Early in the morning of September 27th, Mozilla released Firefox 7, keeping pace with the aggressive release schedule in place since earlier this year. Most notably, this latest version boasts of radically improved memory use and decreased start-up time; two issues many Firefox users have complained about in the past. As a testament to the fervor and its rate of early adoption, Firefox 7’s total use spiked dramatically at the hour of its release.
To investigate this rise in traffic, Chitika Insights analyzed a series of traffic from the USA and Canada over a period of one week, noting hourly growth of Firefox 7 as a function of both overall traffic and Firefox traffic exclusively. Breaking down Firefox 7’s growth as a time series revealed a similar growth trajectory akin to Firefox 6 in that downloads for the browser skyrocket during the off-work hours, exhibiting a brief lapse in the early morning. This trend becomes more pronounced as stray further away from the point of release, perhaps as automatic updates capture less and less of the share of Firefox users.
Although Firefox 7 has yet to reach the level of traffic exhibited by Firefox 6, in just two days’ time the browser already encompasses over 14% of all Firefox traffic, and 2% of our total traffic. This impressive rate of growth is undoubtedly supported by the auto-update feature.
The slightly slower adoption rate of Firefox’s latest browser should not be a big concern for Mozilla, albeit any revolutionary changes between the two versions. Given no such indications from Mozilla or from the reviews of version 7’s functionality, the Firefox 7 release simply meant to fix several important issues. As a publisher, to ensure optimal site monetization, it’s important to ensure that your site is updated to be compatible with the newest browser versions.
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