RSS feedFirefox usage by country: the browser wars are back
According to French company XiTiMonitor, Mozilla Firefox now has a 23.2% market share in Europe. (The report is in French: it’s not appeared in English on their website yet, but no doubt will do shortly.) They have published a couple of interesting maps giving breakdown of usage by country within Europe as well as for other parts of the world.
It seems that it’s taken off the most in Europe and Australasia, where its market share is 23.4%. The USA and Canada are lagging behind on 14.5%, and Latin America comes bottom on 11.1%. Even so, it’s quite clear now that it’s posing a fairly significant challenge to the dominance of Internet Explorer. It has a whopping 40.5% market share in Slovenia, and 15.8% here in the UK.
These figures would indicate that it’s gaining a pretty firm foothold among non-geeks and Microsoft’s dominance of the browser market is no longer something to be taken for granted. Interestingly, Firefox usage goes up at the weekends, suggesting that people are installing it on their home computers though they may be restricted from doing so at work, where they don’t have administrative rights on their Windows machines and can’t install software, condemning them to Internet Explorer.
I use Firefox almost exclusively at home myself, in combination with Google Reader for my RSS feeds. Even though IE7 has been released, and it gains RSS support, tabbed browsing and anti-phishing features, there’s little that it does that the Firefox 2.0/Google Reader combination doesn’t do better. Firefox 2.0 also has a spelling checker for form fields, which Internet Explorer doesn’t. Sweet.
Some of the best Ajax websites out there actually say that they’re best viewed with Firefox, though they usually work fine with Internet Explorer too. There are still a few websites that don’t work properly on Firefox and recommend Internet Explorer, but they tend to be fairly poor quality both technically and graphically. This is no doubt down to the fact that the best developers tend to be geeks who use Linux and view Microsoft with suspicion, if not as the evil empire, and the best designers all use Apple Macs.
Posted at 17:34 on 9 December 2006.
Feel free to take a look round the site — if I
say anything that 
20:56
Just ran across your article.
As a developer with 24 years experience, the best browser is: “The one that the end user is using.” In the end, a developers’ preference is meaningless, as long as the end users and clients are happy. As far as designing and operating systems: Again, the client drives the developer platform, not the other way around. For example, when I was Webmaster for the Santa Clara, CA portion of NEC, they used IBM servers and plenty of cgi, and had no intention of changing. So, I developed in cgi. For a startup here in the San Francisco Bay area approached me with their business plan for a company that supports all pc users in many companies, they inisted on a Windows Server 2008 machine, with ASPX, and .NET functions written in Visual Basic. This tied in with their laptop tools, their software, and their Pc-2-PC software diagnostics. Are they wrong? Of course not. So, my company developed in ASPX and .NET.
In the end, if a developer/designer tries to artificially influence a client to use technology the developer wants and is familiar with, they dis-service their clients. Usually, what it really mens is that designers and developers are not ambitious enough to learn new things, and are likely not a good choice for a company to use. My company develops in all scripting languages, servers, and architetures. This has made us solvent in the recession and we have more work than we can handle.
Opinions are plentiful, but solutions for the client needs are the first priority.
00:44
I’d agree wholeheartedly. I never said we shouldn’t develop for Internet Explorer — on the contrary, since it still has the lion’s share of the market, we can’t afford to ignore it. However, there is no denying the fact that IE — especially IE 6 — is a right royal pain for developers at times. Indeed, some companies such as 37signals no longer support IE6 even though it still has a large enough market share to make this move raise an eyebrow or two.
As with everything else, there’s a tradeoff here. Continuing to support old, legacy browsers will maybe enlarge your user base, but dropping support for them allows you to innovate and get to market faster. It’s a case of where your priorities lie, and only you and your clients will be able to agree on that.
Personally I think the best guide for which browsers to support is the Yahoo! UI Library Graded Browser Support scheme. By their reckoning, IE6 still qualifies for A-grade support and will probably continue to do so for quite some time to come.