With the help of SiteMeter, I’ve been tracking which browser visitors to this site are using since October 2004. Here’s the latest:
The last time I published these stats was in August 2005. The share of visitors using Firefox or Mozilla has gone up very slightly, from 33.2% last August to 35.2% today, a gain of 2 percentage points. It wasn’t all at Internet Explorer’s expense, however. IE delivered an even 60% market share during the same period, down 0.6% overall, with the IE7 beta running on the PCs of 6.5% of all visitors.
From these stats, it’s pretty clear that this is a two-horse race. Netscape continued its slide into irrelevancy, with its share dropping almost in half, to 0.7%. Opera could only gain a half a percentage point in share despite the company’s decision last September to give away the browser.
I’m willing to draw another conclusion as well – at least tentatively. The easy gains for Firefox are over. I’ll be very surprised if Firefox is able to make any significant gains in share when I look at this snapshot six months from now. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that IE will gain back some ground during that time with the help of IE7.
Ed Bott 
Firefox may gain some users from IE when IE7 comes out – because IE7 only runs on XP and higher, those still using 2000 and 98/Me may move to Firefox since it offers many of the features that IE7 provides. But then the numbers of people still holding out on 2000 and 98/Me is going down all the time.
On the whole, I think you are correct though – that Firefox has made its mark and is here to stay, but it’s unlikely to make any great gains now.
Over the last 12 months (April 05 to March 06), my stats report shows IE dropping from 80.3% to 76.3%, FireFox increasing from 11.7% to 15.8%, Mozilla dropping 3.7% to 3.3%, Netscape dropping from 0.9% to 0.5%, and Opera increasing from 0.9 to 1.1%. Yes, FireFox has a presence, but it’s not going to overtake IE any time soon.
Wow! The take-up of Firefox 2.x is low. My Firefox share is 20% with 2.0 being equally tiny.
IE 7 share about the same. That’s pretty good takeup
Subtract one IE 6 and add one Opera 9 since that it what the Imperial MicroSoft Forces require me to identify as in order to use the internet.
I’m sure that will tip the scales significantly since I’m on the internet so much.
Thanks.
Too bad that Maxthon can’t show up in your stats (it shows up as IE 6, I believe). In any case you chalk up at least one user (me) in the Maxthon column.
My K12 School District has IE ahead of Firefox about 25 to 1 in the last week.
The interesting stat is that only 53% of Firefox users are 1.5.0.2 , which means Firefox is now acquiring a significant set of users who can now be compromised by a serious exploit.
Does we believe that Ed’s stats reflect the Internet at large? I would expect fewer Apple users (using Safari) to be reading Ed’s blog…