A recent article over at Tom’s Hardware brings up an interesting point about Mozilla Firefox. The author seems to feel that Firefox growth has slowed down dramatically compared to the years 2007 and 2008. The article also concludes that Firefox is coming under fire by other browsers such as IE 9 and Chrome that continue to improve. But according to the report, Mozilla commands about 30% of the browser market. So though the growth may be slowing, I see no relationship in the report that Firefox is losing market share any time soon.

The report states the following:

Could Mozilla be squeezed out of the market?

Mozilla calculated the numbers by averaging different estimates from Net Applications, Quantcast, NetApplications and Gemius. There is only public access to detailed browser usage data at NetApplications, which can provide some insight in browser usage trends, while the actual market share estimate varies enough to make you question the accuracy of any of these reports.

NetApplications for example, believes that the market share of Firefox is in the neighborhood of 24%, while Gemius puts it closer to 46%, StatCounter at 32%, and Quantcast at 36%. Interestingly, Mozilla itself says that NetApplications claims a 35% market share for Firefox, which this is not what NetApplications publicly states (about 24%). Obviously, the actual market share is almost impossible to pin down as you can spin the number in any direction you want by using the statistics that suit your purpose best.

There is the problem. Whose numbers are we to believe? How accurate are any of the numbers? I believe until a method is developed that can be 100% accurate, it is just smoke and mirrors, plus wishful thinking, for some.

Comments, as always, are welcome.

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