For years, people were treating NetApplications as if their word was gospel when it was, in fact, seriously flawed.
Here's the most obvious example. Macs could never have gotten 10% global market share with their global sale figures, yet most people didn't seem to notice the obvious errors in the numbers. I mean, come on! How could Macs achieve 10% share in the US and 10% share around the globe if up to that time only half of all Macs were being sold to the much bigger market outside the US? Then NetApplications suddenly 'changed their methodology' and market share data suddenly shifted radically to look more like what others have been reporting for years. Instead of saying "hey, they've been lying to us all this time", persons continue to rank NetApplications data as more important than all the other data that still continues to contradict theirs.
The Mozilla figures are what I expected to see, given the data that's out there. Quite frankly, this is only a revelation to those persons who rely only on NetApplication data. While the illustration showing usage by geographic location is useful, it doesn't tell the whole story. The reality is that browser usage varies drastically by country and that the only reason IE has so much market share over FF is that a handful of countries with large populations are using it overwhelmingly. In fact, much of IE's market share comes from China alone. Over 90% of China's Internet users surf the web with IE and 60% of them use IE6. Meanwhile, China makes up nearly 20% of all web users. That means that as much as a third of IE users actually live in China. If you take China out of the picture, it becomes clear that FF is actually doing better than most think.
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