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| Firefox 3.5 quickly adopted |
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| Let’s remember: Mozilla released Firefox 3 on June 17 2008 with great pomposity. The launch of the open source Firefox 3 web browser has set the new Guinness World Record for the largest number of software downloads in 24 hours. As expected, version 3.5 was released on June 30 2009, bringing a lot of great features to Firefox. Within a few days, it was already obvious that Firefox 3.5 gradually replaces its predecessors, without taking market share away from its competitors. |
| Cross section: |
- Study carried out from June 22 to July 5, 2009
- Cross section of 15,251 websites
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| FF3.5: almost 1 out of 10 visits after 5 days |
The graph below shows the visit share of Firefox 3.5 in relation to the visit share of Mozilla registered on websites for 23 European countries.
During the study period, the visit share of Firefox 3.5 beta versions oscillated between 1.0 % and 1.4 %. The final version release on 30 June generated an incontestable increase reaching a 9.5 % share on Saturday, 4 July, less than a week after its launch.
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| A dazzling start for Norway |
The average evolution of Firefox 3.5’s visit share in relation to Mozilla’s visit share registered during the study period on websites in 6 European countries (France, Germany, Norway, Spain, Sweden and United Kingdom) is presented below. It allows emphasizing some behavioral differences between the countries.
In the leading pack, above the European average share (9.3 %), the shares of Norway, Germany and Sweden lay between 11.6 % - 12.5 % on July 5. Until July 4, apparently the visits of Firefox 3.5 by Norwegians are the most numerous: Norwegian internet users were the precursors using Firefox 3.5.
France (9.3 %) and Spain (9.5 %) are average participants with shares near the European average on July 5. During the entire study period we observe that these shares keep being close to the European average share.
United Kingdom lays behind, below average, with a small share of 7.0 %.
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| Stability in the browser market |
However, the evolution previously stated does not mean that Firefox gained market share. As indicated in the following graph, the visit share generated by Mozilla Firefox in Europe, whatever version, remains stable, with better performance during weekends as usually, as we confirmed in our previous study dated April 2009.
Regarding the numbers previously declared, they could mean that Firefox users gradually update their browser but that the version Firefox 3.5 does not change internet users’ habits in browser use.
Five days after its release, the new browser FF3.5 was quickly adopted by most red panda users. Will Firefox 3.5 performance be sufficient to convert news users and relaunch the browser war?
Stay tuned as AT Internet Institute will provide a new browser barometer soon.
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Methodology:
The 23 countries included in the study were:
Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
For each country, we analyze the consultation of a website whose traffic is mainly generated in the country studied. We calculate an average traffic distribution per website. For every website, the visit share for each browser corresponds to the total number of visits of the analyzed browser compared to the overall number of visits for all browsers combined over a given period.
The European indicator is representative of the countries audited. The average visit share in Europe corresponds to the average of the indicators for the 23 countries studied. To evaluate the average, all countries are regarded equal in the value of their parameters.
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