Browser Market Share

White all the fuss about broswer defaults for seearch engines, I thought it might be useful to revisit the browser market share of the readers of this blog.

Internet Explorer is still the dominant browser with 63% share proving that people are lazy.  Further proof of that fact is the almost 1.5% market share that Netscape still has.

Firefox is the browser of the moment for sure, with 27.5% market share.

And Safari is the one to watch with almost 6% market share.

I believe that Apple is going to gain market share in the personal computer market over the next couple years as they take advantage of the slower release cycles coming out of Microsoft and the ability to run XP and OSX on a single Intel powered Macintosh.  If that happens, then Safari is clearly the browser to watch.

My dream is a truly level playing field in the browser wars with Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari each with about a third of the market.

And my view on defaults?  Just make it dead simple for people to change them.  Firefox shows the way with the configuration of its search field.

Comments

[Nathan Waters]

Wow, well it's easy to see why Microsoft is actually deciding to put some development effort back into IE with Firefox becoming such a large competitor.

I hope Google wins their current action against Microsoft who are blatantly copying Firefox in many aspects with IE7 (and I guess Linux and OSX with Vista).

hmm, Safari being a large contender, I can't see it.

Even with Bootcamp (the ability to boot either XP or OSX) I think people would still prefer XP over OSX, unless they're doing video, audio or graphics editting. But it wouldn't be difficult for Firefox or IE to come out with an OSX version if the need arises.

cheers
nathan

[Fiver Stone]

Lazy. Is that really the only reason people use IE? Wow. Could have fooled me!

Seems like an odd way to think about >60% of your readers.

[Dennis Howlett]

Your pie chart is very similar to my own:
60-65% IE
25-30% Mozilla derivs
5% - Safari
5% - others
roughly...

So I can see exactly why MSFT is using every trick in the book - newspaper reader in the OS. MSN default search in IE. All makes sense but sounds like more though subtler attempts at loc-in, all helped by the SAP announcement. (sigh)

[Andrew Fife]

What about Flock? I'm surprised that given your postings on web2.0 related companies and issues that more of your readers aren't using the social networking browser. I wouldn't have expected it to approach Safari, but I am surprised that it didn't even make the list.

[annextraitor]

I've been playing with Flock and Firefox and they just don't feel much better. I've also been running into just as serious, if not worse, memory problems with them as with IE. I'm not convinced that they are better browsers. The greasemonkey plugins are great, but they can be memory hogs, especially if you try to add a bunch of things at once.

With a Gig of RAM, I have to baby my computer more thanks to the various browsers and plugins that are in beta/alpha as well as desktop search (Google Sidebar) that gorge on stupendous quantities of resources. This is not progress, if the attempts to get higher productivity reduce it do to badly coded new apps.

Things got so bad that I had to drop all of my browser bars and bail on IE 7 to get stability back. Learning new UIs and then making them unusable thanks to bad code, leading me to have to relearn an old UI is no way to move forward. If that's laziness, then I have some questions for your MIT profs!

[Chris Hamoen]

I generally read your blog directly in Bloglines - is there any logic to "people who use firefox generally use more advanced blog reading tools, and hence aren't fully represented in your stats?"

[Bennett Zucker]

What puzzles me is how services such as Alexa's toolbar still don't support Firefox. Obviously Alexa will never be as comprehensive as we might like it to be, but cutting out a third or more of browsers is hardly a smart way to build their database.

Regarding defaults in general, the media players are also big abusers. When you download a player, it resets preferences. The one overwrites everything is Apple's Quicktime. Guess it's that superiority complex they've got in Cupertino ... Bennett

[Matt]

Another point: I visit your site fairly regularly, almost always when I'm at work, not at home. Here, I'm on a PC that the nice network administrators have decided must never have anything downloaded on to it by me. In other words, while I am on a Mac at home and started using Firefox only a few days after it was released, here I am forced to use IE. Hell, I can't even install the latest version of Flash without an administrator. This is stupid, of course, but something tells me a lot of others are in the same boat. Most of us spend our time on the Internet while at work, and most of us have no choice about what browser we use while there.