Mozilla’s Q1 2010 Analyst Report – State of the Internet

Ken Kovash

46 responses

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.

Download Report (pdf)

Why do this?  Mozilla is in unique position.  We’re a global community with more than 350 million people around the world using the Firefox Web browser.  While we are careful to ensure the data we collect and metrics we track are fairly limited, we feel compelled to share and evangelize the little wisdom we’re able to extract from our numbers.

The structure we’ve laid out includes two general sections – (1) high-level metrics related to Firefox market share and adoption that you should expect to see with each report, and (2) interesting facts and insights that will be rotated in each report.

Some key insights from this report include:

  • Looking across several sources of market share data, Firefox’s worldwide share appears close to 30%.
  • Usage/Adoption of Firefox this quarter grew most dramatically in Russia.
  • Where do people get the earliest start to their day?  Hawaii, Wyoming, and Maine.  And the latest start?  New York.
  • People in South America and Antarctica are passionate about personalizing their browser.
  • In one usage study, we found one person having more than 600 tabs open at one time.  (This last insight comes from Test Pilot, Mozilla Labs’ platform for opt-in participation in studies and experiments.)

We are seeking input and feedback, so if you have any thoughts, please let us know.

46 responses

  1. johnjbarton wrote on :

    A Mozilla report on the Web presented in PDF makes it more difficult to use and re-use.

  2. Asa wrote on :

    This is great stuff! I particularly like that worldwide market share map 🙂

  3. Seda Gunes wrote on :

    I still prefer chrome to firefox 😀

  4. Erken wrote on :

    It’s so great to see Firefox getting stronger and stronger in Europe! Almost 40% that’s so good! At my company we use and sell computers with Firefox already installed because it’s the best browser around in our opinion! Come on Mozilla! 🙂

  5. ArpitNext wrote on :

    PDF problem?

    http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwiki.mozilla.org%2Fimages%2Fe%2Fed%2FAnalyst_report_Q1_2010.pdf&pli=1

  6. Tyson Cadenhead wrote on :

    It looks like Antarctica is leading the way!

  7. Pedro wrote on :

    600 tabs, wow. I have a browser window open with 44 tabs right now, and I thought that was ridiculous.

  8. integrati wrote on :

    Excellent, thank you.

  9. Meep wrote on :

    And we can be thankful that New York gets started late. If they didn’t, more people would have been in the World Trade Center that fateful morning…

  10. Ken Saunders wrote on :

    Hey this awesome. (insert sarcasm—>) Do you suppose that Microsoft and Google will follow your lead? 😐
    Thanks Mozilla!

    Of course you all know that OpenOffice.org can open PDF’s right? But, I get the point so I converted (saved) the PDF to (as an) ODT.
    http://themozillian.com//downloads/moz-misc/Analyst_report_Q1_2010.odt
    And you can view open documents in Firefox (OOo plugin).
    http://mozillalinks.org/wp/2007/09/openofficeorg-documents-within-firefox/

    “I still prefer chrome to firefox”
    Um, then why are you spending your time loading, reading, and commenting on Firefox content? Trolling?

  11. Alexander Limi wrote on :

    This report is awesome. Informative, entertaining, and exciting.

    Nice work!

  12. Annon wrote on :

    I hate PDF files. Actually, I wish Firefox had its own PDF renderer so I didn’t have to depend on the buggy Adobe plug in, which frequently crashes Firefox. In the meantime, I will use the Google Docs renderer, as ArpitNext recommended.

  13. cerita disini wrote on :

    wahh, its amazing and excellent, thank you.

  14. Percy Cabello wrote on :

    Great data and an entertaining reading. Looking for similar insights coming periodically. Here’s a Spanish translation I did for Mozilla Perú: http://mozilla.pe/reporte-de-analisis-2010-1-de-mozilla-%E2%80%93-estado-de-internet

  15. Pavan Gayakwad wrote on :

    FireFox is a great browser and I was using it for many years (starting from FF v1.0 till 3.5.6). I am very happy to see its growing market share and congratulate the mozilla team for creating such an outstanding product.
    Recently I observed FF performing slow and becoming heavy memory consumer as its features list is growing. I could see multiple requests raised on this issue (on bugzilla) however I felt it is not really attracting required attention from FF dev team. Though I am a huge fan of FF, it is not really stopping me to shift to Chrome when it is faster and better. People may start thinking on this line and may start considering other faster browser in the market. Before this perception spread like wild fire, Mozilla can tackle this issue and spare some effort to retain existing users along with influencing new audience.

  16. Daniel Cawrey wrote on :

    I did not realize that Firefox had such a high market share in Europe.. almost forty percent.

  17. Omega X wrote on :

    NO matter where you are, atleast one person will use the “Heavy Memory Usage” fallacy regardless of countless benchmarks and real use reports proving it wrong.

    Lets go over it again:

    Memory leaks died with Firefox 2. Memory usage got infinitely better in Firefox 3. There has been little to no change in overall memory usage since then.

    If you do have memory usage issues, check your extensions first.

  18. Alaa wrote on :

    congrats to firefox team and community
    we’re the best and a nightly build tester i know as a matter of fact the firefox 4.0 w’ll blow chrome out of the water .

  19. mitsugu wrote on :

    Antarctica is overgreat!! lol

  20. Jon wrote on :

    I have had viruses open multiple tabs on my browser, I think that may as well explain the 600 tabs user.

