Greasemonkey Usage, by Firefox Version, April 2011

I'd like to take the opportunity to review the current usage profile of Greasemonkey, as it relates to Firefox version. There's a couple points to be made, in regards to the work we've been doing recently on the 0.9 version branch of Greasemonkey. This data all comes from the addons.mozilla.org statistics for Greasemonkey.


First, we can quickly note that Firefox 1.x and 2.x combined total only one half of one percent of current usage. This is why we decided to up the minimum compatible version to 3.0. It wasn't worth the effort to try to keep things working in earlier browsers.

Also, now that Firefox 4.0 is out for a while, we can see why we went to 3.0 minimum, and not 4.0. So far only about one fifth of our users have upgraded. For everyone else, we think the recent enhancements we've been making are worth having, so we've taken special effort to make sure that we stay working in Firefox 3, and don't rely on features only available in Firefox 4. Over time, perhaps that will change. The slope is quite steep right now, but if history is any guide, there will be a substantial minority of users that stick with Firefox 3 for some time.

For reference, here's the exact data.