Is Firefox’s 20% market share worth more than just 20%?

Posted by Bhavishya Kanjhan on Dec 13, 2008 in Default | 2 comments

About a month and a half ago Mozilla announced Firefox officially held a market share greater than 20%. At the time of posting this marketshare.hitslink shows the share to be 20.41%.

Not too shabby owning a fifth of the market. However a look at the statistics of some of the popular Technology website shows a Firefox market share exceeding 50%. Arstechnica reports a Firefox usage of 51.34%, ReadWriteWeb at 55.04% and Techcrunch just shy of 60% at 57.80%

You might argue that technology websites are likely to be viewed by enthusiasts who are likely to move away from the standard shipped browser and that real number lie in average users. But then again it is the enthusiasts who spend a lot more time browsing than their, if I may say, ‘regular’ counterparts. This is real life scenario.

Doesn’t this increase Firefox’s usage statistics then? As an unrealistically simplified example let’s take 20 people browsing for an hour each versus 70 people browsing for 15 minutes each. Firefox’s timewise usage is higher than IE in this example but that’s not what I’m going for. The point is Firefox may be pegged at 20% (which by the way is a huge achievement) but it’s 20% weighs and counts for a lot more.