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You Don’t Use Firefox?

I was at a friend’s house the other day, who is one of the unlucky ones that still has a dialup connection to the interntet. Her computer is a relatively new and is running Windows XP. I was using it to check out a site that I am working on. I am a Firefox user most of the time, but all she had installed was Microsoft Internet Explorer, so I fired it up and browsed to my site. While suffering through the 1 to 5 seconds it took for pages to load, I tried to imagine why she wasn’t using firefox. Then it hit me. It would take forever to download Firefox with that slow dialup connection, and thats probably one reason why many people don’t want to bother with installing a new browser.

That got me thinking. So I searched for how many people were still using dialup, and I found that as of july 2004, about 51 percent of internet users had a broadband connection (source).

Then I looked at the statistics for this site, seoLogs.com. I would think that most people that are interested in SEO are pretty internet savvy.

Well it turns out that so far this month19.5% of visitors to this site used Firefox , while 61.3% used Microsoft Internet Explorer.

I thoght I’d compare that with a site that was geared more toward the general public, so I looked at the stats of one of my clients sites, a travel site. So far this month 1.5% of visitors used Firefox, while 81.3% used MSIE.

Conclusion:
Although FireFox is a great browser, I don’t think there is any chance of it overtaking MSIE any time soon. Most people probably don’t have any motivation to install a new browser on their computers. Microsoft Internet Explorer is the king, and unless they are forced to include Firefox with Windows, or unless there is some other major change, it looks like things will stay that way for a while.

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