OSX and FireFox growing steadily

Ever since I switched to Mac about a year ago, I’ve been sure that the Intel Macs and OSX would become serious competition for Microsoft. According to thecounter.com, Mac users now account for almost 4,3% of all their visitors (72.993.015 person user sample thus far this month).

I’m not saying that the figures from thecounter.com are 100% representative. They are based on info from a small JS that is loaded on all of internet.com’s sites, so it’s a tech-based audience, but still it’s very interesting to see how steadily the number of Mac users grow. Two years ago, mac users were only 2%. I seem to remember that Gartner Research predicted late 2006 that Mac’s wouldn’t get above 2.9% in 2007? Fun to see how analysts fail to really research the market. Just imagine the rush that will come now that Adobe finally has delivered CS3 on the Intel Mac platform. I bet they forgot to think about how that will affect Mac growth?

Another fun fact - the project I’ve been working on the last year has seen insane Mac growth. Initially, only two of the coders had Macs in the building. Now it’s about 20 of us doing Flash, HTML and Java on shiny new Intel Macs. I’m pretty sure that OSX will have near 6% market share by the end of this year, driven by iPod and iPhone sales.

On a similar note - Back in 2005, mozilla based browsers was at about 5%. Now, these account for more than 24%. Who said the browser wars were over? 😉