The good folks at Mozilla are trumpeting a new report by global analytics service Net Applications that documented a 20% global market share for two out of four weeks in October. It's a new high bar of popularity for the 2nd most popular browser in the world.
Firefox is safe, standards compliant, extensible...and not made by Microsoft. That's what most people like about it and the number of fans is growing. As a non-default browser on Windows computers, Firefox use can also be used as a proxy for measuring increasing sophistication of aggregate web users. There are certainly sophisticated web users who use Internet Explorer, however.
We know that because 27% of ReadWriteWeb readers came to the site using IE last month. That makes it the second most popular browser among its readers after Firefox at 55%. Their readers came in on 188 different browsers in October.
Innovation in browsers is continuing at a high speed rate. For example, just today "private browsing" feature was added to an official Firefox build and that's sure to be appealing to mainstream users and early adopters.
Congratulations are due to the Mozilla team and community. A web filled with Firefox users is a better web for us all.
