I just spoke to a friend of mine from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business who’s the CEO of PrepMe, a startup firm that runs an online SAT prep course. He mentions that they’ve hired a new web designer to make their website “Mozilla-compliant” (his words, not mine) because about 12% of their visitors are using Firefox!
Given the likely demographics of their users (I think there’s a pretty decent chance that most visitors are kids in high school), it looks like Firefox is scoring big points amongst teenagers. I know it’s not big news — we’ve known this for a while but it’s always great hearing from content creators that Firefox adoption is growing and they’re having to adapt or be left behind.
It’s often hard to gauge the impact of Firefox based on raw percentages alone, but when someone tells you that they’ve had to make business decisions based on an increase in Firefox usage, that’s something concrete you can’t ignore.
Another friend of mine who helps to run some of the IT infrastructure for one of the largest Model United Nations conferences for high schoolers in the United States has also provided me with a day’s worth of their web server logs. I haven’t yet parsed it, but I hope to do so within a couple of days. The results should be interesting.
UPDATE (2005-09-27): PrepMe’s new standards-compliant website has gone live! Check it out!
April 27th, 2005 at 8:11 pm - Edit
Firefox adoption by classmates at my school started because I began using it and giving it to people as a way to get around the school’s restrictive firewall. Those people have spread it to other people, and most of them tell me they now use Firefox at home.
April 28th, 2005 at 8:15 am - Edit
Hi, I’m looking for an online SAT course for my son, can you point me in the right direction?
April 28th, 2005 at 9:02 am - Edit
It’s strange seeing the sites that get high Firefox percentages. My wife recently started a fanfiction archive website, and I’ve been keeping an eye on the stats; it seems to get somewhere around 35% FireFox (only 60% MSIE), which is way more than I was expecting for a totally non-technical website. (This is after filtering out the developer’s IP addresses, which would probably have been enough hits to skew the stats towards FF.)
April 28th, 2005 at 5:44 pm - Edit
Hi Fred — I’ve replied to you via email.
April 29th, 2005 at 8:52 am - Edit
Hi, I didn’t get it. Just to make sure, my email is: fred.zeller@gmail.com
Thanks a million!
April 29th, 2005 at 9:16 am - Edit
Resent, the email address you gave me previously was @mail.com, so looks like you missed out the ‘g’. Anyway, you should have it now.