Little more than a month ago, I did a post on statistics on browser usage at TPM. The gist of the story (with graphs) was that fewer and fewer people are using FireFox and Internet Explorer, while more and more are using Safari and Chrome. Chrome, which is made by Google, is on pretty much pure organic growth, while Safari is being fueled to a significant degree by sales of iPad and iPhone, which basically force users to use Safari.
I just looked at the numbers again. And the shifts are striking, even over the last seven or so weeks.
I continue to be surprised though just how quickly the browser market is changing. I just looked at the month-to-date stats for November. And they showed significant changes just over the last 6 or 7 weeks. The number is users on Chrome has jumped more than 1 percentage point. Safari usage has dumped over 1.5 percentage points. And there are parellel drops for Firefox and Explorer.
As of today: Firefox 34.50%, Explorer 26.63%, Safari 23.66% and Chrome 12.52%.
To be clear, these numbers are not the web as a whole but the TPM audience — on that tends to be more tech-savvy, Mac-using and affluent than the web at large. But for those of us who follow these things, these are striking changes over very short periods of time.
Back in that early October post, I also noted overlapping trends in operating system usage. Mac has been growing in market share for much of the last decade. And our audience is much more Mac-using than people on the web in general. Back in September 63.4% of our users were using some version of Windows and 28.54% were using Mac. The rest were made up of mobile devices — most of which were either iPhone or iPad.
Even over the last 7 weeks the changes have been substantial. Windows usage is down to 61.69%. Mac usage is up and iPhone and iPad usage is up too. Indeed, if you add up Mac and the iOS (iPhone, iPad, etc.) devices, 34.95% of visits to TPM are now coming from some Apple operating system.
