Firefox 3 adoption rate and the culture of the Internet

Ars Technica (Which is increasingly showing its bias and has lost some esteem as of late) runs this article entitled 20 million Firefox 3 downloads in a week, ~4% market share. I want to go out on a limb and pontificate on this data.

I believe that not everyone who intends to upgrade soon has had the chance. (I upgraded at home on the second day because FF2 was slow and had that memory problem (and my wife would never restart firefox, resulting in frustration for her). I haven't upgraded my 2nd home machine, nor have I upgraded my work machine.

But lots of people are enthusiastic for FF3, whether for technological reasons, or for general nebulous Internet enthusiasm (the big news of the week). I'll take a step backwards and suggest that those who upgraded make up most of the Cyberculture drivers (i.e., those for whom the Internet plays a part in their lives). So what I'm really getting at is that Internet-people only make up 5-10% of the Internet.

I've noticed in many blogs and articles, tech-writing and otherwise, people make assumptions about users based on what they believe an Internet User is*. But remember, an Internet User is only one who is visible on the Internet, and I believe that only accounts for at most 1 in 10 users. So, my point is for writers/UI designers/etc to be careful to not assume a user's behavior or needs based on 10% or less of the population.

*that is to say: I have 254 entries in my blog roll, I wake up to 1000+ new articles in my RSS reader daily, my pajamas have a special pocket for my iPhone so I can read twitter messages in my sleep; this makes up half of my human interaction and now I know what people and computer users are like

** I am posting this from Safari on windows. I like safari, although its font rendering on XP leaves something to be desired.