One of the interesting things that graph shows is the IE market share on weekends vs weekdays. It is noticeably lower on weekends, but only by ~5 percentage points.
People often argue that corporations that require employees to use IE are boosting the browser's market share, but from these numbers, that effect seems small. The weekend market share should be a reasonably decent estimate of browser share without the "corporate effect".
I think the "corporate effect" is mostly on IE6. I've seen that people who have a choice to switch from IE6 usually do, but they switch to IE7, not Firefox.
For example, my company gets a ton of hits from IE; about 50% IE7, 25% IE6, and 10% Firefox (our software is for Windows, so we see almost no mac users). The only one of those that drops considerably over the weekend is IE6 (by about 10%) and IE7 spikes nearly as much (8%).
I don't believe 10% for Safari. My sites see nearly 7 million unique visitors a month and of that, almost 64% is IE (75% IE7, 23% IE6, and almost 2% IE8), about 26% Firefox (I forgot the breakdown but FF3 is almost all of it), and then you have Safari with 3% and Opera with nearly the same and then Chrome with about 1.5%. I just looked at these numbers for yesterday's traffic.
Our sites are not specific to Windows or Mac, the United States is our highest single geographic visitor but if you lump everyone else together then international traffic is higher than our domestic traffic.
Take it for what it's worth but I just don't think 10% is valid.
That jibes with what we see at Kongregate. For the last 30 days Safari was 4%, though we have a lot more Firefox than you do. Out of 6.6M uniques:
IE 49% (78% IE7, 21% IE6, 1% IE8)
Firefox 41% (95% FF3)
Safari 4%
Chrome 3%
Opera 2%
Our audience has a lot of teens and college students, heavily male, with US about 48% and Europe making up most of the rest. 92% Windows, 6% Mac, 1% Linux.
We don't have great age demographics on our traffic but in general it is weighted relatively heavily towards men as well but older than I would guess Kongregate's users are which probably explains the level of IE usages we see compared to yours as I would guess the older the user population skews the less likely they are to go and download something other than what came with their operating system.
I think this shows the advantage that a default browser has on the two vendors' operating systems. Amazingly, over 20% of people bothered to download and install Firefox.
Mayhaps Ubuntu, The Google OS, and A Squeak-like OS based on Arc need to come pre-installed on new hardware each with their respective default browser.
The (rather poorly explained) thrust of the article was that the beta release temporarily increased the proportion of requests using that browser to 10%.
This is probably from people trying it out; I tried it but went back to Firefox when I needed to do some work. I did the same thing with Chrome.
People often argue that corporations that require employees to use IE are boosting the browser's market share, but from these numbers, that effect seems small. The weekend market share should be a reasonably decent estimate of browser share without the "corporate effect".