The W3Schools.com browser stats nicely reflect long-terms trends online; so what specifically can we learn from the graph I made? First, the obvious: Internet Explorer is in a long term decline almost perfectly mirrored by the rise of Firefox. Second, there is something very different about IE7 adoption (plateauing) compared to IE6 adoption (linear) five years ago. Is this partially the WGA effect I predicted? Regardless, its bad news for Microsoft.
Update: Asa blogged the other day about the same trends I noticed, except he was looking at WebSideStory and NetApplications data.
Update 2: (July 8) Compare my graph for w3schools.com with this one from oreilly.com:
Source, via Asa’s blog; see also the ‘others’ graph for oreilly.com
June 15, 2007 at 11:03 AM |
[...] something though; to what extent does Jobs consider Firefox a threat to Apple? Its obvious that Firefox is eating IE for lunch on Windows, but is the same thing happening (or starting to happen) to Safari on the Mac OS [...]
October 4, 2007 at 4:11 PM |
[...] WGA is an example) doesn’t really work except to aggrivate honest users? And Firefox is kicking IE7s ass in terms of adoption rate? And with Vista sucking so bad and XP being given a temporary reprieve [...]
October 16, 2007 at 1:47 PM |
[...] to watch; pretty much regardless of the source, IE7’s market share appears to have plateaued at a level below IE6’s, most likely due to the WGA DRM which they have now [...]