Firefox users doubled in 1 year

According to Mozilla 125.000.000 people are using the foundations browser (Firefox).

John Lilly, chief operating officer i Mozilla, writes in a blog post that there’s now 125 million Firefox users. This is almost double the amount compared to when Firefox 2 was released last autumn.

The numbers are based on Mozillas Application Update Service (AUS). If Firefox is open and you are connected to the Internet it will check for updates daily. This way Mozilla can also track the number of installed and running browsers. The latest release was out last Friday by the way (2.0.0.11).

However, the number of users are not absolute it’s merely a prognosis. Lilly writes that number of “pings” received by AUS has been multiplied by 3. This is supposed to be a standard way of measuring unique users, at least in USA, and implies 3 persons sharing the same PC on average per week. Lilly himself thinks the FF user number are a conservative estimate.

What IS certain is that the number of pings received by AUS have nearly doubled since 24th October last year.

Firefox AUS pings since 24th Oct 2006

The diagram below shows browsers by version and type in percent visiting Blogvaria since 1st January this year. The numbers (unique users) are pulled from Awstats which is a pretty good tool in this respect.

Browsers by version and type in percent visiting Blogvaria 2007

Firefox 1 & 2 are used by more than half of my visitors, Internet Explorer 6 & 7 by one third. Opera and Safari makes up 3 and 4 percent respectively while Netscape and other browsers makes up the remaining 6%. It will be interesting to see how this changes during 2008, and I will most likely post a follow-up on that in about 1 years time.

It’s worth mentioning that my readers probably doesn’t reflect the browser usage in general. Mainly because I suspect most my readers are quite computer savvy (as I’m not sharing kitty stories and cooking receipts). However it’s clear that Firefox has established a solid market share, and with version 3 just around the corner I can’t see why this should change in the near future.

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