Internet Explorer vs. Mozilla Firefox - What does traffic on my site say ?

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I was just looking at the statistics on my web traffic today and found a interesting fact today - 90% of my traffic uses Mozilla as the web browser.

(At this point another interesting statistic that pushes Microsoft to the place where it is in the desktop market is that about 70% of my traffic uses Microsoft Windows. The remaining 25% is split between Mac and Linux variants)

Although I made the browser switch about a year or so ago, the above statistics made me a little curious of what exactly people think about Mozilla and why it is grabbing market share from Microsoft Internet Explorer at a furious pace.

Some statistics first ....

• Open Source Free Browser
• Nearly 60 to 70 million users (Wikipedia) - and still growing fast and furious
• Capturing Market share at the rate of 1-2% percent per month - just my guesstimate may be even more !

So what makes Mozilla really tick - Top 5 reasons

1. Its Open Source - everybody hates to be controlled after all
2. Has reached a critical mass of downloads - easy to download and start using no need to buy it !
3. Tabbed Browsing - makes the web faster and more efficient. You can concentrate on reading a page without the confusion of having to switch between windows. While you're reading a page, links you have opened in background tabs are loading so when you're ready to read them, they've already finished loading and you don't need to wait.
4. Customize - Set up your toolbars the way you want them. Have just a thin strip with everything on one bar. Have a set of toolbars with every option available within reach. Firefox's toolbars are fully customizable so you can have it the way you like it. Firefox even lets you create new toolbars. Third party extensions often add Toolbar items to the Customize Palette as well.
5. Most Extensible. Firefox's user interface can be extended by developers using industry standards such as XML, CSS, JavaScript etc, as well as complex C++ add on modules. Examples of such extensions include everything from relatively simple utilities to advanced tools such as a JavaScript Debugger and Document Inspector. A full list of existing extensions is available at update.mozilla.org. Extensions are easily installed.

Yes yes these are key points but what I think is the biggest reason simply is that - at a user level people are simply bored of using Microsoft Internet Explorer and chose the best alternative. It just happens that the alternative has now made such a splash that people are using it more and more as the main stream option.

Tags: firefox, mozilla, internet explorer