Firefox Hits 25% Usage on PCWorld.com

Time for another one of my periodic reports on how many PCWorld.com users are running Firefox.

The news is what it's been for awhile: Firefox is still gaining ground on Internet Explorer, albeit not at the torrid pace it was in its first months of existence. With an hour and forty minutes left in the month of September, it looks like this'll be the first month that Mozilla's browser bops past 25 percent usage among our site's visitors.

Here's a graph of Firefox's growth from August of 2004 to the present:



Meanwhile, IE 6.0 usage for September is at 59.77%, just slightly above the lowest figure it's hit recently, which was 59.50% back in May. 4.70% of visitors are running the IE 7 beta; it'll be interesting to see how quickly that percentage grows once the final version arrives, and whether the official release of IE 7 will have any impact on Firefox's usage one way or the other.

Opera, by the way, is at about 2.42% once you account for both 8.x and 9.x--a steep drop from its highest point this year, when it crept past 8 percent at one point. I'm not sure if there's a logical explanation for the fluctuation...or which browser the folks who were using Opera earlier in the year and aren't now have moved to.