Following up on Stews’ comment/question on my post yesterday, I did a little reading and statistics collecting, and here’s a little summary of what I found:

Based on information available, 47.3% of Internet users in June 2009 accessed the web using one of the Firefox browser versions. By contrast, combined stats for the Internet Explorer browser versions still in use (IE6, IE7 and IE8) over the same period totalled 40.7% making Firefox the preferred browser overall.

With just under 1.6 billion Internet users globally, the Firefox usage figure equates to just over 755,000,000 users. Not a billion, but certainly heading in that direction.

Hope that that answers the question Stew, and that my calculations are reasonably correct.

The sources of my information, and a number of other interesting points that were encountered:

W3 Schools have been tracking web usage statistics for a number of years, and from their site I found browser statistics for the first half of 2009. These show that Firefox usage has grown steadily each month (except for the small drop May to June.) By contrast, Internet Explorer 6  and 7 show progressive declines in usage, with only IE8 gaining users since the beginning of the year.

What is noticeable is that Firefox seems to have become the preferred browser for the majority of Internet users globally. When we add all three IE flavours together (in June), we get a combined user base of 40.7% compared to Firefox’s 47.3%.

Browser Statistics Month by Month (from W3 Schools.com)
2009 IE7 IE6 IE8 Firefox Chrome Safari Opera
June 18.70% 14.90% 7.10% 47.30% 6.00% 3.10% 2.10%
May 21.30% 14.50% 5.20% 47.70% 5.50% 3.00% 2.20%
April 23.20% 15.40% 3.50% 47.10% 4.90% 3.00% 2.20%
March 24.90% 17.00% 1.40% 46.50% 4.20% 3.10% 2.30%
February 25.40% 17.40% 0.80% 46.40% 4.00% 3.00% 2.20%
January 25.70% 18.50% 0.60% 45.50% 3.90% 3.00% 2.30%

Personally, the figure in the above table that scares/troubles/worries/amazes me the most is the almost 15% usage that IE6 still holds. IE6 is now over 8 years old, has been superseded by two newer editions of the Internet Explorer browser, and has been generally vilified by the Internet community (both developers and users) for its poor security standards and its multitude of bugs and incompatibilities.

Based on the figures above, and the number of internet users in the table below, there are still almost a quarter of a million users running IE6. Scary thoughts fill my head…

Okay, so that’s browser usage, but what about user numbers?  Well, from Internet World Stats, I found the following info:

AFRICA REGION Popul. (2008 Est.) % of Global
Popul.		 Internet
Users		 Internet Penetr-ation Growth
(2000 – 2008)		 % of Global
Users
Africa 975,330,899 14.50% 54,171,500 5.60% 1100.00% 3.40%
Rest 5,734,698,171 85.50% 1,542,098,608 26.60% 332.60% 96.60%
WORLD 6,710,029,070 100.00% 1,596,270,108 23.80% 342.20% 100.00%

Whilst the growth of Internet use in Africa is a huge 1100%, penetration (i.e. the population percentage with access to the Internet) at just 5.6% is still woefully low. Especially when compared to the global average of almost 24%. To put that into simplistic context: globally, about 1 in 4 people have regular access to the ‘Net. On the African continent, it’s about 1 in 20.

South Africa specific information is a little dated, but still fairly telling:
SOUTH AFRICA
ZA – 48,782,755 population
4,590,000 Internet users at December 2008
This represents 9.4% of the population
Only 378,000 broadband internet subscribers as of September 2008 (I have read elsewhere recently – will confirm the source – that SA broadband uptake has been increasing rapidly in the first part of this year, so this figure may need some adjustment.)

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