Firefox the World's Most Popular Browser?
Color us skeptical, although Firefox is the official browser of RCPU. (No money changed hands for that designation, by the way. We just made it up.) StatsCounter says that Firefox has passed Internet Explorer as
the most popular browser in the world.
If that's even close to being true, we find it kind of funny. After all the rigmarole of the browser wars and the U.S. Justice Department lawsuit against Microsoft in the '90s (not to mention the EU hassling the company over IE in recent years), a little browser with no operating system behind it and no real advertising or marketing to support it has literally conquered the world. Score one for innovation and word of mouth (or keyboard, as the case may be). But, again, we're a bit skeptical about this story. We do sort of want it to be accurate, though.
Update: Reader Rob e-mailed to point out that your editor totally misread the news about Firefox being the world's most popular browser and got a little carried away. The hook here is that Firefox 3.5 is now ahead of IE 7 in market share and is (supposedly, although we're still skeptical) the single most-used version of any browser. IE overall, counting all versions, still has much higher market share than Firefox. We got sucked in by headlines on this and didn't read closely enough. Sorry about that. It will likely happen again, but we'll do our best to avoid it. And thanks to Rob for paying attention.
Posted by Lee Pender on December 21, 2009