Mozilla Firefox has been a popular alternative to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer for well over a decade and employs the open source initiative. In recent years, the browser’s market share has fallen behind Google Chrome and doesn’t look like narrowing the gap anytime soon. To be fair, Firefox still provides a great experience and shouldn’t be dismissed. According to the latest Firefox Hardware Report which is compiled to give developers an insight about the browser’s audience, one in ten users are running the ancient Windows XP operating system. This isn’t a shocking statistic because Windows XP was extraordinarily popular and older machines probably have Firefox installed because it’s supported.
The report also outlines that 44.86 percent of users are running Windows 7 while 25.67 percent use Windows 10. On another note, the primary resolution is 1366×768 and Intel iGPUs appear to be the most popular choice. Interestingly, Intel processors account for 86 percent of devices, although 70 percent of these only have two physical cores. Additionally, the frequencies tend to hover between 2.3GHz-2.69GHz. In terms of memory, most people have 4GB in their system with 2GB being the second most popular option. So what does the data actually tell us? It illustrates that a large portion of people are using really old PCs and believe they’re perfectly functional for web browsing tasks. Consumers have moved towards tablets, and all-in-one transformables too which could make the desktop results appear quite different. While Windows XP was a great operating system back in the day, I would rather people install a version of Linux which is more secure, has updates and works decently on low-end hardware. Sadly, this isn’t always a viable option if people aren’t into computing or know someone who can walk them through the process.
The percentages of the operating systems in this report, are the typical percentages we see in reports about operating system market share. Which means that there is no preference to Firefox from users of specific windows versions, to the contrary to what some sites are saying, in their effort to prove that Firefox is an outdated browser for outdated PCs and users. Because news posters can also be fanboys of a specific browsing application.