Apple Macs standard browser Safari could be making huge gains or maybe its holding steady in the browser wars; it all depends on whose stats you use. The same can be said of Mozilla Firefox, while Internet Explorer is losing ground in the US but seems to be holding its own world-wide.
The conflicting figures come courtesy of two web metrics firms, Net Applications and OneStat. Net Applications’ figures come from its live stats customers and sample over 40,000 URLs. OneStat uses a daily sample of 2 million visitors spread across 100 countries to come up with its numbers.
Net Applications’ numbers cover the US only and paint rosy pictures for both Firefox and Safari. Firefox has seen its market share bounce from 9.5 percent in January 2006 to 13.67 percent a year later, although the latter figure is down a bit from December 2006’s 14.0 percent.
Safari has seen even stronger growth, according to Net Applications. In January 2006, 3.0 percent of all web surfers were using Safari. A year later, that figure had grown by over 56 percent, to 4.70 percent.
Over the same time period, Microsofts Internet explorer is slowly falling despite releasing its seventh incarnation this year
. Starting at of 85.31 percent at the beginning of 2006,Internet explorer usage dipped to 83.56 percent in July and ended December at 79.64 percent, recovering modestly to 79.75 percent for January 2007.
OneStat’s figures tell a different story, both in the US and around the world. For the US, OneStat reports a much more modest decline for Internet Explorer, which dipped to 78.13 percent last month from 80.91 percent a year ago. Firefox saw a significant gain of 14.3 percent in the US, while Safari saw a much more modest rise of 3.7 percent, from 3.55 percent in January 2006 to 3.68 last month.
In contrast, the worldwide browser market share figures are much more static. Internet Explorer usage has remained almost static over the past year, dropping a mere 0.01 percentage point over the last year. Firefox has shown modest growth during the past year. The open-source browser was the choice of 11.69 percent of web surfers in January 2007 compared to 11.23 percent the year previous.
The biggest surprise in OneStat’s worldwide market share figures comes courtesy of Safari. Apple’s web browser, the choice of 2.02 percent of web surfers tracked by the firm in May 2006, dropped to 1.64 percent at the beginning of 2007. Overall, that’s a 12.7 percent decline from January 2006’s 1.88 percent figure.
There’s a big difference, especially for Safari. While Apple’s home-rolled web browser is doing very well in the US, it’s slipping around the world. That can be explained in part by the rapid growth of the PC market in countries where Apple isn’t a big player, most significantly, India and China.
Firefox continues to grow, no matter what the venue. In the US, Firefox is definitely making gains at the expense of Internet Explorer. Worldwide, some of those more modest gains appear to have come at the expense of Opera and Netscape. Firefox jumped 0.46 percentage points between January 2006 and 2007, while Opera dropped from 0.77 percent to 0.58 and Netscape dropped 0.03 percentage points to 0.13 percent. Meanwhile, IE’s 0.01 percentage point share dip was statistically insignificant.
Curiously, the release of Internet Explorer 7 last summer didn’t provide any additional momentum for Microsoft. IE7’s browser share soared from 3.18 percent in October 2006 to 25.01 percent last month, but all of that gain came at the expense of older versions of the browser, especially IE6, which dipped from 77.17 percent to 54.04 percent, according to Net Applications.
If there is any clear takeaway from the morass of statistics we just waded through, it is that competition between web browsers is alive and well. In the US and some Western European countries, users are increasingly willing to ditch Internet Explorer. In the US, some of those old IE users are apparently showing up on a different platform as well as a different browser.
Thats all for this week stats fans.
Have a great weekend. I really am off to the pub this time.
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