How fast is Firefox growing?

It’s all in the headline, and who you want to listen to.

VNUNet.com: Firefox market share rockets

ZDNet UK: Firefox’ growth starts to slip

Mozilla’s Asa Dotzler notes that Firefox has been downloaded more than 25 million times since its 1.0 release last November and says: “As Firefox and other Gecko-based browsers push toward 10%, IE has finally fallen under the 90% mark for the first time in WebSideStory’s tracking history.”

But a closer reading of the report from WebSideStory (a leading Web metrics firm that specializes in this measurement) tells a slightly different story. In his analysis, WebSideStory CEO Jeff Lunsford notes:

We track usage rather than downloads, however, and are seeing that the growth in Firefox’s usage has slowed slightly since its big surge in November. This is probably to be expected as we move beyond the early adopter segment. Growing concern over potential security holes in the browser might be another factor to consider. Back in December 2004, it seemed Firefox was a lock to reach 10 percent by mid-2005, ahead of the reported year end goal of the Mozilla Foundation. Given the latest growth rates, the year end target still appears attainable, but a mid-year achievement is unlikely unless we see increased marketing activity from the Mozilla Foundation.

For what it’s worth I’ve been using Firefox as my everyday browser for the past few months, but I’ll probably switch to the latest release of Maxthon (formerly MyIE2) this week. And of course I’m very interested in seeing what’s in the IE7 beta due in a few short months.