After Two Weeks, Firefox 5 Is Already Used by More People than Firefox 4

Firefox 5 has been available for about two weeks now. It's the first release under the new rapid development cycle at Mozilla and was pushed as a security update for Firefox 4. It shouldn't be much of a surprise then that Firefox 5 already has a bigger market share than the Firefox 4 it's replacing.

Compared to previous releases, even the relatively recent Firefox 4, that's a huge improvement in adoption, but one to be expected since Firefox 5 was pushed via the automated update channel.

In fact, Firefox 4 now has fewer users than the older Firefox 3.6, which is still updated. The fact that Firefox 3.5 users were automatically updated to 3.6 with the latest security patch should boost the latter's usage numbers even faster.

According to the latest StatCounter numbers, Firefox 5 had 11.63 percent of the browser market in the week ending July 3rd. The latest version overtook Firefox 4 - now at 5.69 percent - in market share last week.

Firefox 5 represented only 0.54 of the browsing market before the stable release was launched, those being Beta users. It shot up to 4.35 percent in the first week and now has double the market share of Firefox 4.

Meanwhile, Firefox 3.6 is sitting at 8.82 percent of the total browser market, up slightly from the previous week when it had 8.72 percent. The uptake can be attributed to Firefox 3.5 users. Firefox 3.5 is still used by 0.9 percent of internet users, as measured by the analytics company.

While Firefox 5's adoption is quite impressive, Google Chrome still gets things done faster. Two weeks after Chrome 12 launched, it had 16.78 percent of the market, while the Chrome 11 it was replacing was down to just 1.97 percent.