Sutor scooped this on his links for the day; it's from Jacqui Cheng's article on Ars Technica.
The data is from Net Applications. You can see visually how Firefox is taking share directly from IE. Now, what strikes me interesting is that this Net Applications data will be a good indicator of Vista penetration simply by providing visibility on IE7 market penetration (once the starved throng of masochistic CIOs are let loose on that long-awaited stack of nothing). The OS data may lie -- particularly in the blinding marketing onslaught we are about to face from Vista.
Yes, Net Applications tracks OS market share, but I think their methods are sales-based and not installed base-based. I hope someone from Net Applications might comment on this. I haven't made time to digest their data-collection methodology.
(I am among those lonely souls who recognize how badly the Linux server and desktop installed bases are understated simply due to distribution characteristics of free software and obsolete data-collection habits which even today make a poor attempt at estimating software which naturally dodges the bar-scanner at points of sale.)
And regarding Firefox, I thought I noticed the download ticker clicking over at a higher rate in the last weeks. See that Firefox has achieved somewhere approaching a quarter-billion downloads down there on the foxy ticker on my right nav. (I've no idea if the Mozilla Project has made a decent attempt at making the ticker feed any kind of reliable indicator. Moz?)
The Windows installed base, recall, is said to be about 650-million large, with the potpourri of Office vintages taking up real estate on about 450 million of those PCs. Firefox downloads are not equivalent to aggregate installations of Firefox, due to repeat downloads by administrators and users who refresh the box periodically -- fellas like me. Nonetheless, a couple hundred million here or there, give or take, and we're getting somewhere.
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