14 DAY TRIAL // The Firefox open source browser accounts for over 350 million users worldwide, a percentage which is roughly equivalent with a 30% share of the global browser market, according to statistics released in the Mozilla Q1 2010 Analyst Report – State of the Internet. The report is a “somewhat standardized” perspective over the state of the Internet from Mozilla’s perspective, revealed Ken Kovash, manager of Analytics for the open source browser maker. While the Mozilla Q1 2010 Analyst Report looks at Firefox, it provides no information on rival browser. Fortunately enough, Net Applications published its own statistics of browser usage share worldwide today for March 2010.
According to data from the Internet metrics company, Firefox accounts for 24.52% of the browser market with Firefox 3.6 at 11.25%, Firefox 3.5 at 9.28% and Firefox 3.0 at 3.20%. This week Mozilla released the last update for Firefox 3.0, namely 3.0.19, and users are bound to migrate to versions 3.6.x or 3.5.x as soon as possible seeing as the two are the only supported variants of the open source browser.
The overall market share of Internet Explorer continued to drop and is down to just 60.65% at the end of March 2010 from 61.58% the previous month. Internet Explorer 8 is the most used browser worldwide with a usage share of 23.70%, IE6 is runner up with 18.41%, and IE7 comes in third with 13.16%. In mid-March 2010, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview, giving the users an early taste of what IE8’s successor will bring to the table. At this point in time, Net Applications offers no statistics for IE9 usage, however, the Platform Preview is not intended for deployment in production environments, or for everyday browsing, but for dev testing.
Google Chrome jumped over the 6% market share mark, accounting for 6.13% of all users at the start of April, up from 5.61% in March. Opera also managed to increase its market share, albeit only slightly, from 2.35% to 2.37% in the past two months. The same is valid for Apple Safari, which grew from 4.45% to 4.65% between February and March 2010.
In its report, Mozilla also broke down Firefox statistics by continent. In this regard, the company notes that it accounts for a market share of 26% and 100 million users in North America, 39.2% and 152.7 million users in Europe, 26.6% and 68.7 million users in Asia, 31.4% and 31.7 million users in South America, 29.7% and 5.6 million users in Africa and 28.7%(6.7 million users) in Oceania.
Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) RTW is available for download here (for 32-bit and 64-bit flavors of Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008).
Firefox 3.6.2 for Windows is available for download here.
Google Chrome 4.1 Stable is available for download here.
Opera 10.51 is available for download here.
Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Platform Preview is available for download here.
