Firefox 3.6 automatic upgrade seems to be paying off
Mozilla’s decision to offer users of Firefox 3.5 to automatically upgrade to 3.6 seems to be paying off quite well:
From looking at some web statistics that I generated from leading web sites, this is how the browser market place looks for the top 95% of web users:
| Browser | Market share last week |
|---|---|
| Internet Explorer 7.0 | 26.69% |
| Internet Explorer 8.0 | 22.55% |
| Firefox 3.6 | 13.67% |
| Firefox 3.5 | 9.36% |
| Safari 4 | 7.84% |
| Chrome 4 | 6.87% |
| Internet Explorer 6.0 | 6.00% |
| Firefox 3.0 | 3.46% |
There is some kind of anomaly here with Internet Explorer 7 growing compared to last month, which I’m not sure how it happens but I’ll keep my eye on it.
Other then that we can see that the migration from Firefox 3.5 to Firefox 3.6 has been much stronger then the migration from Internet Explorer 7 to Internet Explorer 81.
On the other hand – even disregarding the IE anomaly, we can see that Internet Explorer 8 struggles to gain market share against Internet Explorer 7, taking more then 3 months to take less then half of IE7’s share, while Firefox 3.6 took up about 65% of its slightly older sibling in about two weeks.
This is a major success for Mozilla and I for once am very happy with that as 3.6 brings some changes that I’m very interested in like support for Microsoft’s document.readyState feature.
I can only hope that Microsoft can achieve such a success with the migration to Internet Explorer 9, which promises to bring many standards support improvements including finally support for normal DOM events and will allow web developers to finally use a proper event based programming model without all this attachEvent compatibility junk.
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- although – it can’t be seen in this visualization but the migration from Internet Explorer 6 to Internet Explorer 7 was almost as strong once Internet Explorer 7 was pushed as a “critical update” through the Windows Update service [↩]