I read a report today looking at the market share of Firefox in Europe, with the conclusion being that about 25% of Europe (on average) is using Firefox, and in particular 18% in the UK.
Just out of interest I compared my stats from my most popular “main stream” site with that shown in the report and got some fairly similar results: 11% for March 2007 compared to 18% … 6% out is a fairly significant difference but not huge considering the difference in sample size that I am making assumptions about. Curiously though, the report showed usage of 15.8% in November 2006, compared to my own stats of 14%. A much smaller difference, but my Firefox readership has actually decreased!
I dug a little deeper into my stats: November 2006 saw a 66% and 10% share from IE6 and IE7, and 14% from Firefox. But then in March 2007 I’m seeing 47% and 34% for IE6 and IE7, but only 11% for Firefox … basically to conclude it looks like Internet Explorer, particularly Internet Explorer 7, has taken about 3 or 4% market share from Firefox (on one of my websites anyway) between November 2006 and March 2007!
That came as a bit of a surprise to me. I’ve not done any in-depth analysis of the numbers yet so this could just be a case of more people visiting from IE7 machines rather than an actual decrease in Firefox users, but its certainly quite interesting to see Internet Explorer actually gain market share! Keep tuned for further updates on this as I get the feeling the whole browser (and certainly user statistics such as resolution etc) has gone through a bit of a change recently!