Ive personally never claimed any percentage of market share of firefox and neither would I attempt to.
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The stagnation of Firefox I cant comment on because I dont know. My site certainly does not have any claims such a these on it.
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So what does it mean? Not much. But I think it does say something that approx 26% of people are using an alternative. That to me is good enough, although I would like to hear from someone who knows more about the source of these stats, as in my circle of family/friends/work collegues I dont know anyone who DOESNT use Firefox.
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That being said, its all really a little academic, as if the only "bragging rights" that MS has is that more people use the browser that was part of a Windows installation at point of purchase, the fact that a noteable percentage have drifted away from that, makes me wonder if this is a figure that should be seen as a good thing for MS.
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Either way, Im happy for MS to claim the rights to the most used browser, if thats what they want to use to "prove" how popular MS utils are. I somehow think that this revelation wont really cut it and changes nothing to the general public opinion and perception of MS.

Firefox's share of the market is not relevant, its power to influence the market is what matters.

We can see from IE8 that Firefox is powerful enough to make Microsoft bring IE into the 21st century. So long as browsers all follow standards, it doesn't matter which one they use (and they are free to switch). Look at all the people still using IE6, locked into dying technology because of poorly written intranets and websites. Firefox hasn't been promoted because it has extra wizzbang features, its because of its standards support.

If we are all going into the cloud, then isn't it important that we are not tied to one gatekeeper for all our information?

The rest is just statistics, we can all agree it is bigger than 10% which IMHO is enough to stimulate competition. Web statistics mean nothing on their own, you have to look at trends.

In the late 90's the market share for IE was assumed to be >99% so it doesn't matter if you use non-standard HTML as long as IE understood it. Over time the other browsers have taken IE's share well under 80%.

Windows "Life without security"
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It matters not what browser is more popular, if youre running on a Windows system, there are security issues.
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Now I know there have been posters on the previous threads claiming the impartiality of security report on Windows written by someone who works for MS, but if you want the reality of Windows security, look no further than the presidential campaign in the US, check out how the president in waiting has become a victim of a malware attack already.
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http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Cybercrime-Reportedly-Touches-Obama-McCain-Campaigns/?kc=rss
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To the chips imposter, it seems you were wrong, but worse than being wrong, thats another badly timed post on here for the MS shill poster.
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I hope you enjoy the link and look forward to the Andre Da Co$ta spin you will put on it.

It seams a lot of the competition has moved to between the JavaScript engines, ie between WebKit and Geko. WebKit is used by Chrome and Safari, Geko by Firefox. The intense competition between these two has left IE in their dust. Performance benchmarks are showing both of these running 3 times faster than IE. I've even heard of people switching to Mac's just because Safari is so much faster then IE (I guess they didn't realize they could install Safari on a PC). Anyway this is really re-vitalizing the AJAX world and standards based rich web applications. We are suddenly in a world where the AJAX applications under Chrome, Firefox or Safari are faster and richer than proprietary plugin nonstandard programs like Flash or Silverlight under IE.

Anyway I wonder if the battle between Chrome/Safari vs Firefox will irradicate everyone else as the processor battle between Intel and AMD wiped out everyone else. PS I mostly browse with Chrome these days, but I do have all the browsers installed and use them all from time to time.

Don´t forget to see that Firefox has significant more market share in europe. Firefox has 30-40% market share here in germany.

"I don't know Net Applications' methodology, but I know enough about analysis to question the exclusivity of that 20 percent figure. If it's not exclusive, then the Firefox percentage is less significant in real terms."

I question that. Firefox usage is unlikely to be exclusive for a significant portion of it's user-base. There will be a statistically significant portion of it's user base that wants to use it exclusively, but can't. Such as where a critical system at work only works in IE.

At this adoption level the absolute number has less importance. It is sufficient to force Microsoft to improve Internet Explorer. Future designers and developers who are now in college want to use standards compliant browsers. If Microsoft let it's browser stay in 2001 they would lose another generation of professionals.

