Firefox use nearly doubled in '06

[Humpty]

The open-source Firefox browser was used by 14% of computers online at the end of 2006, according to Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based Net Applications. That was 46% higher than its 9.6% share of the browser market at the beginning of the year.

 

The biggest loser was Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which also released a new version, Internet Explorer 7, last year. Even so, its market share fell to 79.6% from 85.1% at the start of 2006.

 

Apple Computer Inc.'s Safari Web browser rode increased sales of Mac computers to finish the year with 4.2% of the market, up from 3.1% at the beginning of 2006. Safari is only available on Apple hardware running Mac OS X.

 

The Opera Web browser also grew its share to 0.9% of the market from 0.6%, after signing deals with cell phone makers and game console makers such as Nintendo to have the software bundled with those devices.

 

AOL's Netscape was, like Internet Explorer, also a loser. It started the year with 1.24% but saw its share of the market fall to 0.9%.

 

Article

[Eldmannen]

I hope Mozilla Firefox keeps getting marketshare.

 

It sucks when IE holds all the marketshare, and they don't follow webstandards and implement their own non-standard stuff like ActiveX, VML, etc and other proprietary extensions.

 

And when dumb people make websites that only works in IE.

 

Browser diversity is good for the web.

 

Though, I hope that in a dumb browser war/competition, that browsers don't start mass-implementing useless and dumb non-standard features just to have more features than the competition.

 

If it wasn't for Firefox, then probably there would be no IE7. IE7 was made because Firefox was gaining too much marketshare.

[XPSP2]

Where do they get these stats from? First its online computer users then its cell phones.

[Andavari]

I can imagine after people used the mess that is IE7 they switched.

Now to only wait and see if SongBird during its development really is going to live up to the hype and be the Firefox to media players and make things like WMP11, iTunes, etc., look silly.

[Eldmannen]

I can imagine after people used the mess that is IE7 they switched.

Now to only wait and see if SongBird during its development really is going to live up to the hype and be the Firefox to media players and make things like WMP11, iTunes, etc., look silly.

I tried out Songbird, think it was a nightly build or something. The skin wasn't so good, it was very black and the borders and toolbars was black and so was the inside of the windows too, so it was too black with few good contrasts that separate the interface.

But it was a rather cool app, you could easily use it to quickly find alot of different music and listen to that. It had lots of like websites with free music, and podcasts, and online radio stations, and stuff.