Update: Firefox vs. IE in O'Reilly Network Logs
In April of 2005, I posted an entry on Firefox vs. IE in O'Reilly Network Logs, in which I noted that Firefox represented 35% of access, up from 19% the year before, and that IE was down from 75 to 54%. The other day, a reader who identified himself only as Phillip asked for an update. I forwarded his request on to Andrew Odewahn, the director of the O'Reilly Network, who let me know that as of last month, Firefox passed IE, with 46% of all access to O'Reilly sites, vs IE's 45%. Here's Andrew's chart, which also shows the uptake of IE7 and a bounce in "other browsers" (Apple's Safari?):
Here are Andrew's notes on the graph:
- The vertical axis represents the share of visitors by browser type
- Data covers all O'Reilly Media domains that use hitbox (O'Reilly Network, oreilly.com, make, etc)
- The thick blue line at the top represents all IE browser versions. Starting from around 50%, IE's share has fallen to ~45%.
- The red line is Firefox. It's gained ground steadily, and is now just ahead of IE.
- The dotted lines represent specific versions of IE; unfortunately, we don't have visibility into the different versions of Firefox. The dotted orange line is IE 6. The sharp drop at the end of 2006 is most likely due to the release of IE 7 (the dotted green line) on October 18, 2006. Just from eyeballing the chart, about 12% of our visitors switched from IE 6 to IE 7 in the 2.5 months from mid October to January. Adoption of IE 7 has tapered off since the start of 2007.
- The thin blue line (around 10%) is the "All Others." I find it interesting that it dipped below 10% for a while, but has started picking up again.
Update: A number of people asked for more detail on "Others," so I just put up another post listing stats for Opera and Safari.
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Sorry but statistically this is meaningless relative to overall browser share because your site visitors are techies and, as such, far more likely to use Firefox or virtually any alternative to IE. I would, at the minimum, leave a footnote recognizing this- it's interesting but only reinforces what anyone working at a tech company knows- techies don't use IE. When I was a marketing director at a SaaS company I had to beg the engineers to use IE so we could identify problems 'typical' users were encountering with IE before they hit CS...
Martin: I thought it was pretty obvious that this was specific to O'Reilly and had nothing to do with overall browser share. But then I'm a techie, I guess. And since Radar readers are mostly techies, they probably can infer for themselves that this isn't representative of the larger market. :-)
I wonder if the uptick in "other" share is related to an increase in popularity of Safari.
(Argh -- By the time I read the last footnote about "All Others" I forgot that Safari had been mentioned above, which prompted my redundant speculation about who the "others" might be. Never mind!)
Really nice chart. Thank you. Be cool if, say, Google could show us the same kind of chart for the use of their search - it might be more representative of the wider internet population. I wonder if you could pull any strings there, Tim? :)
Cool! Is it possible to have a comparation between Windows and Apple operating systems?
I see FF flat for the last several months with IE dropping. As I note on an aside of my homepage:
"For those unaware, any browser besides the non-conforming IE is the way to go, preferably the highly modifiable Firefox browser from the Mozilla Foundation. Enjoy your browsing experience by getting more out of it."
An obvious rip from somewhere (maybe their download page), but so true!
Needless to say, I loath all things M$. They are slowly but surely crumbling, as most recently signified by Gates slip in the Forbes list. (Ok, not related, but I couldn't refuse :-)
While this is interesting, it's a bit too much of the "30k feet view". It would be much more interesting to see a further breakdown, including Opera and Safari by name, as well as by OS.
One would hope that the browser most commonly used by readers of this, the blog of the guy who coined the term "Web 2.0", would be Firefox.
Yes, of course O'Reilly readers are not typical of the entire market -- but they are often good predictors of the whole market. In 1992, when we started playing with the WWW, it was only for "alpha geeks." Ditto with Linux, Apache, Perl, etc. They started with alpha geeks, but soon spread to a wider market.
But that being said, I wasn't meaning this to be taken as an overall statement on browser share.
Interesting to see that while IE7 was automatically pushed by the MS autoupdate, Firefox usage was little bit going up.
Not exactly what MS had in mind :-)
can we conclude that revamping your application sometimes trigger users to try something different ?
This is a slight imperfection with those stats
Firefox is being judged as a Whole - while IE is being sub categorized into versions 6 and version 7.
Probably most techie users are using FireFox 2 by now, but not all.
In the future could you release your stats from Search Engines, Web site referrers, including, Digg homepages??
Search Engines Web --
You're misreading the graph. We have all firefox and all IE lines. The version 6 and 7 lines for IE are aggregated into the "all IE" line (along with any earlier versions of IE.
My mom uses firefox and so do most people who meet her and ask anything computer-related.
HI,
That is correct. Most of the techies uses Firefox. But, the trend is changing. I can see my colleges or cafe people started using firefox.
I think it's actually interesting that overall IE usage dropped when IE7 was released. Before that, it was quite stable. How do we interprete that? "If I have to change my browser anyway, I can switch to a sensible one after all!"?
It looks like the (small) drop-off in overall IE usage corresponds with the release of IE7. Maybe when people saw how IE7 implemented tabs it pushed them over to FF? Maybe something else about IE7? Thanks to KB931768 IE won't even run at all on my machine.
My IT department locks down the desktop computers and has Firefox set to launch web pages by default. Otherwise I'd use IE.
I wouldn't say techies use Firefox like others here would, I'd say DIYers use Firefox. Most experienced professionals I know prefer IE to Firefox because they think targeting the lowest common denominator sucks. And that's Firefox, the lowest common denominator.
Jake Lockley, You're such an idiot. It's IE that's the lowest common denominator (go look up the idiomatic phrase 'lowest common denominator'). For an artsie non-techie, at least you should have a better grasp of the English language.