Browser War Hots Up: Google plays favorites, Firefox hits 20% market share

[engine]

Browser Wars Hots Up [vnunet.com]

The latest data on browser market share indicates that Mozilla has broken the 20 per cent barrier in worldwide adoption.

Data collected by Net Applications showed Firefox’s November market share was 20.78 per cent, with Microsoft’s Internet explorer falling below 70 per cent for the first time. Google’s Chrome browser was used by less than one per cent of the internet population.

Browser Wars Hots Up [news.cnet.com]

Google, of course, has good reasons for pushing upgrades, just as Microsoft has had its own good reasons for forced upgrades. Better security, lowered support burdens, etc. Just because a vendor wants its customer base to upgrade to a newer version doesn't suggest nefarious design. In fact, it often implies the opposite.

But by offering links only to Firefox and Chrome for its upgrade, Google is doing something that helped to make Microsoft the 8,000-ton gorilla on the desktop: playing favorites.

[davidof]

On a Pr9 site I run we see around 78% share for IE which has been holding fairly steady - but it is in a PC/Mac oriented business sector. Safari gets around 4% with FF around 11%.

The breakdown for major IE versions is:

Msie 8.0 0.4 %
Msie 7.0 19.9 %
Msie 6.0 19.8 %
Msie 5.5 37.1 %

This is just using the information reported by the Browser so subject to the usual error. So not that many folks on IE 7.0 yet.

Most Firefox users are on 3.0+, probably as a result of the automatic upgrades.

[swa66]

Msie 5.5 37.1 %

That's very high. Any idea to why it's that high ?
(I've less than 1% of visitors (as defined in google analytics) still on versions of IE prior to IE6 [I doubt the site works well for them anyway])

Did you include stats from a long while back as well ?
Or have content that draws people with very old computers for some reason ?

(e.g. "upgrade from Windows 2000" content or something like that might attract a different population)

[nealrodriguez]

browser wars episode 3; the attack of the scripts

[moTi]

it very much depends on your location. the average american joe seems to adapt amazingly slowly - or at least seems to have totally different preferences. located in central europe, i'm noticing well over 50 percent firefox users in my stats meanwhile - though average age of my site visitors being relatively young.
overall firefox is the most used browser for non-corporate use since last year. it's amusing that people report things like msie 5.5 usage or banks that only accept msie.
however, i'm still one of the few who likes msie most. for browsing experience as well as programming.

[tomda]

Just went throught an article explaining the jump of FF usage and decrease of IE usage.

It's simple:

End of year holidays + Increase of unemployment = increase of residential browsing = higher Firefox share vs IE

[davidof]

> That's very high. Any idea to why it's that high ?

I was surprised, I can't think of any reason why people would be using anything under 6.0. Are there other clients that claim to be 5.5? I admit I just took the figures straight from awstats without looking at the log files. They are for November.

I know that internally the company is still on 6.0 - that's 200,000+ browsers which will skew the figures somewhat.

[grelmar]

I can think of reasons why people still use 5.5 in a corporate environment. Corporate IT infrastructures can be painfully slow to change, largely due to the bureaucratic constraints. One of our customers just finished (within the past 6 months) their win2k migration, from win95.

It's a huge company, and they wanted to make sure that everyone, from the CEO, to secretaries, to shipping and receiving, was "properly trained on the new systems."

They're ignoring XP and Vista, and their IT guys are working with Windows 7 beta, getting ready for the next migration. They're expecting to have that done by 2012 or 2013ish. Maybe.

[swa66]

win2k migration, from win95

LOL, from one unsupported version to another unsupported version.

And then some wonder why Google insists to autoupdate their browser to get their applications to work properly...

[Hugene]

The author of the article is a clown:

But by offering links only to Firefox and Chrome for its upgrade, Google is doing something that helped to make Microsoft the 8,000-ton gorilla on the desktop: playing favorites.

No one has ever seen the page he displays as example of this, and no one would have ever seen it if it wasn't for his article.

[swa66]

The author of the article is a clown

That's rather harsh, but I think it's clear he's anti-GOOG and/or pro-MSFT.

Honestly: is it that unexpected for Google to promote the browser they made (in part) to fix problems some of the existing browsers create for the applications like gmail and more they have in store for us ?
Is it that unexpected for Google to promote Firefox, an open source browser that caters to a slightly different audience than theirs and that they help finance (MSFT didn't finance mozilla).

Is it that bad of Google to not promote a non-standards compliant browser like IE7 (CSS of IE7 is still the most deviant from the standard compared to FF, opera, safari, chrome, etc.)

Moreover it's a recommendation not a "thou shall only use", or the next step "you can't use".