I recently came across a NetApplications study that was profiled in SearchEngineJournal: Firefox currently has about 8% of the browser market (down from 8.71% in June), as measured by Web traffic statistics.
That jibes quite well with some data that we collected, but didn’t release, from our May-June 2005 “Spyware” telephone survey: 9% of internet users have Mozilla Firefox installed on their home computer.
Here are some interesting data nuggets from our survey that shouldn’t be treated as inerrant Truth because the sample size is pretty small. We had only 106 Firefox users in the sample, so the margin of error is +/- 10% on any findings that compare them to other internet users. Nonetheless, we thought they might interest people who are looking for very broad trends among internet users and they might inspire other internet researchers to probe these issues.
Firefox users are more likely than non-Firefoxers to say they have had spyware and/or adware programs on their home computer – and 65% of Firefox users said they started using a different browser to avoid having unwanted software (like spyware) installed on their computer, compared to 18% of all internet users who said they had taken that step.
Firefox users may also just be more computer savvy than most people. Firefox users are significantly more likely than non-Firefoxers to say they have installed software on their home computer and are more likely to say they have a firewall set up.
Men are more likely than women to say they have Firefox installed on their home computer. Otherwise, Firefox users pretty much look like the rest of the online population – there are no significant differences when it comes to age, income, or education.
