W3Schools: June Data

W3Schoools.com posted their June browser data and so here’s the updated graph:

The usual caveat of course: the specific numbers are only for this site and not a reflection of the internet as a whole… however, the trends that they depict do tend to reflect what’s going on, and there are a few interesting trends:

* IE5, available only on pre-XP versions of Windows, has dipped to its lowest level yet: 0.5%.  This is the same level IE4 had six years ago; by the end of the year it will fall off the chart.  W3schools will likely use that spot to track IE8 data.

* IE6 continues its steady decline; it is now surpassed in marketshare on W3Schools by IE7.  If trends continue, it will dip to ~10% on W3Schools by early 2010.

* An inflection occurred in the IE7 data in January, marking an end to the marketshare plateau that started in April 2007; during those nine months it only rose by ~2%.  In the five months since January, IE7 on W3Schools has increased by ~6%.

From April 2007 to January 2008, the percentage of computers running Vista that visited W3Schools increased by ~5%.  From January to June they increased by ~2.5%. The rise is roughly linear over the entire April 2007-June 2008 period.  Thus there appears to be no direct correlation between the Vista increases and IE7 market share. The variation then must certainly be due to XP users…  Why this is I do not know however.

* The sum of all IE versions (5 and up) continues to decline.  On W3Schools.com Firefox should overtake IE before 2010.

* Firefox also had a slight increase in adoption rate, but with the inflection occurring in March.  Could this be due to the release of FF3b3 in mid-February?  With the release of the final FF3 in mid-June it will be interesting to watch to see if this causes a significant bump in the July numbers.

* Corresponding to the FF adoption rate increase, the sum of IE+FF has jumped to its highest level ever for W3Schools: 95%.  Despite the significant attention Safari and Opera get, they are used by only a relatively small fraction of internet users.  The interesting thing about Safari is that its market share is only about half that of the Mac market share on W3Schools.com; it seems that Firefox is quite popular regardless of the OS.

Finally, not on my graph, is “Moz”; “The Mozilla Suite (Gecko, Netscape)”.  Its marketshare has been low and in steady decline ever since W3Schools stopped lumping it together with FF in 2005.  Currently its at the same level as IE5; 0.5%  It will almost certainly also be dropped from next year’s data.