From the perspective of a digital agency, you sometimes get the feeling that the entire world is using either Firefox or Safari.
But in fact the real story of the last few years has not been the remarkable rise of Firefox (and I am a massive fan, of course!) but of the resilience in Internet Explorer's market share.
I cobbled together the graph below (click on it for a larger version) from browser statistics up until the end of Q2 2008 from TheCounter.com. (This will understate the impact of the launch of Firefox 3 on the 17th of June - Wikipedia quotes a share of 19.73% for Firefox in August 2008.)
So Firefox has eaten into Internet Explorer's market share - but as of June 2008, IE still enjoyed 78.3% of browser usage. Over the last two years, Microsoft's share of the browser market has dropped by just eight percentage points. For the majority of users, there have not been compelling reasons to switch from a browser that is stable and works pretty well.
Those who were dissatisfied with Internet Explorer will already be using Firefox or Safari - and it is these early adopters who are most likely to jump once again over to Google Chrome.
But in fact the real story of the last few years has not been the remarkable rise of Firefox (and I am a massive fan, of course!) but of the resilience in Internet Explorer's market share.
I cobbled together the graph below (click on it for a larger version) from browser statistics up until the end of Q2 2008 from TheCounter.com. (This will understate the impact of the launch of Firefox 3 on the 17th of June - Wikipedia quotes a share of 19.73% for Firefox in August 2008.)
So Firefox has eaten into Internet Explorer's market share - but as of June 2008, IE still enjoyed 78.3% of browser usage. Over the last two years, Microsoft's share of the browser market has dropped by just eight percentage points. For the majority of users, there have not been compelling reasons to switch from a browser that is stable and works pretty well.
Those who were dissatisfied with Internet Explorer will already be using Firefox or Safari - and it is these early adopters who are most likely to jump once again over to Google Chrome.
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