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Firefox 6 already sees bump in traffic soon after debut

Firefox 6 just launched last week, and new research already sees the latest version of Mozilla's browser accounting for a significant fraction of traffic.
Written by Rachel King, Contributor

Firefox 6 officially debuted last week with a host of new features and security fixes. Internet users must already be flocking to the latest version of Mozilla's browser at a rapid pace -- at least according to Chitika Insights (a.ka. the research arm of online advertising network Chitika).

After Chitika took a look at all U.S. and Canadian traffic between August 16 and 22, the survey found that Firefox 6 has already garnered at least eight percent of the total traffic from browsers and approximately 45 percent of all Firefox-stemming traffic.

However, don't get too excited for Firefox 6 just yet. Chitika found that the growth rate for Firefox 6 is starting to taper off, likely due to the fact that all of the early adopters have already downloaded and started using Firefox 6. That means that Mozilla has some work to do in order to get other Firefox users and beyond to jump on this version now.

Interestingly, Chitika also found that Firefox 6 usage peaks during the morning and at the end of the day, but very early morning hours tend to belong to Internet Explorer. Yet, this phenomenon is only relevant to Firefox 6 and not previous editions of the software. It's not clear what Mozilla could try to do to make up for this gap -- except maybe start some kind of advertising campaign targeted at night owls and graveyard shift employees.

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