Reg readers in Firefox 3 lovefest

Outside the norm

By Cade Metz in San Francisco • Get more from this author

Posted in Applications, 15th November 2008 00:45 GMT

HP whitepaper - The business case for Virtualization

Mozilla’s open-source Firefox browser accounts for 20 per cent of the worldwide browser market. So there’s no doubt Reg readers are outside the norm.

In the first ten days of November, more than 47 per cent all of Reg traffic came from browsers using Gecko — the rendering engine at the heart of Firefox. The new Firefox 3 alone hit more pages than all versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer combined.

You can draw your own conclusions. But we would argue that Reg readers exhibit a certain technical savvy you won’t find in the general population.

Here’s the complete breakdown for those ten November days:

	Reg share
Gecko-based browsers (total)	47.2%
IE (total)	36.4%
Firefox 3	36.5%
Firefox 2	6.9%
Firefox 1	0.9%
IE 8 betas	0.6%
IE 7	17.6%
IE 6	15.9%
IE 5	2.3%
Webkit	7.7%
Opera	3.6%
Other	5.1%

So, Reg readers are less susceptible to the Redmond Borg, and they upgrade quickly. But they have no more interest in Apple’s second-rate Safari browser or Google’s new Chrome than the average human. Webkit’s 7.7 per cent Reg share covers Safari and Chrome. And the worldwide market share of the two also-rans is about 7.3 per cent, according to Net Applications.

The Reg has no objection to readers using Internet Explorer. But we would welcome the death of IE6. Coding for IE6 is not enjoyable. ®

HP whitepaper - The business case for Virtualization