According to xitimonitor Firefox is getting 25% share in Europe. That is a huge deal – now every 4th European uses Firefox to browse the www. Here is a chart that shows European Firefox usage per country:
Besides Europe, Firefox wheels spin all over the World, for example in US over 15% of users use Firefox, for Australia it is 25%, almost 12% in South America, over 13% in Africa and around 12% in Asia. Here is a snapshot:
There are three more factors that play in favor to Firefox:
- Everybody wants MAC
- Ubuntu is getting very popular
- Vista is not exactly going anywhere, while XP is going, but mostly going down
For somebody who does not do any web development and uses Microsoft Windows products (XP, Vista – well who uses Vista anyway.. ), this may not sound like great news, but for everybody else it is a pleasant "turn around", and it is going towards:
- Much better browsing experience for people with MAC, Linux, and other non-M$ OSs
- No more optimizing for IE, including those ugly JavaScript if(IE)/switch(OS) statements, and different CSS
Yes, the idea is that Internet Explorer will die out the same way it was born – along with Windows
It will not happen overnight or tomorrow, but it is already happening today…
IE is not going to disappear that quickly. Many organizations and businesses have products that were written optimized specifically for IE, and therefore they will stay – and there are many of them. Some of them are not visible to the world statistics, ’cause they are internal. Take for example all governments and fortune companies Intranets.
Firefox is good, but not there yet.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens within the next 5-10 years with the average computer user becoming more and more knowledgable. Companies that claim to be serving in the areas of “Tech Consulting” aren’t using what the average computer techie is currently using; such as, Linux with alternative browsers and apps that give more productivity. What will companies that still use IE7 say to a small business owner who has been using Firefox and Ubuntu to surf the web? It’ll be hard to take these companies serious who still maintain there internal structure based on IE because “All of there stuff runs on it and the change would be confusing” while their motto is something along the lines of taking a Chance, Challenge or be Daring to Dream to do business with us.