  21. escalix wrote on :

    Look on this 2010 Internet Browser Software Review Product Comparisons
    http://internet-browser-review.toptenreviews.com/
    1. FireFox
    2. Chrome
    3. Internet Explorer
    4. Opera

  22. Simón wrote on :

    I completely agree with johnjbarton:

    A Mozilla report on the Web presented in PDF makes it more difficult to use and re-use.

    Why do we have the best Web Browser on earth if you end up publishing a report in a proprietary format?
    Where is the HTML version of the document?

  23. Zhang Zhengbiao wrote on :

    thanks!

  24. Bill Hemp wrote on :

    Nice and concise report!

    Thanks Mozilla!

  25. Marc wrote on :

    Nice, europe still going strong, let’s hope the US catches up 😉

  26. Antoni Jaume wrote on :

    I usually have 4 Firefox windows with 10 or more tabs open each. I enjoy a lot that after an exit, they reopen all of them.

  27. Denis wrote on :

    А Opera10.51 все равно лучше и быстрее

  28. Hector Macias Ayala wrote on :

    Who the hell lives in antartica?

  29. Andrés Proaño wrote on :

    Interesting report. I am curious about how do they obtain that information. Is firefox sending that info, do people voluntarily send it?

    regards.

    -Andrés

  30. Isherwood, John wrote on :

    Good to see this openess.
    Any reklation to Google’s problems ?

  31. Alexandre Demuynck wrote on :

    @Simón: Actually, PDF is now an open standard (since the updated version 1.7 from 2008) although this PDF file contains a 1.5 versioning…

    @Andrés Proaño: Which information? If you read well, the information obtained about the person having 600 tabs open was indeed voluntarily sent in.
    If you’re talking about the add-ons statistics from Antarctica, I suppose those were retrieved from the internet addresses of the people who provided these add-ons.

    A very interesting report. Here, in Europe, people often speak about Mozilla and of course Firefox when the subject is Internet browsing.
    Internet Explorer is no longer a sole leader (if it ever was in terms of licensing and technology).

  32. Ushuaia-Info wrote on :

    Many scientifics lives on Antarctica

  33. Pete wrote on :

    Firefox has been my main browser for many years but, as of late it has been crashing and closing. this has been happening since before they would save more than one open page. If I knew how to save my history and bookmarks I would do so and then uninstall and reinstall. I have not tried chrome but use opera when gets to frustrating. I have many times have had well over 100 tabs open. The new problem is that Vista will say Firefox is already open so it will not open another one until I close that one. I go into the processes and everywhere but can find no Firefox open so to cure this I must do a restart. Any suggestions?

  34. OpenOffice fan wrote on :

    Great the PDF is produced with OSI standard presentation software.

    Check the PDF’s document properties….
    “PDF Producer: Microsoft (R) Office PowerPoint (R) 2007

  35. Rustam Alhas wrote on :

    I think that 70% of Microsoft’s IE share is mainly because – as Chief Lizard Wrangler once well put – “The average consumer does not know the difference between browser, Internet and search box.” Imagine what Firefox’s rating would be if they could distinguish!

    That being said, I’m a happy to be a Firefox-educated knowledgable Firefox user! :o)

  36. darlyn wrote on :

    I’m guessing one with 600 tabs open only did it to add some variety to the usage study. not because they actually needed 600 tabs open. I would love to know which tabs were open.

  37. Xianhang Zhang wrote on :

    If you ever want to study a person with 600 tabs open, contact me. I regularly run between 150 & 300 tabs open with peaks of much higher.

  38. Idiots wrote on :

    Why don’t you fix tab opening issues, popup window issues, model dialog issues and a host of other broken things in your damn browser, instead of spending google’s money spying on your users, and trying to think of ways of making money out of your browser.

  39. Bandito wrote on :

    “In one usage study, we found one person having more than 600 tabs open at one time.”

    I don’t remember opting in to any usage statistics…

    I’ve gotten it down to about 360 right now, but I’ve been over 1k tabs before. I had to write a special script to prevent firefox from crashing on load (FF tends to crash on load when you go over 500 or so tabs).

  40. Don wrote on :

    Re: Hawaii
    Having previously worked for a company that does business with another in Hawaii, I’ll speculate that the reason you see that effect is they simply start their work day earlier then the rest of us. In order to work or interface with us, they need to do so in the first half of the day, just as we needed to wait until X hour to avoid ringing them at 4AM. Over the last 60-70 yrs., they probably developed a business culture that reinforces early morning work.

  41. taggart wrote on :

    600? Is that all?

    $ grep “\<embed url" .gnome2/epiphany/session_crashed.xml |wc -l
    782

  42. Sumner wrote on :

    Gosh what a waste of resources, having so many tabs open at once. It’s mind boggling. One wonders what’s wrong with having a bunch of well organized bookmarks, instead of burdening Firefox, and the computer, with all those open tabs.

  43. aceraspire wrote on :

    Very good topic, and helpful report.Thank you Ken.

  44. infrared ear thermometer wrote on :

    Yes, I think so. the topic is very interesting

  45. glue gun wrote on :

    It is quite interesting and very useful. Thanks.

  46. Jimmy Nguyen wrote on :

    Nice post !
    In Q1 of 2010, the Firefox worldwide market share was 30%, but in my opinion,
    the statics will increase with the release of Firefox 4 (>2million downloads on first day)in Q1 of 2011.I & all my friends are also the Firefox “fan”, great web browser. Thank Mozilla, Firefox team alot.
    Keep it up !

    Jimmy