

Firefox Passes IE6 In Market Share - nategraves
http://www.electronista.com/articles/09/03/04/firefox.overtakes.ie6/

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alecst
Forgive me for being _that guy_ , but:

> Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or
> exclamation points, or adding a parenthetical remark saying how great an
> article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's
> important.

From: <http://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

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chairface
Was the title edited? I don't see any of those things.

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misterbwong
I believe the original title was: Firefox Passes IE6 In Market Share (FINALLY)

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JoelSutherland
According to StatCounter. It's numbers are much different from the other big
players (Net Applications, Alexa etc.):

[http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/statcounter_launches_gl...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/statcounter_launches_global_stats_tool.php)

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dcurtis
Their numbers for Safari are hilariously wrong; they suggest Opera has a
bigger share (at 1.9%). Considering all other metrics seem to indicate Safari
has a 3-6% share now, this leads me to question all of their other numbers.

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aodhan
Hi,

Thanks for the comment. StatCounter tracks over 10 billion pageviews monthly
from across the entire world. The current global stats are based on a sample
of 4 billion monthly page views from it (to be expanded shortly!).

There are very few other web stat providers out there who would have anywhere
close to that reach we have. The ones that are currently providing global
stats would be very us-centric and if you check our US stats they will more
closely match them.

[http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-US-
daily-20080701-2009030...](http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-US-
daily-20080701-20090306)

I hope that helps.

Aodhan Cullen

StatCounter

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josefresco
*Results may vary.

Here's a hint: Look at YOUR traffic and determine what browsers to support.

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nategraves
Well spoken. It's interesting to see how different browser usage and
resolution settings can be from one market segment to another.

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chairface
The title seems a little triumphant for my tastes - wouldn't it arguably be
more accurate as "IE6 dips below Firefox in market share"?

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axod
"dip" implies it may recover. I'm pretty skeptical that we'll see a resurgence
of IE6 usage.

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GavinB
IE6 is like vinyl, man. It's a timeless classic. The pages just look better
through it, like they did when I was a kid!

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aasarava
Does anyone know where to get current stats on IE5.0 and IE5.5 use? I'm
guessing it's below 1% if you look at a wide variety of "general use" sites,
like portals and news, but it'd be great to have some solid data on that --
especially to show to clients who request that their sites support it.

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anatoli
Microsoft dropped support for IE5.0 and IE5.5 on their websites. I think
that's a sufficient argument right there. :) Haven't had anyone argue with
that so far...

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aasarava
Thanks for that info -- definitely a helpful bit of ammo.

Would still love to see some stats from a general pool, though, if anyone
knows where to find them. You could argue that just because MS stopped
supporting the versions doesn't mean there aren't people who just can't figure
out how to upgrade or don't know they need to out there. Knowing that that
number is some trivial percent would be very helpful.

Barring that, maybe the argument can be strengthened if Google and Yahoo have
also dropped support. Will check it out.

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anatoli
Not sure about Google, but Yahoo dropped IE5 and IE5.5 support long, long time
ago.

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akincisor
[http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-
daily-20080701...](http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-
daily-20080701-20090306)

That graph shows that ie6 usage dips on weekends (while firefox usage peaks).
This seems to suggest that most of the people using ie6 are using it at their
workplace and many of them tend to use firefox at home.

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michaelk
It's sort of sad how technologically uninformed most people are, considering
how important this stuff has become.

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jwilliams
I don't see it as the fault of individuals, more the fault of the industry.

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nategraves
I do agree that the industry plays a large part in the continuation of bad
practices. I'm always amazed at how apathetic some browser developers have
been in responding to developer requests. It seems that, ultimately, the
browser developers would benefit from more websites working on their product.

At the same time I'm optimistic that as users become aware of some of the
great plug-ins that are available for Firefox and the great speed and
usability of Safari and Chrome, they'll be more inclined to finally make the
switch.

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rokhayakebe
Microsoft still owns about 20% of Firefox I think.

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ctingom
It's about time!

