Zdnet just reported that after one year Firefox has 8%+ of the browser market. Pretty cool. I don’t use Firefox on my Mac, but I wish I did. It’s too slow for some reason, though perhaps getting a newer version would help. Tabbed browsing is available in Safari, the Mac browser, but the huge open-source developer community is not. Getfirefox.com is the place to go to download it if you haven’t, takes about 2 minutes and is very easy.
Update: I am NOT getting paid to talk you into getting Firefox, though I think this campaign is hillarious!
That said, I couldn’t help but notice that my traffic here is very different. Not 8% but 71% of my recent pageloads have come via Firefox/Mozilla. Only 23% through IE. Now my stats don’t go back very far, so a few big reading sessions by Firefox users could dramatically alter this, but I think it does say something. I think it says that Firefox is the browser of choice for early adopters of Web2.0 (probably you if you’re reading this blog). And to be honest, that’s significant. There are many things that don’t translate well between the two. For example, readers here in IE 6 probably see my sidebar pushed way down to the bottom of the screen. I’m working on fixing that if I can, but it’s an issue. Likewise, the Technorati Tag bookmarklet that I was working on awhile ago doesn’t work in IE 7! As we try to make Web 2.0 more inclusive, that means turning people on to it who are still using IE. Heck, I talked to a guy this morning on the phone who’s pretty big into Web 2.0 and he was using IE! So this is something to think about, perhaps mitigating some enthusiasm about Web 2.0 evangelism.