Browser trends

An article at Extreme Tech proclaims "The Death of Firefox":

It doesn’t look good for Firefox: Almost every month for the last three years, Firefox has lost ground to Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Safari. For most of 2009 the trend was fairly straight as it fended off Chrome and nibbled away at IE, but between 2010 and today Firefox has lost a third of its market share, from a worldwide peak of around 30% down to 20%...

Compounding Firefox’s losses is the stark reality that it’s unlikely to make any gains. Google has obviously spent a lot of money advertising Chrome, but there’s no way that ads brought it nearly 30% of the web’s two billion surfers. People are migrating to Chrome because of word of mouth: Geeks and power users picked it up first, and they’ve been installing it on the computers of friends and family ever since. Microsoft, too, is using a dollar bill tourniquet, and when Windows 8 tablets roll around with IE10 as the default browser, you can be sure that its market share will climb...

More at the link.  Out of curiosity, I looked this morning at my Google Analytics to see which browsers readers coming here used during the past year -

The distribution is quite different from the national numbers cited above - many more Firefox users here, many fewer IE.  I don't know why.

And I don't know what difference it makes.  I use Firefox, but not for any particular reason.  I'm an English major with a biomedical background stumbling my way through cyberspace as a hobby, so if anyone wants to offer advice, or pimp/diss a browser in the comments, please feel free to do so.