80% of the user base work with what they are given. As Apple and Linux gain share the 80% will be eaten into.

smist08: Gecko and Webkit are layout engines.

The reason IE continues to dominate percentage-wise has less to do with its shipping with the dominant OS (and thereby becoming its defacto default, used by the clueless and lazy world wide), and more with the uninstallability of it.

You *can't* uninstall IE.

You can barely get Windows updates without it.

You certainly can't get updates automatically without it.

Therefore it's going to be with us as long as Windows is the dominant PC OS, and will continue to be dominant in "marketshare", and I for one welcome that.

Why?

Because between IE and Outlook, I won't have to worry about picking up side jobs at $50 to $100 a pop correcting chowderheads poor choices.

As a friend says:

The more I support Windows®, the more I love my Mac.

"I don't know Net Applications' methodology...."

Joe, they have a large number of 'popular' sites scoring up the UA string provided by visitors' browsers. And that tends to UNDERESTIMATE Firefox and other alternative users, because so many dysfunctional and badly coded websites insist on seeing something with "MSIE" inside it.

Because of this "proprietized Internet" problem, Opera, Firefox, Chrome, Konqueror, and all their variants allow the user to pretend to be "Internet Explorer" at the click of a button, and many users just leave it there.

gazillions of those "Internet Explorer" visits are really coming from other browsers spoofing themselves as something like this:

"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)"

When they're REALLY something like this:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1b2pre) Gecko/20081014 Minefield/3.1b2pre ID:20081014031758

And so, the "Internet Explorer" market share is really much smaller than NetApp shows. But that's the only way to measure, and the data is better than nothing at all.

One is my "pretend to be IE6 for a while" spoofer string, the other is my real UA. It isn't even Firefox, of course. Many badly built websites go beserk when they see "Minefield", but work fine when I pretend to be an older "Firefox 3".

A competent website never, never needs to test for a specific UA. If you're doing this, fix your code!

@oDDmON oUT

I hear you on the IE, Outlook, Outlook Express and Vista to XP upgrades. Without trying without advertising I make a minimum of $300 a month cash from these products. And usually the same people over and over. I put Firefox on but they won't use it (though some people I feel so bad for I put a IE skin on Firefox and change the icon to force them to use it). I tell them over and over. I try not to take their money but they just can't help themselves. I tell them to buy a Mac offer to put Linux on their PC. These products bought my Mac my GPS for my truck the other day etc etc etc. I would really hate for Microsoft to dismantle these products from the OS.

Mike says :

"I don't know Net Applications' methodology, but I know enough about analysis to question the exclusivity of that 20 percent figure. If it's not exclusive, then the Firefox percentage is less significant in real terms."
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I did some research on the Net Applications company a while back, and found little that told me a lot about this company. I can tell you that they use all Microsoft tools to do their research. I suspect that they have some sort of link with Microsoft itself beyond that, but cannot prove it. Their figures on Firefox and Linux, are one of the lowest I have seen of any company that does this type of surveys, which is another reason to suspect them. But then, who knows, maybe they are right.
Figures can be greatly off by the tools you use, or the type of websites, or locality of those sites, used. For instance, we would expect Linux use to be less in the USA, and less Linux users to be on Microsoft sites, or sites relating to that. So if you base your survey on those types of sites, well, the facts can be twisted to suit the outcome you wanted. And wouldn't it just be like Microsoft to set up a "just the facts" type of survey site? Not saying Net Apps is one, just that they could be.

A few comments: firstly everyone I know who uses Firefox or an alternative is forced at some point to use IE for sites that require it. I wouldn't consider them to be IE users.

Secondly I think surveys of large media outlets that monitor their readers' browser preferences are telling. I recall reading (within the past week or so) of two sites whose readership chose Firefox nearly as much as IE. (I can't find the reference, so this is from memory.)

My point? There's an enormous population who will use what's given to them, but among the more active users (younger readers, the technically sophisticated) Firefox adoption is much higher than the oft-quoted twenty percent.