Mozilla Releases First Analyst Report; Firefox Sits at 30% Usage

Just over a month ago, I posted a news story that spoke about reports that claimed that Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser might not hit the 25% market share it obviously seeks, which had to do with some trending declines. But in a report released by Mozilla itself last week, it becomes clear that it’s not wise to only believe a single source, but rather multiple in order to gain a better perspective on things.

The reason being is that according to Mozilla, Firefox’s worldwide share currently sits at 30.27%, effectively soaring past the 25% mark spoke about in the aforementioned news post. The way the company calculated these usage shares is by gathering data from various Web services and data analytics companies, such as Quantcast and Net Applications. To come up with a worldwide usage share, it simply calculated the averages across all of the results.

For those looking for raw numbers, 30.27% amounts to 365.4 million people. You might be surprised to find out that North America isn’t where the highest Firefox usage is seen, but rather that title belongs to Europe, where 39.2% of Web users surf with Firefox. Whether or not the recently-implemented browser selection included with European versions of Windows is partly to thank for this, the report doesn’t say.

Other highlights from the report include some stark growth in Russia, the fact that people in South America love applying Personas to their browser, and people in Antarctica just love their add-ons. It’s also interesting that Mozilla used the stats it collected to find other interesting data as well, such as the fact that people in Hawaii seem to kick off their work day earliest, while New York starts the latest.

You can find and download the full report at the URL below and get more information than you could have possibly wanted. Mozilla plans to release a new report every quarter, so it will be interesting to see if Firefox surpasses 30.27% in the next release or not, given that other browsers, such as Chrome, are readily gaining ground in overall usage share.

Today we released the first ever Mozilla Quarterly Analyst Report, focusing on the State of the Internet. This is the start of something new… in addition to metrics related discussions on this blog and across the broader community, we wanted to create a somewhat standardized, ongoing report capturing the state of the internet as seen through Mozilla’s eyes. You should expect to see this report released at the end of each calendar quarter.