Firefox 2 Is Taking Off!
For most of October, the vast majority of Firefox users hitting my website were using Firefox 1.5, The percentage using Firefox 2 (betas and RCs) hovered around 3% for the first three weeks. The percentage of IE users with IE7 hovered around 2%.
The IE7 percentages didn't change much when IE7 was released. It climbed from ~2% to ~4%. But Firefox 2 jumped from 3% to 8% the day it was released, and has already climbed to 22% in less than a week!
| Date | Fx2/Fx | IE7/IE | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 10 | 5% | 2% | |
| Oct 11 | 3% | 3% | |
| Oct 12 | 5% | 2% | |
| Oct 13 | 5% | 2% | |
| Oct 14 | 1% | 3% | |
| Oct 15 | 2% | 2% | |
| Oct 16 | 3% | 3% | |
| Oct 17 | 3% | 2% | |
| Oct 18 | 2% | 3% | Internet Explorer 7 Release |
| Oct 19 | 3% | 3% | |
| Oct 20 | 4% | 3% | |
| Oct 21 | 4% | 4% | |
| Oct 22 | 3% | 4% | |
| Oct 23 | 5% | 4% | |
| Oct 24 | 8% | 3% | Firefox 2 Release |
| Oct 25 | 12% | 4% | |
| Oct 26 | 12% | 3% | |
| Oct 27 | 15% | 3% | |
| Oct 28 | 14% | 5% | |
| Oct 29 | 17% | 4% | |
| Oct 30 | 22% | 3% |
IE7 will probably take off more next month, when automatic updates start offering it. But it's interesting to see: when Firefox offers a new version, nearly 1/4 of its users have upgraded within a week. When IE offers a new version, everyone wants to wait and see.
(I've got even higher FX2 numbers on the Alternative Browser Alliance, but traffic's so much lower that the stats are very erratic. On that site, the second-highest percentage of IE7 hits (14%) is actually a week before the release!)
