I'm not sure which clients would indicate they were browsing from Antarctica.
All the British stations use a satellite link to the British Antarctic Survey headquarters in Cambridge, UK. The link to the Antarctic is transparent to the outside world so all browsing down on the stations (and ships) appears to come from a Cambridge IP address. I'm sure many of the other Antarctic stations work the same way.
The VoIP phone system works the same way so you can ring the station using a "local" Cambridge number. This often lead to strange conversations when people dialled the wrong number and found out they had accidentally phoned the Antarctic.
That is an interesting issue, and one I've never considered before cause I just took the data from MaxMind for granted.
I work for Mozilla crunching numbers. There isn't any way I could share any IP addresses of course. If you pull down the data from MaxMind and do a search for AQ, you'll see a set of IP address ranges that are recorded as being located in Antarctica. We get a small amount of traffic from IP addresses in those ranges.
I'm sure that this has been noted, but in this graph: http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-daily-20090101... it's interesting to see how ie6's number dips down every weekend---presumably due to office workers under corporate mandates during the week and left to their own devices on saturday and sunday.
Not the same bump -- Vista is bundled with IE7. Presumably we are looking at bumps for different segments of the population, using Vista and XP/IE6 respectively.
Summary: Firefox has 100% marketshare in one continent, Antarctica, out of what is most likely a very tiny sample size. Please stop with the linkbait titles.
I think he got it, and thinks it's very stupid to submit a story that's already been on Hacker News with a title that manages at once to both make something look overblown, and to make a stupid lame joke that's below the standards of this site.
Sorry for the confusion. I was referring to the percentage of average daily Firefox usage by country. e.g. 27% of Firefox usage originates in the US, 11% from Germany, etc.
The numbers you are quoting are the percentage of a sampling of all internet users in Germany who use Firefox v.s. IE.
Either IE dropped by 15% overnight, last September (with Opera taking those 15%), or SC figured a way around Opera's IE cloaking. Or maybe a new version of Opera came out that had Opera set by default as its UA string? Anyone know?
Opera has several different levels of cloaking, and it can really through a UA parser for a loop.
Opera can declare itself solely as Opera, or as IE but still mention that it is Opera, or as Firefox but still mention it is Opera, or as IE or Firefox without mentioning it is Opera, or whatever the user wants to type in there to be clever.
All the British stations use a satellite link to the British Antarctic Survey headquarters in Cambridge, UK. The link to the Antarctic is transparent to the outside world so all browsing down on the stations (and ships) appears to come from a Cambridge IP address. I'm sure many of the other Antarctic stations work the same way.
The VoIP phone system works the same way so you can ring the station using a "local" Cambridge number. This often lead to strange conversations when people dialled the wrong number and found out they had accidentally phoned the Antarctic.