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Firefox has ‘at least’ 126m users
Author: Tim SmalleyPublished: 3rd December 2007
Mozilla estimates that there are more than 126 million monthly Firefox users.
Firefox’s penetration into the market is a popular topic among technology enthusiasts, but most market share reports don’t paint a clear picture. Many of these reports are done by collecting statistics from a wide selection of sites, but Lilly points out that the results can be skewed depending on the types of sites being used for the data sample.
“The most basic issue is that there’s no way to really represent the complexity and the dynamism of the global Web — it’s just too big, with too many things changing too rapidly,” he explained.
With sites that are focused on early adopters and technology enthusiasts, like bit-tech for instance, Firefox’s market share will be higher than it is on publications that have a broader mass market appeal. Lilly was quick to ensure people didn’t understand the point he was making though.
“Don’t misunderstand: all of these studies are extremely useful and help understand what’s happening around the world,” he said. “I’m just asserting that it’s very important to understand the limits of particular studies and the assumptions that are baked in.”
Lilly arrived at this number by leveraging the data collected by the Firefox Application Update Service, whereby the browser sends an anonymous request to the update servers each day to check for updates.
By counting the total number of pingbacks, Mozilla is able to estimate how many instances of its browser are running on a given day. This is a number it refers as the Active Daily Users (ADU). Back in October 2006, there were around 23 million ADUs and in November this year, the number of ADUs peaked at almost 49 million – more than doubling in size in just over a year.
So how did Lilly get to 126 million from the 49 million peak ADUs? Well, his maths gets a little creative at this point, as he multiplied the ADU number by three.
Yeah, we told you it was a little creative... but he makes a fair assumption that not every Firefox user is using Firefox every day of the week and there’s also the fact that corporate firewalls and proxies could also be preventing large numbers of Firefox installs from communicating with the update servers.
That said, Lilly believes that the estimate is a conservative one, saying that “this is a conservative multiplier (we think it could be more like 3.5) that we’ve gotten to by doing some of our own experiments, piecing together data we’ve received from sites who have done their own calculations, and then really testing them against the best common sense top-down tests we can.”
With an estimated 125m monthly unique users, Firefox’s market share would represent just 10.5 percent of the total number of Internet users around the world (which is reported to be around 1.2 billion per month). This is appreciably less than where most reports suggest Firefox’s market share lies, which explains why Lilly believes that the estimate is on the conservative side.
Interesting stuff. Let us know your thoughts in the forums.
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Comments (31)
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Firefox wont be able to beat IE. ever. but that may not be their goal anyway, so kudos to the Fox!
if they merge with Google tho............... :)
edit: just noticed, this is my first post since june
I'm glad to say I don't use IE anymore, not really because it sucks, but just because FF does things better for me, even against IE7.
But his methodology is just as rubbish as any other
I don't know about you, but i probably have 4 computers with Firefox on, plus a couple of virtual machines (and I think a couple on portable apps too)
But I'm just 1 user, so maybe his estimate should be /2 - assuming each user has just 2 copies of firefox
That's nice. Most CEOs I know tend to be really long winded about it...
(sorry)
Oh, and Leitchy, I'm a developer of sorts as well... Graphic designer, website designer, PHP coder, Flash programmer, and a few others... The only time i use IE is when I need to check cross compatibility. Other than that, I don't even have an IE icon on my desktop.
Go Firefox! :)
Hah, beat me to it.
Firefox isn't bad by any means though.
...Says Roto while using Firefox because IE sucks horribly...
same but only some of techs pc have firefox, and some do but the option to configure the proxy is blocked
In my experience, it's faster than IE.
The one thing that used to bug me about FF was it used to hang loading PDF files, but that was fixed a year or so back.
Firefox use 30/10/2007:
http://img404.imageshack.us/img404/3229/firefox2007106kq0.png
http://imageshack.us
http://img404.imageshack.us/img404/971/firefox2007102ak5.png
http://imageshack.us
Now i'm using the FF3 Beta 1, it's faster. I don't even care for not being able to use mouse gestures (yet).
More people use Ff than IE :)
as they should lol
Haven't touched IE in... two years? Anytime I use someone elses comp, I dl FF for them and show them, though I don't set it to default, that would be rude.
I have Opera, but rarely use it. For some questionable sites though, it seems more secure since no one really cares to exploit such a low userbase browser.
Possibly because FF now works better with badly coded sites
And probably because most people now code to standards (and use validators to check it)
Because Firefox, opera and a few others actually follow the standards properly, they work well
But IE still isn't anywhere near standards compliant and as such, still needs special coding for things to work (its a nightmare - sigh)
Edit:
On that note, the BT main page has 55 errors :o
However, I wouldn't want my browser to do that (and I'm sure a lot of other people wouldn't)
There is no good way, unless every site on the internet all gathered statistics, that way, it wouldn't matter where you surf, But even then, you can fake your browser ID, and so on and so forth
The problem is, there is no good way, yet people still come out and quote these statistics, which are based on foundations so shaky that coughing could bring them down
But I personally probably only visit a handful of sites a week, so I doubt I see that much of the rubbish