Firefox 4 Passes 100M Downloads, Fails to Eat IE or Chrome Market Share

At least, we’re assuming some engineer deep within the bowels of the open-source-themed company is expressing such a statement. That’s because the company’s latest incarnation of its flagship browser, Firefox 4, just surged past 100 million downloads (as tracked by the company’s own real-time download meter).

 

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European Firefox users have contributed the most to Firefox 4’s download share, grabbing the browser around 38.6 million times since its March 22 launch. North American users have eaten up just shy of 30 million downloads, and users downloading the browser in Asia rank a respectable third with around 20 million downloads.

As far as countries go, the United States is leading the download charge with more than 24.4 million downloads to its name. That’s crushing the total of second-place Germany and its 7.3 million downloads of Firefox 4 to date.

Of course, it’s not just about the specific countries that are downloading the latest version of Mozilla’s browser. As for how the browser itself tracks against its peers, StatCounter reports that Firefox 4 has grown to a market share of 8.04 percent since its launch. That’s a bit off from Internet Explorer 8’s commanding 30.4 percent market share and, indeed, the 18.41-percent market share for version 3.6 of Mozilla’s Firefox browser.

The number of worldwide users running Internet Explorer 8 has remained relatively constant since Firefox 4’s launch, hovering around a market share of approximately 30 percent. Users running Firefox 3.6 dropped from around 23.1 percent to 18.4–go figure–and users of Google’s Chrome browser remained relatively constant at around a market share of 15 to 16 percent.

So what does this tell us? It appears that Firefox 4 has done a great job of serving as an upgrade for those previously running the browser, but its ability to siphon off users from its two big rivals remains unimpressive, at best.

In fact, Firefox use itself–across all versions of the browser–dipped slightly from Firefox 4’s launch week to the present-day, dropping from a market share of 30 percent to 29.4 percent. The percent of worldwide users running Chrome has remained virtually unchanged, and Internet Explorer use has taken a tiny jump up from 44.8 percent to 45.1 percent.

As for how StatCounter arrives at its numbers, the service chronicles browser figures based on more than 15 billion monthly page views across the more than three million websites that the service counts within its network.