Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2 adoption rates
The latest versions of the two major contenders in the browser wars have been out in the wild for about two weeks. Let's use clickdensity data -- from millions of visitor sessions over nearly 2,000 sites -- to take a quick look at their success to-date.
The graph above shows how the market share of Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2 has changed over the last two weeks, since 16th October 2006.
Internet Explorer 7 has grown from about 2%, to just under 5% of all browser usage. In the same date range, Firefox 2 has grown from just over 0.1%, to nearly 2%. Combined, these browsers will be used for about 7% of all visits to your site, so if you haven't tested for CSS and other incompatibilities, you should start thinking about it now. In about a week, these fairly new browsers will account for over 10% of all traffic on the web.
So how have these new releases impacted the general IE versus FF split?
The graph above shows – over the same timescale – Internet Explorer (all versions) slightly reducing its grip on the market, from 90% to 86%. Firefox (all versions) increases from about 7.5%, to about 10.5%.
There is evidence to suggest that users who have upgraded to-date are the more tech-savvy users, and that a higher than average percentage of these are Firefox users.
If we assume that technical users have a higher screen resolution than the 'average' user, then we can see from the 'average screen size' table below that these users are early adopters of both new releases, and have a higher concentration in the Firefox camp.
| Browser | Avg. Screen Resolution |
|---|---|
| All Browsers | 1065 x 788 |
| Internet Explorer (all versions) | 1052 x 780 |
| Internet Explorer 7 | 1132 x 829 |
| Firefox (all versions) | 1146 x 838 |
| Firefox 2 | 1223 x 893 |
(Note that the values above are mean averages, not mode, hence the strange resolution values. Also note that OSX users have not been included.)
Could it be now that these users – typically early adopters – have upgraded, that we'll see the Firefox 2 adoption rate slow down, with respect to Internet Explorer 7 adoption? We’ll post an update once the automatic updates have been released and bedded in.