Study: FireFox still gaining on Internet Explorer

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Small circles and large.

Going by what's said here, there's a surge of popularity for FireFox. But in the article, there are reasons to believe that it's not surging, more like splashing a few droplets on IE.

From the article:
While Microsoft's IE continued as the overwhelming market leader, it witnessed another marginal decline, this time a dip of 0.8 percent. IE claimed 95.5 percent of users in June, 93.7 percent in September, and 92.9 percent last month. The Opera browser and Apple Computer's Safari combined reached just more than 1 percent of users.

The last sentence is discouraging to me. As you know, I like the fact that Opera has a paid staff. And worse (because Opera is expanding into non-pc markets), Apple's Safari has a less than 1% share.
Yes, Safari hasn't been around long, but people pay for an Apple because they care about computers. And I haven't heard much against Safari. So Apple users are very likely to download an Apple software product promptly, I assume. (Hope someone can correct me because...)
This means Apple owners aren't using their devices to surf the web to the shopping/entertainment sites being monitored. This in turn means Apple isn't doing much in the ahm... leisure usage market. And that's bad for gaining market penetration. Poor Apple.
[If anyone reading this thinks it's a criticism of Apple or gloating over their problems, please reread until you better understand.]

Worth repeating a point I made before: this study is based on monitoring of a few sites, so it's a sample. A change this small may be nothing more than the result of the methodology. We do not know for certain that IE usage has dropped off. We also don't know for certain that it ever was as high as 95%.
This data is better than no data at all, but conclusions drawn from it have to be considered very tentative at best.

So, tentatively, we can say that if Firefox/Mozilla is causing any reduction in IE use, that reduction is very small.


Also from the article:
Firefox may continue to show gains, but the software could reach a ceiling, according to WebSideStory's Johnston. Most of its users are technology-proficient early adopters rather than average Web surfers. "(Firefox) hasn't gotten to mainstream," he said.

If he's drawing this conclusion based solely on the data shown here, there's not much support for that statement. On the other hand, if he access to surveys of mindshare, or whatever you want to call it, saying that most people have never heard of FireFox and are reasonably satisfied with IE, that would be something else again.

Ignore his observation about the mainstream, and his statement seems intuitively correct. The first adopters probably are interested in software. They may be Microsoft avoiders, they may be interested in playing with new software and bored with IE, they may just be curious.
A small circle of people.

In each case, these are not mainstream, software-averse people. That's the group in the majority, the large circle. Microsoft caters to them and watches them closely because they're the vast, vast majority. That's why Microsoft has such large profits.

I'd say the best indication that FireFox is reaching the mainstream is if Microsoft invests in IE enough to remove any user advantage from downloading FireFox.
Having a massive lead and huge resources is advantageous, isn't it?!

Posted by: Anton Philidor   Posted on: 11/02/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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