14 DAY TRIAL // Firefox 6 is out the door and landing on people's computers, Firefox 7 is getting ready to take the center stage in a few weeks' time. This only a few months after Firefox 4 came about. You'd think then that Mozilla has been fairly successful getting its users to upgrade and get accustomed to the rapid release cycle.
But, as it has always been the case at Mozilla, there are plenty of people using older versions of Firefox, older in this case not meaning Firefox 4 or anything like that, but Firefox 3.6 or even Firefox 3.5.
Mozilla is trying its best to get people to upgrade, but even it recognizes that Firefox 3.6 is still popular, so much so as it is still supported, with security updates, even after Firefox 4 and Firefox 5 have been deprecated.
StatCounter, for example, lists Firefox 3.6 as having 8.6 percent of the global market share in July, significantly more than Firefox 4, with 3.38 percent. Firefox 5 had 14 percent of the market that month.
Firefox 3.6 dropped to 8 percent in August, while Firefox 5 to 10.83 percent. Firefox 6, launched this month, reached 5 percent market share.
Net Applications has more detailed data, it lists Firefox 3.6 as having 6.94 percent of the global web browser market in July.
Firefox 5 enjoys a solid 11.94 percent share, second only to IE 8 with 29.23 percent. Firefox 4, on the other hand, was only used by 2.38 percent of internet users in July.
Firefox 3.6's market share may have been helped by the people upgrading from Firefox 3.5, as Mozilla pushed the latest security update to 3.6 as a minor update for 3.5.
But Mozilla won't move Firefox 3.6 users automatically to the latest Firefox 6, at least not for now, so the aging browser is still going to have some popularity for the coming months.