What is the rate of firefox 2.0 and 3.0 adoption?

Question

Part of the question:
1) How much of the market share does IE have? Opera? Firefox?
2) How many Firefox 2.x browsers have already been migrated to 3.x?

For those who question whether this is programming related: This is for deciding what has large enough market share to actually be worth supporting for a web application -- given limited development resources.

Answer 1

In Short:

Sign up for Google Analytics to gain real stats, or try to get stats from a site serving similar content.

Long form:

You should really identify your target audience first. Tech audiences tend to have a much higher percentage of Firefox because they get the early adopters, 50% or higher depending on the content. You can also bet that the majority of these have been upgraded to the latest version.

Non tech sites that attract only casual users tend to have closer to an 85% grip on the market and upgrades are more sparse.

This is very subjective, identify your site demographic and estimate based on your target audience. Or sign up for Google Analytics and get accurate stats for your site. Absolute figures won't help you out much here because they will not accurately reflect your user base.

Answer 2

From a recent web analytics report for a site of ours that has over 500,000 regular visitors with 10 million page views and over 50 million hits:

Browser                   Visitors   Percent
Internet Explorer 7.0     408,248    52.27 % 
Internet Explorer 6.0     225,708    28.90 % 
Firefox 3.0               83,405     10.68 % 
Firefox 2.0               23,734     3.04 % 

Edit: This was for a major hotel chain - mostly business users. I imagine some percent of those were technical, but mostly upper class business folks, to my knowledge.

Answer 3

A more pertinent question might be how may designers had to revert to Firefox 2.0 from 3.0, which breaks everything in sight.

Answer 4

There are some recent surveys, but FF 2 vs. 3 is sketchy

http://ma.tt/2008/07/ie6-independence/

http://www.thecounter.com/stats/

http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php

http://www.onestat.com/html/aboutus_pressbox.html

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Answer 5

This can be a chicken and egg issue.

1. start tracking browsers (Google Analytics is awesome at this
2. check your site or application out in all browsers yourself. 2.1 This is important, because if your site breaks or is unusable in browser 'X', your stats will be off (negatively) because users either abandoned your site, or switched browsers.
3. target browsers to cover as many as possible, within reason

There's no real reason why your site should not support all of the following;

• Firefox 3
• Firefox 2 (*)
• IE 7
• IE 6 (*)
• Safari 3
• Opera 9.x
• Konqueror 4.x
• Google Chrome (**)

( * ) dropping support for these is on the horizon

( ** ) supporting chrome is as simple as supporting Safari

as for the stats, remember that 70% of stats are wrong, and the other 50% are made up.