So most people are talking about the rise of Firefox, and the market share it is capturing. But one thing people are failing to mention is the market that these stats are taking from. If I take one of my own communities (granted very small) which focuses on open source on laptops then you would find Linux OS 42% and Windows at 55% (amazing how even an Linux driven content still has a majority of Windows OS as it user hits in the past month). You will find Firefox at 61%, IE at 22%, Opera at 7% and Mozilla at 6.5%. While the OS scale isn't what I expected, the browser market is about right (especially when considering the inflated Windows OS numbers).

Now, that was a tech market, lets move to the business market. Again I work for a Project Management training and consulting firm. I am registering Windows at 96%, Macs at 3% and Linux at .5%. This is about on target with other publishing authorities. For the regard, other OS'es registered are SunOS, PalmOS (my cell :/), iPhone and SymbianOS (the CEO's cell). Pretty interesting. Now, for the kicker the browser market share. While seeing IE at 77%, Mozilla at 20%, Safari at 2% and Opera at 1% doesn't shock me too much, what does it the versioning within the two biggest, IE and Firefox.

The majority of our Internet users are using IE 6.0, making up 50% of IE traffic. That is nearly 40% of our site's visitors. Just under the other 50% is IE 7.0, which the other .5 percent being IE 5 and IE 8. Come on, are you kidding me. Their are still companies that haven't moved to IE 7 yet. I understand not doing it the first year. But seriously. IE 7 makes a world of difference, for both the end user and the web developers. In my eyes, this is just unacceptable. If you have a corporate web site or app that requires IE 6, then you need to get on the move and get it updated to dump IE 6.

Firefox is moving along nicely. Considering it has only been released for a few weeks now. We are registering 30% of our users running Firefox 3.0. I am showing just over 1% using 1.5, with the rest of the FF users running some version 2.0. This is about what I expected. I am expecting by end of year to have FF 3.0 be over 75%. Unless they push FF 3.0 updates over their automatic update, then I expect that number to be closer to 90%. But as far as a web programming perspective, this isn't as big as a deal, because FF 2.0 follows the specs set forth by HTML and CSS pretty closely, as does IE 7. The reasons for end users to upgrade remain the same, better security.

The last spec I thought was interesting, and have seen reported elsewhere is screen resolution and colors, these are very important. 98% of our users use a resolution of 1024x768 or higher, which 35% using exactly 1024x768, only 2% use 800x600. Which is great when desining a site, the extra width planning for 1024 verus 600 is awesome. Screen colors actually suprised me a bit. I would expect 32bit color to be over 95%, but it isn't. it is just under 90%. 24 bit at 3% and 16 bit at 6%. Interesting.

I am not going to do any grand finale conclusion, as those are mostly crocs of shit anyways. What I am going to leave you with is the numbers and let you draw your on conclusions. These numbers don't tell you how much better any one product is compared to another or better adoption of one to the other. Just the stats over a month.