Firefox beat Internet Explorer in number of people accessing wordpress.org by about 80,000 in January. Of the people visiting with IE, over 90% were using 6.0. This makes web development much, much easier. (13)
Unfortunately, those aren’t global statistics; however, for developing the WordPress site, it does indeed make things much easier for you. Congratulations, hopefully these statistics will spread like wildfire. 
Visitors to wordpress.org != Visitors to wordpress.org blogs
But I believe it is representation of users of WordPress, which is who I code for.
“WordPress recommends the open-source Firefox browser” 
well my wp blog look good when viewed using firefox.
It holds much much more. W3schools must have been prudent.
Roy - No those figures are about right.
Of cource the figures for indivdual sites vary. My work site gets 93% from IE, but thats because of its demographic (teachers and schools).
When you concider that the Mac is around 4-5% on its own and there is NO version of IE on those anymore (plus Mac users tend to be more clued in on technical and software change/upgrades), combined with an estimated 15% share for Moz/Firefox, then its not hard to see where the figures come from.
I usually estimate 75%, but thats still in the ballpark of w3schools.
Gregory,
As soon as I had posted my comment, I realised that I forgot to state the most important point. Browser shares, just like many stats, depend on the definition. Do you count hits? Visits? Unique IP addresses?
The fact is: Firefox users are blasting the Internet with requests for data — some of it never even to be viewed. Firefox users also tend to spend more time on the Internet. So, far less than 30% of all people use Firefox. Maybe 30% of traffic is Firefox driven. For the record, in the month of January, 52.2 % (101508) of my site’s traffic was Firefox… but I bet most unique visitors use IE6 because they come randomly from Google.
90.000 means nothing when we can’t compare it to the total amount of visitors
Roy,
very true. I tend to use unique visitors in this context however - as those are the actual people that visit - thats your number of visitors. However it is always interesting to see how hits breaks down too. I find this less useful tho.
I’m not sure what you mean about blasting the net with data. They open up in new tabs more, I know I do, but this is because its easier to see the data, hardly not-viewed.
I would also bet that IE makes up more, just because it’s a larger market share, but that’s sort of the point about market share I think. I would imagine that the percentage of IE and Firefox coming in from google is the same actually - maybe more from firefox, because of the easy google search feature in the toolbar.
Of cource, as ever - all this depends on your projected audience and current readership!
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