Blog of Metrics

On the heels of this week’s announcement that Firefox recently surpassed 50% market share in Indonesia, we thought it would be interesting to look at what other regions are also nearing this amazing milestone.  Thanks to Net Applications, we’re able to share this data, which is typically only available via a subscription to their service.  In the chart below, you’ll see which countries are next in line for passing the 50% mark and the degree to which each region has been growing in 2008.  Please click on the image for a full view.

We’re aware that this analysis isn’t exactly rigorous.  For example, with the Indonesia discussion, we were able to do a bit of triangulation ensuring that the story was in fact accurate (e.g., comparison with other market share sources, comparison with our own internal growth numbers).  That said, we should point out one very compelling fact…

Net Applications shows that Firefox is most likely to soon surpass the 50% mark in Slovenia, Poland, and Finland – with 48%, 47%, and 45% June market share numbers, respectively.  What has Xiti, another provider of market share information, had to say on this subject?  According to their latest report, Firefox market share is highest in Finland, Poland, and Slovenia – with 46%, 44% and 44% March market share numbers, respectively.

Given how eerily similar these two distinct data sets are , it seems as though the data presented in the chart above should, at the very least, be directionally true… giving our communities one more reason to celebrate.

Wow!  According to Net Applications, Firefox surpassed the 50% mark in June 2008 (subscription required for country breakdown).  We know we’ve been very close to passing this mark in several European countries, including Finland, Slovenia and Poland, according to Xiti, so we were excited to see this news about Indonesia.  As some background information, Indonesia is the world’s fourth most populous country, with a relatively low, but rapidly growing internet penetration rate.

There might be some questions about Net Applications’ sample, but consider these factors:

1. According to another web analytics firm, WebSideStory, Firefox had nearly reached 35% market share in Indonesia late last year, and this measurement was based on a sample of 200,000 daily visitors in Indonesia.  (unfortunately, this measurement service was suspended earlier this year after Omniture’s acquisition of WebSideStory)
2. Both Net Applications and WebSideStory agree that the growth (i.e., trend) of Firefox share in Indonesia has been greater than in any other region.
3. According to our own internal numbers related to Firefox usage, only a couple regions around the world have matched Indonesia’s growth rate so far in 2008.

Putting all these factors together make it clear that Firefox adoption and the Mozilla community are flourishing in Indonesia.  And it looks like our Firefox 3 launch party in Jakarta was a success… see photos here and here.

A couple months ago, we speculated on what the Firefox 3 universe would look like approximately one month after launch.  In that analysis, we took our download and usage numbers from the time period following Firefox 2’s launch in 2006 and extrapolated from there.  We’re now exactly one month removed from Download Day, so we wanted to update that discussion and see how close our guesstimates were for Firefox 3.

Specifically, how many cumulative downloads of Fx3 have we seen since Download Day and were does the “Active Daily User” number for Fx3 usage stand today?  Below you’ll see this snapshot analysis, along with a comparison to the launch of Firefox 2:

The numbers above match fairly well with our original predictions.  So, how else can we interpret these results?  One pattern that stands out is the conversion percentage, i.e., how well downloads are translating to active daily users.  Dividing the “red” number by the “blue” number, you’ll see that the conversion rate was approximately 38.5% during the first month of Fx2 and has been approximately 33% during the first month of Fx3.  This could merely be a seasonal effect… or perhaps this tells us that there’s a little room for improving the user’s experience from download to install and from install to long-term usage.

Many of us at Mozilla and within the Mozilla community were excited when Stephen Colbert gave Firefox 3 his “Colbert Bump” on the day of Firefox 3′s launch (a big thanks to Jonathan Zittrain).  You can watch the video here.

Download Day was a wild success, and we were happy to share some thanks and credit with Stephen.  However, a few questions naturally arose, e.g., what was the direct impact of the Colbert Bump? and could the effect be precisely measured?

Here’s what we did:  we looked at downloads of Firefox 3 by users within the U.S. – and then we drilled down to a minute-by-minute view to see what, if anything, could be detected.  At minute 23 of the broadcast, Colbert said, “Firefox 3 just got the Colbert Bump.”  What happened next?

We saw a big spike in downloads exactly one and two minutes later:

Apparently we’re not the first to find scientific evidence proving the Bump’s effect.  If you’re interested in that previous study by James Fowler of the University of California at San Diego, you can read the complete version here.

We recently looked at the spike in activity of Firefox related search terms on Download Day.  Following up on that post, I wanted to find other interesting ways to put the launch into perspective.  For example, looking at “Firefox” on Google Trends shows us that traffic of firefox was off the charts during launch – something on the order of 2X what occurred with the Firefox 2 launch in 2006.

Pushing this perspective a bit further, I thought it would be interesting to see how both the Firefox 3 launch and the historical trend stack up against other products and organizations.  While there are a lot of different ways to go about this, I took the top three “best global brands” according to the latest report from Interbrand and BusinessWeek.

Plugging “Firefox”, “Coca Cola”, “Microsoft”, and “IBM” into Google Trends returned the following:

Notice a trend here?  Two brands show a downward trend and one shows an upward trend over time.  While this isn’t exactly a fair or rigorous brand analysis, it is cool to see Firefox trending so well.