Blog of Metrics

Mic recently shared a few words of congratulations with our localizers and translators around the globe who helped make the Firefox 3 launch a great success.  As a follow-up, I wanted to spell out a few numbers associated with the impact and success of these contributions:

• about 73% of downloads since launch have been from users outside the U.S.
• about 55% of downloads since launch have been of non en-US language versions
• (some users outside the U.S. download and use the en-US version, hence the difference between the two percentages)
• of the latter group — more than 11 million downloads in absolute terms — the percentage breakdown is shown in the chart below

Great job!

Polvi previously highlighted some interesting Firefox related search patterns via Google Trends.  With the recent launch of Firefox 3, we thought it’d be wise to update that analysis.  Internally, we could see that web traffic to www.mozilla.com spiked by a wild factor on Download Day and that traffic coming in through our search engine marketing programs similarly increased.  But, what did this mean more broadly?

Looking outward via a tool like Google Trends can help us better put our evidence into perspective.  While I’ve been waiting for the regular Google Trends chart to optimally show the impact of Download Day, in the meantime we can see some of the impact via Google’s Hot Trends.  Looking at the data for June 17th, you’ll notice that three Firefox related terms appear in the top 100 list: #27 is “mozilla firefox 3 download”, #80 is “get firefox” and #99 is “firefox 3 release date”.  As Google explains here, “Hot Trends aren’t the search terms people look for most often — those are pretty predictable, like [weather] or [games]…  Instead, the Hot Trends algorithm analyzes millions of searches to find those that are deviating the most relative to their past traffic.  And the outcome is the Hot Trends list.”

The drill-down capability is a cool feature.  For example, looking at “mozilla firefox 3 download” below, you’ll notice that the hotness factor was “On Fire” and 10am pacific time represented the peak hour of day (which was also true of the other two search terms).

Putting yesterday’s story in some perspective…

In the first full month after Firefox 2’s launch, Firefox 2’s worldwide market share had reached 3.62%.  It was indeed a wild success.  So, what about the launch of Firefox 3?

We’re only about 24 hours in, and Fx3 has already surpassed the point Fx2 reached at the one month mark!  According to the live tracking from Net Applications, Fx3 has been hovering around 4% worldwide market share.

Net Applications has built hourly tracking into their service just to follow Firefox 3 during download day.  Click below to see where the worldwide market share of Firefox 3 currently stands.  It’s growing by the minute!

Mozilla recently engaged in a press tour supporting the upcoming launch of Firefox 3.  Last week, we sensed that the buzz and anticipation surrounding the launch was reaching crazy heights; but from a statistical standpoint, the effects of PR efforts such as this can sometimes be difficult to quantify.  However, we recently noticed one unusual spike in our Firefox 3 download numbers:

What happened on Thursday, June 5th?

Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal published a Firefox 3 review… a review largely based on Walt’s interview with Mike Schroepfer and Mike Beltzner.  You can read that review here, see a CNBC interview here, and see a picture of the hard copy here.  Schrep, Beltzner, Melissa, Nicole, and many others deserve a huge thanks for organizing the press tour, sitting in the hot seat, and producing the best piece of software ever created.

John Lilly highlighted a milestone a few months back when we reached 50 million active daily Firefox users.  Now, just more than four months later, we’ve surpassed 60 million active daily users.  Wow!

What’s perhaps most shocking is that the percentage growth of Firefox usage has continued, all the while our base number has become substantially bigger.  In other words, when Firefox had 10 million active daily users, growing at 50% per seven or eight month period meant that we had 5 million new daily users join our community.  Now, to maintain that percentage pace, we’re seeing nearly 20 million new daily users join our community over a roughly similar time period (e.g., 50% recent growth as we went from 40 million to 60 million active daily users).

This remarkable pace of adoption and community growth stands in stark contrast to some outside expectations from just a few years ago.  Here and here you’ll notice that folks were writing about a supposed decline in Firefox growth back in 2005.  Clearly, those predictions have not played out; far from it, an opposite scenario has become reality.

Thanks to our contributors, volunteers and community members around the globe… they certainly deserve the credit for Firefox’s amazing success.

Since Download Day was announced (just a few days ago), it’s been fun to watch in real-time the way Firefox community members around the globe have embraced it.  We’ve already seen pledges from community members across more than 200 countries (or regions)!  In addition, I thought it’d be interesting to see how the early number of pledges matches with Firefox adoption.  In other words, have certain regions been ultra avid in the way they’ve embraced Download Day, relative to the size of their region’s Firefox user base?

Below is a chart showing the number of pledges by region (as of earlier today), along with the associated percentage out of total pledges (# of pledges from region x/total pledges across all regions).  The last column then shows us what percentage of Firefox users hails from each country.

As one example, you’ll notice that a country such as Poland has been particularly excited about Download Day.  While about 4% of all Firefox users are in Poland, nearly 8% of all Download Day pledges can be attributed to community members in Poland.

A few other things to highlight thus far:

• The international Firefox community has been amazingly active, with nearly 85% of pledges attributable to members outside the U.S.
• In addition to Poland, Brazil, Japan, the Netherlands, Russia, Mexico, Argentina, Taiwan, Chile and Portugal are among the most active regions (among many, many others)
• Colombia made the list above.  Why mention this specifically?  Colombia has also shown the greatest increase in Firefox usage, on a percentage basis, since the beginning of 2008.  Usage growth by country is an entirely different topic, but this one nugget of info seems relevant in calling out our community members in Colombia.

After last month’s hiccup, yesterday Net Applications released its latest market share report for May 2008.  Firefox showed a nice improvement in the April to May timeframe, going from 17.76% to 18.41% worldwide market share.  Net Applications provides their own interpretation here.

The interesting part of the story is that while Firefox 3 continues to show rapid adoption, most of our growth was driven by increased usage of Firefox 2.  In other words, Firefox 3 adoption is not coming at the expense of Firefox 2 usage (it’s not simply the case of existing users updating from Fx2 to Fx3).  Clearly, the overall health of the Firefox brand is amazingly strong as we head towards the official release of Firefox 3.

The first chart below details the change in Firefox market share numbers over the last five weeks, and the second chart highlights the latter two columns:  Firefox 3 adoption relative to the share of Opera (I didn’t mean to put Opera on the spot here… it just seemed like a relatively good benchmark).  Source for all data: Net Applications.