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Mozilla COO John Lilly reveals internal statistical data on his blog that suggests that the open source browser is used on over 125 million computers. These kind of market share statistics are almost always an exercise in fuzzy math. Many browser market share studies are based on traffic collected from web sites. Lilly rightly points out that sites frequented by technology enthusiasts are almost always slanted in Mozilla’s favor. European websites also see a higher number of Firefox users than the US does.

“There’s no way to really represent the complexity and the dynamism of the global Web—it’s just too big, with too many things changing too rapidly,” says Lilly. “All of these studies are extremely useful and help understand what’s happening around the world. I’m just asserting that it’s very important to understand the limits of particular studies and the assumptions that are baked in.”

Lilly goes into a fairly long and reasonable explanation about how he arrived at the 125 million user number, but even his math is just as easy to question as any other. One thing is for sure, the success of Firefox has been a sign of broader success for the overall open-source community. Firefox 2 has built upon that success, and although Microsoft is still the market leader by a significant margin, Firefox 3’s release is sure to continue to annoy the Redmond giant.

Read [John’s Blog]

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