Did Firefox Lose Market Share in July to IE Followup
August 15, 2005 5 Comments
As you could probably tell, I seemed a bit skeptical in this post. I decided to run some stats on LQ and compare them to the ones I did in July. It turns out that LQ has also seen a small drop in Mozilla/Firefox usage and a small increase in IE usage. I have to admit I'm quite surprised. I'm interested to do this same test again next month to see if a pattern is emerging. We all knew that the growth of Firefox had to slow down a bit at some point, but I thought that plateau would come after 10%. Let the speculation begin on why it's happening. I don't think the fact that all the new “back to school” PC's come preloaded with IE should be underestimated. Given a little time to become infested with Spyware, will the Firefox number start to rise again? Any other speculation? The numbers below are for the first two weeks of August (I've included the July numbers for comparison).
| Browser | % |
|---|---|
| Firefox/Mozilla | 57.7 -> 56.8% |
| Explorer | 27.9 -> 29.1% |
| Unknown | 5.2 -> 5.2% |
| Konqueror | 4.1 -> 3.9% |
| Opera | 3.3 ->3.2% |
| Safari | 1.2 -> 1.2% |
| Galeon | 0.3 -> 0.3% |
| Links/Lynx | 0.2 -> 0.2% |
Jeremy's Blog 
I think you have a point there (about the spyware, etc). You know that I'm pretty open-minded about OS and browser choice (although I lean toward the bleeding edge of Linux and FreeBSD, which is also no secret). I just wanted to share something about my weekend. I got a used computer case the other day. My intention was to perhaps house the Gigabyte P-II board I had. I thought that it would make a nice internet machine for my sister (who, ATM, can't afford a new PC). The case came with everything inside except a power supply. For kicks, I fired it up, and the old thing lept to life, sort of…the computer wanted to leap to action, but the silly thing took forever to boot. At the time, the neighbor was possibly connected to the net.
Oops. Hit enter at the wrong time. The ironic thing about that post is that the url is sacrificing for me!
I agree about the “back to school” PC stuff:
Two years ago I started a computer engineering course at the University of Guelph and got my first PC. I used IE for about a year before I tried Firefox. The only reason I got into it is because it was open-source and to be honest, I still don't know which one is better (in this case, better means more secure, faster, easier to use), but I still use Firefox for the open-source reason alone.
If you recommend it to someone, they'll ask why, and a lot of people can't provide a detailed enough answer that'll make them try it. Why is it more secure? I know it's a little easier to use and the difference in speed, I find, is negligable. So why would the average user switch?
It's more secure because security is one of its fundamental design issues, not an after thought. Not being “integrated with the OS” also helps. The spyware issue that plagues you with IE just goes away with Firefox. The fact that there are a ton of cool extensions is just icing on the cake IMHO.
–jeremy
Thanks, that helps me.
I think a lot of people are looking for an answer they can understand as a reason to check it out, while if I told my parents it was more secure because it's not “integrated with the OS”, they wouldn't get it.
Firefox may be in the more advanced class of users for a while.