14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla has released its first-ever "State of the Internet" report, something it plans to do every quarter from now on. And it's starting things off on a very optimistic note, the open source foundation says Firefox now has about 30 percent of the web-browser market worldwide, based on several independent sources. What's even more encouraging is that its market share is still growing in most regions.
"Today we released the first ever Mozilla Quarterly Analyst Report, focusing on the State of the Internet," Mozilla announced. "[W]e wanted to create a somewhat standardized, ongoing report capturing the state of the internet as seen through Mozilla’s eyes."
"Mozilla is in unique position. We’re a global community with more than 350 million people around the world using the Firefox Web browser. While we are careful to ensure the data we collect and metrics we track are fairly limited, we feel compelled to share and evangelize the little wisdom we’re able to extract from our numbers," Mozilla's Ken Kovash explained the reasoning behind the move.
The most interesting thing to come out of the analysis is that Firefox is getting close to the 30-percent mark, with some regions having significantly more than that. Mozilla's open-source browser is particularly popular in Europe, where two in five people online use Firefox, the exact number being 39.2 percent. Of course, it's more popular in some countries than in others, for example, Firefox is the most used web browser in Germany, where it's getting close to owning half of the market, according to another report.
Europe is followed by South America, where Firefox is favored by 31.1 percent of Internet users. Africa is close behind, with Firefox getting a 29.7-percent slice of the market there. North America is not faring so well, though, as Firefox is only used by 26 percent of the Internet-going population there.
When it comes to countries, Firefox is most popular in Indonesia, where it has a very solid 60-percent share. Other countries are coming from behind fast, though, notably Russia, where adoption grew by 20 percent just in the last quarter. There are plenty of other interesting morsels in Mozilla report (PDF - open in Google Docs Viewer) like data from the tab behavior test it ran last year. For example, the test found that someone managed to have more than 600 tabs opened in Firefox at the same time, though the average Firefox user has just two or three.