John writes a detailed post on the methodology used by Mozilla to estimate Firefox’s global market share.

Here is a direct quote of his summary points, but the full article is worth a careful reading:

• We think there are at least 125,000,000 Firefox users in the world right now, give or take. That represents a doubling since Firefox 2 was released a little over a year ago, and significant growth in every country.
• At Mozilla we view market share as an important quantitative metric that can help us ask smarter questions and build better products, but it’s only one of many
• We have systems here that tell us approximate number of daily users, and use that information to inform much of what we do.

By all measures, Mozilla (and especially Firefox) is an open source success story. They are also pioneering new metrics to measure the penetration of open source tools into business and user markets. This good data will help to further increase the market share of those very open source tools being measured, by helping guide us to more effective ways to promote them.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 3rd, 2007 at 10:13 am and is filed under Free Culture, Open Source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.