Mozilla released Firefox 14, the latest full version of its flagship open-source browser, on July 17th. In the immediate days following the release, traffic data points to a tremendous number of users already having migrated to the latest version.
Likely driven for the most part by an automatic upgrade mechanism, Firefox 14 is already responsible for more than 46% of Firefox Internet traffic. Our updated Chitika Firefox Version Live Tracker was used to visualize the last 24-hours of Web traffic between each different version of Firefox. The data is culled from all Firefox-based ad impressions amongst the hundreds of millions of impressions seen within our network.
Just one day after its release, our network already showed a 3.5% adoption rate amongst Firefox users (Note: Image below represents data on July 18, 2012):
Just two days later on July 20, this adoption rate had ballooned by nearly 10 times to 35.9% – making Firefox 14 the most widely used version of the open-source browser. (Note: Image below represents data on July 20, 2012):
By early Tuesday morning, the number had grown to just over 46% – a terrific adoption rate for a new Web browser within that short a time period. (Note: Image below represents data on July 24, 2012):
Based on these findings, along with observations from our Firefox 13 adoption study, several trends can be highlighted:
- Firefox 3, the oldest version of the software still maintaining a high degree of use, is now beginning to see a drop in user base. Firefox 3 users accounted for 17% of all of the browser’s users on June 8, 2012, but that share has now dropped to 9% just over a month later. This could indicate that the newest Firefox features, such as privacy and URL auto-complete capabilities, are better updating motivators than those included in previous versions.
- With Firefox 13, the last month saw adoption move from 5.4% to 64.5% of all Firefox users, prior to the release of Firefox 14. That version, along with Firefox 14, includes automatic updating functions which should help Firefox reign in fragmentation issues that negatively impact web designers. Firefox 14’s support for Windows 8 also speaks to Mozilla’s fast development cycle for its browser that can help it quickly address new developments in the marketplace.
Visit Chitika Insights’ Firefox Version Tracker by following this link: http://labs.chitika.com/firefox