'Net Features : firefox

Browsers: Chrome Rules, IE Steady, Firefox Falls

Pete Prestipino — Sat, 11 Aug 2012 19:30:00 GMT

According to recently released data from traffic measurement service provider StatCounter, the Chrome browser now accounts for more than one-third of the browser market worldwide.

Statcounter is reporting Chrome's global market share to be 33.8 percent, up from 32.8 percent fin June and from 22.1 percent July 2011.

Despite Chrome's continued rise, IE remains strong with a 32 percent share of the browser market. Firefox however didn't fare so well in July. The browser is losing ground and now accounts for 23.7 percent. Apple's Safari browser came in fourth with 7.1 percent global market share.

What purpose does this information serve? Designers and developers in particular pay close attention to these types of reports as it enables them to understand global browser usage so design changes can be prioritized. For example, reading this data, a designer might opt to fix bugs in Chrome first, then IE and Firefox.

Chrome Gains Ground in Browser Wars

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 14:45:00 GMT

Google Chrome surpassed 20% of the global internet browser market during the month of June 2011 according to Internet statistics firm StatCounter.

Chrome took 20.7% of the global market, up from 2.8% in June 2009. Microsoft's Internet Explorer has fallen from 59% to 44% globally and Firefox dropped slightly from 30% to 28%.

"It is a superb achievement by Google to go from under 3% two years ago to over 20% today," commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. "While Google has been highly effective in getting Chrome downloaded the real test is actual browser usage which our stats measure."

StatCounter Global Stats are based on aggregate data collected on a sample exceeding 15 billion page views per month (4 billion from the US) from the StatCounter network of more than three million websites.

The Browser Wars Get Bloody

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 17:30:00 GMT

The reason that it is important to pay attention to browser usage amoung Internet users is that it ultimately influences how Web professionals design and develop their Web properties. For the first time that I can remember, one of the old standby's is on the ropes.

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) browser has fallen below 50% of the worldwide market for the first time according to StatCounter. The company’s research arm, StatCounter Global Stats finds that Microsoft IE fell to 49.87% in September followed by Firefox with 31.5%. Google’s Chrome continues to increase market share at an impressive rate and has more than tripled from 3.69% in September 2009 to 11.54% in September this year.

“This is certainly a milestone in the Internet browser wars,” commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. “Just two years ago IE dominated the worldwide market with 67%.” Cullen added that Microsoft’s agreement with European Commission competition authorities to offer EU users a choice and menu of browsers from March may have tipped IE below 50% globally.

In Europe, IE market share has fallen to 40.26% in September this year from 46.44% in September last year. In North America IE is still above 50% at 52.3% followed by Firefox at 27.21% and Chrome at 9.87%. The rise of Google Chrome in North America has also been impressive and in June it overtook Safari for the first time.

The Most Popular Browser... in the World?

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 19:00:00 GMT

NetMarketShare, which monitors market share and usage of major Web browsers, has released their January 2010 report.

They report reveals that IE (holds a solid 62.12% of all browser usage) followed by Firefox (24.13%), Chrome (5.22%), Safari (4.53%) and Opera ((2.38%). Do note that all versions of browsers are included in NetMarketShare’s report.

Google’s Chrome Browser gained 0.6% of global usage share in January at the expense of both IE and Firefox, which both lost share during the last month. Our own anaytics reveal that Chrome is the only one of the browsers listed to have gained significant share. Chrom usage on our own site is up to just over 8%.

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State of Applications from Wakoopa

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 16:06:00 GMT

Software discovery social network Wakoopa published "The State of Apps: Software, Games and Web - Q2 2009" trend report today.

We’ve pulled out a few of the more important findings (leaving out much of the “gaming” data) revealed in "The State of Apps - Q2 2009" report including:

- Twitter continues to experience steady growth and was used by 25% of the Wakoopa community. Twitter usage peaks around 9 PM daily and is one of the most actively used apps at that time.
- Facebook narrowly beat out YouTube as the most popular social media site among Wakoopa users. Other popular social media sites included Flickr, MySpace, Last.fm and LinkedIn.
- The biggest overall gainer on the Web was Habbo, a social networking website aimed at teenagers. The second largest gainer was social media community Orkut, designed to make your social life more active and stimulating.
- Firefox was the most popular browser with 55% of all Wakoopa members in Q2 2009. Google Chrome is the second most used browser worldwide among Wakoopa users, except in Asia where Internet Explorer is the top browser of choice. More then 90% of all Linux users utilize Firefox as their primary browser.

"The continued rise of social networks like Facebook and Twitter coupled with the diversification of the browser market led to our decision to publish this report on a quarterly basis," states Robert Gaal, CEO and co-founder of Wakoopa. "Our goal is to highlight some of the overall trends and changes we see developing on the application landscape, and in the process provide insight into the habits of Wakoopa's community of software enthusiasts and early technology adopters."

The statistics in the report were generated during the second quarter of 2009 by more than 110K software enthusiasts and early technology adopters who are active, registered users of Wakoopa.com.

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January '09 Browser Market Share

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 02:50:00 GMT

NetApplications released browser market share numbers for January 2009. As you might expect, Internet Explorer still has a hefty lead with 67.55% total market share, followed by Firefox (21.53%), Safari (8.29%), Chrome (1.12%) and Opera (0.70%).

The real story in all this, as others have mentioned, is the substantial growth seen by Firefox over the past year and the general decline in usage of Internet Explorer. Back in March 2008, IE had a nearly 75% maket share while Firefox had nearly 18%. Compare that to the information presented above and you'll see the dramatic nature of the shift. While the September release of Google's Chrome has made a slight dent in the total browser share, Safari has grown nearly 70% since March 2008,

FF Extensions for Developers/Designers

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 14:20:00 GMT

While Google's Chrome has yet to roll-out the inevitable onslaught of extensions, Firefox has loads ready for the taking - many of which provide great value to both developers and designers. Let's look at a few and why you’d want to use them.

Read Firefox Extensions for Web Developers and Designers now.

Browser Usage Market Share - Firefox 3

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 13:40:00 GMT

Net Applications Global Internet Usage Market Share study (say that ten times fast) tracked the release of the Firefox 3 release by the hour and monitored the well-promoted (yet poorly executed in my opinion due to downtime) Mozilla Download day and the results that followed in relation to usage market share for browsers. Net Applications states that Firefox made some "excellent gains in usage market share the last 2 months, which would imply a spoke in new users of FF3". See the chart below.

Firefox 3 Ready for Download

Mike Phillips — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Firefox has removed the "recommended for develoers only" tag from Firefox 3 and approved it for public consumption.

Upgrades include greater stability, security and the ability to run websites while offline. Although further tweaks are intended and the download page is still recommending the download only for developers, Mozilla told Reuters the browser fit and ready to go.

"In many ways it (Firefox 3) is much more stable than anything else out there," Mozilla Corp Vice President of Engineering Mike Schroepfer said in an interview.

Firefox Add-on of the Day: FireShot

Mike Phillips — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This handy tool takes a screenshot. Of course, your keyboard can do the same thing, but with FireShot you can add notes, graphical annotations, modify the image and select how much or how little of the screen you want to capture. This is a perfect tool for Web designers, or anyone involved in the development of a website, or even a nice way to show website visitors all the great features of your newly re-designed site.

Once you're finished with the screen shot, you can email, save as JPG, JPEG or BMP, copy it to a clipboard or send to an external editor.