which provides services to help website owners track visitors to their websites and perform better on search engines. The firm produces monthly statistics showing the operating systems and browsers used across all their clients’ sites. While this is only a snapshot, the firm covers thousands of websites, meaning it’s likely to be a very good measure of overall web trends, even if the actual figures may not be precisely accurate.
What do they show?
The figures for November show the breakdown of browsers as:
- Internet Explorer (all versions) 69.77%
- Firefox 20.78%
- Safari 7.13%
- Google’s Chrome 0.83%
- Opera 0.71%
- Netscape 0.53%
- Other 0.22%
These figures represent two symbolic firsts: it’s the first time Internet Explorer has fallen below 70% and the first time Firefox has risen above 20%.
Are these particular figures totally reliable?
A calendar quirk means the November figures may be a little misleading. During November there were 10 days which fell on weekends, plus most people in the US (which is likely to be the largest audience for the sites involved) were off work for one or two days for Thanksgiving. This means many American company offices were only open for 18 days in the month; in other months, that figure can be as high as 23.
Generally people accessing the internet at home are more likely to be using browsers other than Internet Explorer. That’s because most companies stick to Microsoft products on company networks, either because they think they are better and more reliable, or because it’s easier than retraining staff.
Net Applications says there is some evidence that this did affect the figures: the proportion of people using Firefox rose during the Thanksgiving period. Interestingly it was also up during the US election, likely because people were inspired to look for news online during the evening.
However, the firm forecasts Firefox will again top 20% next month and that the trend away from Internet Explorer will continue.
What difference does it make?
There isn’t a major financial effect for Microsoft as Internet Explorer is free and the company is no longer allowed to tie it in with other products or use it as a promotional tool. However, if more people try and like Firefox, it may make them more likely to consider trying alternatives to paid products such as Microsoft Word or even Windows itself.
There is also some psychological damage. If Internet Explorer’s share ever fell below 50%, it would be a blow to Microsoft’s reputation.
On the Firefox side, the continuing growth means it will become more accepted as a mainstream browser. This will likely encourage more developers to both contribute to the browser itself (through the open source project which is the basis of the program) and to develop add-on features.
