Regional Patterns in Firefox Adoption

Ken Kovash

6 responses

Last week, we looked at which regions have shown the fastest and slowest adoption rates of Firefox 3.5.  Asa had a great idea to expand on this analysis – why not visualize it through a global map to more easily see if there are any overarching patterns across particular regions?

So, we took our Firefox usage data from the past week, uploaded it to IBM’s manyeyes project (which we previously mentioned here), and created the following visualization.  The image below shows Fx3.5 adoption by region.  You’ll notice that there seems to be relatively more dark shaded areas around Russia and Asia.

fx35_usage_map

If you want to explore this visualization further, you can visit the manyeyes page or simply click on the “interact” button below.  You’ll notice that with the drop-down menu near the upper left-hand corner, you can select the Firefox version — Fx2, Fx3.0, or Fx3.5 — you’re interested in viewing stats for.  This should also come in handy for detecting regions where Fx2 usage is still significant (which we previously explored here).

Would you like to see this type of data updated regularly? Would seeing it trended over time be helpful? Let us know.

6 responses

  1. Jon G wrote on :

    As interesting as this is, given that everyone wants IE 6 to die, for various reasons, it would be almost as interesting to see IE6 usage broken down by country to see how much of it is really corporate users stuck in the past vs home users vs bootleg copies of Windows…

  2. dave wrote on :

    What Jon G said above is very true. I’d also like to see country percentages for “Not IE”.

    I think it’s more important that IE drops below 50% than if Firefox (or any other single “modern browser”) rises above 50%. We shouldn’t have to worry about splitting the vote, indeed it’s in the webs interest if people code to the standards, not to the implementations (see the IE6 problem above)

  3. anon wrote on :

    Sudan is sea?

  4. Donnie Berkholz wrote on :

    You might be interested in focusing on rates of change, and even on acceleration and deceleration of those rates (i.e., rates of rates). A deceleration in Firefox adoption would tell you that you used to be doing really well somewhere in gaining new users, but you’re starting to fail — why?

  5. Peter GG wrote on :

    IE6 will never die UNTIL Firefox finally introduces .MSI installer packages. We are already in 2009 and no .msi? This is ridiculous, Mozilla…

  6. cuz84d wrote on :

    @Peter GG:

    File a bug if you need an MSI.. that would be more helpful. And IE6 usage share is what it is, but IE7 failed to keep some things that worked in IE6 working in the next release.. so corporations don’t upgrade if 1 app is not compatible with the new version.. I saw it first hand. The Vendor we used had to produce a new version that was spitting out IE6 specific code.. the tool designers were not any smarter than people who don’t know how to use standards for anything else.