[citation][nom]Kevin Parrish[/nom]End-users are catching on however, as Mozilla's Firefox has taken the lead in the browser wars in November, enticing a whopping 44.2 percent of Internet users. Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 comes in second, taking up 26.6 percent of the market, followed by Internet Explorer 6 with 30 percent. The three other contenders: Chrome, Opera and Safari, didn't even break into double-digit percentages."[/citation]
What? According to whom?
This doesn't make any sense. First of all, 30% is more than 26.6%, so shouldn't you have said that IE6 comes in second, and 7 third? Also, how much of that 44.2% is FF2 and how much is 3? I mean, you split up IE6 and IE7 into separate entries, right? If you take both IE versions together, they still outnumber "Firefox" by almost twelve and a half percent. You can't honestly say that FF has "taken the lead" when your own figures have it trailing by more than ten percent.
Also, I know the margin of error has to be figured in, but 44.2 + 26.6 + 30 = 100.8%, leaving
NO room for Safari or Opera, when in actuality they have some significant non-zero usage. In fact, according to Net Applications, Safari usage in November was 7.13%, and "Other" got a few whole percentage points to split among Opera and various lesser-knowns. Altogether, they take
almost 10% away from FF and IE! These data also disagree severely with your figures for IE's and FF's total share.
http/marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0
IE still takes up 70%, FF and others split the remaining 30%.
I'm pretty sure you got your numbers from w3schools's Browser Stats page, but they put IE6's share at 20% rather than 30%. I think what happened is that you saw 20% but wrote down 30%. This can account for the complete lack of other browsers in your figures. Even correcting for this error, that
still puts IE's total share a couple of points above FF's.
You also have to keep in mind that their stats come from their own logs, meaning they collect the data from people visiting their site. That can create a strong self-selection pressure in the numbers, inflating the FF score because (apparently) fewer people interested in Web Development use IE as their main browser. Most other sources seem to agree better with Net Applications' numbers.