All that proves is that 58.4% of visitors of your site use Firefox. That does not prove “the dominating browser of choice is now Firefox”. I could show statistics from my site that say the opposite. A more accurate measure (in my opinion) would be to aggregate the browser usage statistics from sites like Google.com, Yahoo.com, MSN.com, etc, that appeal to the widest base of all users possible.

I’m not saying that your stats should be ignored. I think it is probably wise to design your site to display equally well in Firefox, IE, Safari, and Opera (or at least as much as possible), to accomodate as many readers as possible.

I agree with boohiss.

The cyberwyre.com statistic says nothing, but most of your users use Firefox. This site provides information for Internet affine people - they know which software is good for them. That is why they use alternative browsers (mostly Firefox, because it is a hyped browser).

On general websites you only see a slight increase in alternative browsers, because the users do not care about safer/better ones.

These are both excellent comments. I personally found these statistics so shocking because I myself am having trouble making the switch, which is why I wrote this post. Dare I say it, I am writing this comment in IE right now simply because I am so used to using the browser. I have Firefox running in the background, yet somehow I naturally load up IE first…

Don’t feel bad if you prefer IE. It’s only an unsafe browser by default. If you are cautious and set your security settings appropriately, it’s not a bad browser. Don’t switch to Firefox or Opera because of all the anti-Microsoft hype–switch only if you want to switch. Personally, I prefer Opera over everything, but if you like Firefox or IE the best, use those!

First off, I.E. by all account is not only the dominating browsers, holding steady at about 83% of all users. Experts have also noted Firefox growth has now slowed and will probably start to diminish once I.E. 7 is released which is very soon. Your figures are way out of whack.

Secondly, I think you have hits and visitors mixed up. I don’t think you are getting 50,000 visitors a week. Just the fact you are getting those high numbers on Firefox usage should tell you something is not kosher.

First of all, since this site opened early-January, it has received 109,282 unique visitors; 146,161 visits; 286,173 pages served; 1,811,053 hits.

Secondly, I don’t doubt that IE 7 will take off as soon as it is out of beta. The current release is very cool and it’s about time Microsoft came out with a tab based browser. The mini screenshot of each tab is also very useful. My stastics make sense though, and describe my target visitor quite well. The main users of this site are quite astute on the computer already and recognize the advantages of Firefox vs. IE.

As has been mentioned, Firefox vs IE users will vary depending (in part) on the theme of a website being measured. i.e. I’d be willing to bet a website dealing with senior citizen issues would have a much higher number of IE users vs Firefox (because IE was likely the default browser when they got their computer) whereas a hightech gizmo themed website would have a much higher ratio of FF vs IE, imo.

And on a related note, since you’re an Adsense affiliate, you may want to feature that ‘Download FireFox’ button (or whatever it is) that’s now a part of the Adsense program. That way you can make a buck each time someone downloads Firefox…

https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=25886

Just a thought.