05 November 2008, 15:30

Market research says Firefox has crossed the 20 per cent line

Figures from the market researchers at Net Applications, show the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox web browser scored an average worldwide market share of more than 20 per cent during two weeks in October. "Mozilla has reached an important milestone" is the heading on the Net Applications web site. According to their blog Firefox's developers see things the same way themselves, .

In October as a whole, Net Applications put Firefox just below the 20 per cent mark with a share of 19.9 per cent. Microsoft retains the lion's share with Internet Explorer, which stands at 71.3 per cent. Apple's Safari takes third place with 6.6 per cent, 0.33 per cent of its counted hits coming from iPhone users. According to this count, Opera has a share of 0.75 per cent, leading Google's Chrome by 0.01 per cent.

As always, such statistics have to be treated cautiously, because the samples taken by the market researchers don't come from a representative selection of web users. That also applies to the following statistics for users of heise online.

Browser shares at heise online
User/Agent	October 2008 - per cent	September 2008 - per cent	October 2007 - per cent
Firefox 3.0	48.9	47.2
Internet Explorer 7.0x	11.3	11.1	11.1
Firefox 2.0	9.5	10.7	47.6
Internet Explorer 6.0x	8.8	9.4	15.2
Opera 9.x	7.7	7.5	8.3
Apple Safari	4.4	4.2	3.9
Gecko (Mozilla/Netscape 6, ...	3.0	3.0	3.9
Firefox	1.5	1.4	1.4
KDE Konqueror	1.2	1.2	2.0
Google Chrome	0.6	1.3
Firefox 1.5	0.5	0.6	2.1
The remaining shares went to other or unknown web browsers.

Browser makers at heise online
Provider	October 2008 - per cent	September 2008 - per cent	October 2007 - per cent
Mozilla & Co (Gecko engine)	63.9	63.1	55.7
Microsoft	20.9	21.3	27.0
Opera	7.8	7.6	8.5
Apple	4.4	4.2	3.9
KDE	1.2	1.2	2.0
Google	0.6	1.3
misc. mobile browsers	0.4	0.4	0.9
Netscape < 6.x	0.1	0.1	0.2
Shares of operating systems at heise online in June 2008: Windows XP 58.6 per cent, Linux 14.0 per cent, Windows Vista 11.7 per cent, Mac OS 7.5 per cent, Windows 2000 4.3 per cent, other/unknown 2.3 per cent, Windows .NET 1.6 per cent