Mozilla Gains on Internet Explorer

Alizarin Erythrosin writes "PCWorld is reporting that Internet Explorer's share of the browser market has dropped 1%, the 'first noticeable decline since WebSideStory began tracking the browser market in late 1999.' With all the exploits and security holes in IE recently, it's no wonder! Google News has related stories, including many on the recently disclosed (and patched!) bug in Mozilla on Win2k/XP machines (documented on Slashdot on Thursday)"

Comments

Whooptyshit, one percent.

[JessLeah]

I love Mozilla as much as the next geek-- and I hate hate hate hate hate Microsoft-- but one percentage point is simply not statistically significant. It could be a glitch. It could simply be a single large-scale corporate migration to Mozilla, plus a glitch. It could be a totally random thing. Wake me when IE is down to 60% usage.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[xyvimur]

1% gain... with statistical error of 3%... or something like this.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[Anonymous Coward]

Everybody uses a webbrowser. 1% of everybody is a lot of people. It is also a high growth rate for a browser which is still in single digit market share territory.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[garnetridge]

"A loss of 1 percent of the market may not mean much to Microsoft, but it translates into a large growth, proportionately, in the number of users running Mozilla and Netscape-based browsers. Mozilla and Netscape's combined market share has increased by 26 percent, rising from 3.21 percent of the market in June to 4.05 percent in July, Johnston said." A 26% increase for Mozilla and Netscape in less than one month is significant to them. I'll bet MS considers it significant also.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[yelvington]

Whoa there.

Margin of error applies to survey methodologies -- ask a sample, project the answer to a larger population.

WebSideStory isn't doing that; their data is continual, actual pageview analysis from their (large) customer base, and in that context a one percent shift is really a one percent shift, not one percent plus or minus something.

It's still small, though, and is yet more evidence that people do not behave rationally.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[Dreadlord]

RTFA

A loss of 1 percent of the market may not mean much to Microsoft, but it translates into a large growth, proportionately, in the number of users running Mozilla and Netscape-based browsers. Mozilla and Netscape's combined market share has increased by 26 percent, rising from 3.21 percent of the market in June to 4.05 percent in July

So Mozilla market share increased by 26%, and it's the first month after those articles about how Firefox is better than IE hit the mainstream journalism.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

It could simply be a single large-scale corporate migration to Mozilla...

Now that would be significant...

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[El Cubano]

and I hate hate hate hate hate Microsoft-- but one percentage point is simply not statistically significant.

Statistically, no. Numerically, yes. One percent of ~100,000,000 is ~1,000,000 (or whatever number you attribute to existing MS Windows installations).

It's a big deal.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[jd142]

actual pageview analysis from their (large) customer base

Which means that it is just a sample of all browser users, and not a random sample at that.

From the story:

WebSideStory's estimates are based on a daily survey of about 30 million browsers hitting thousands of different Web sites that use the company's Web analytics software, Johnston said.

So it only measures visitors to sites that have specifically installed the software. It would not be unreasonable to suggest that those sites that would install such software tend to be more computer oriented and thus visited by more tech savvy visitors, people pre-disposed to have an alternative browser. That may not be the case of course, but in no way is this a true random sample of websurfers.

This is more akin to the cnn poll on the cnn home page. There's no control in place to assure a random sample.

Even if this were a true random sample, which it isn't, since this is only a subset of all computer users, there would be a margin of error. The margin of error would be dependent on the total number of websurfers world wide and the total number of unique surfers in the sample.

The best that can be said for this is that visitors to a set number of sites might be trending to Mozilla.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[mst76]

> Margin of error applies to survey methodologies -- ask a sample, project the answer to a larger population.

The sample is the WebSideStory user base, the population is all the WWW. Since one is persumably more interested in the population than in this sample, there is a margin of error.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[ScrewMaster]

Well, given that there are probably hundreds of millions of Web-capable Windows systems worldwide, and that even a large corporation might only have 50K such machines, I'd say that that one percent (if true) certainly is statistically significant. That's huge, actually, and I doubt that the innovator from Redmond is too pleased. But you're right that it's too soon to tell if it is a statistical artifact or a genuine change in user behavior. I mean, ideally this alleged mass-migration represents a sustained reaction to a faulty product, but I supposed it could be just users reacting to recent events, like CERT's recommendation last week (and I'm sure that went over real well at the last Microsoft staff meeting.) Interestingly though, CERT's announcement was fairly well publicized (hey, it appeared on the 6:00 am news here) and after that I got a *lot* of questions at work about it. At least a dozen coworkers downloaded one or more of Mozilla's products on the spot. Explorer's insecurities aren't just theoretical problems that affect big companies. They're real issues that piss people off by the millions every day but as is typical with Microsoft products users are only dimly aware that there are alternatives and had no how to get them. Mozilla, for one, has made it pretty easy to get hold of their stuff, and they did report a big activity spike after CERT's report.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[SimplexO]

From Blake Ross's blog (a mozilla developer who is only 19) says "We are less concerned with actual download numbers than with trends--how many more or fewer people are using Firefox this week than last--and we're very happy with the trends we see now. Our goal, then, is to concern ourselves more with maintaining these trends than with the big picture: keep Firefox growing weekly and the rest will follow." Source.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[avdp]

It would not be unreasonable to suggest that those sites that would install such software tend to be more computer oriented and thus visited by more tech savvy visitors

Yes, it would be unreasonable. Websitestory is one of those pagecounter services (add an image at the bottom of your page kind of deal). If anything, it would not be unreasonable to suggest that the sites that use it are NOT computer oriented (since a site like slashdot knows how to implement their own counters).

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[next1]

So it only measures visitors to sites that have specifically installed the software. It would not be unreasonable to suggest that those sites that would install such software tend to be more computer oriented and thus visited by more tech savvy visitors, people pre-disposed to have an alternative browser. That may not be the case of course, but in no way is this a true random sample of websurfers.

as someone who works for another major web analytics provider i can tell you that they would in fact have a wide variety of clients, so their numbers would not be slanted toward tech sites.

IMHO their stats would actually be one of the best indicators of a market trend it would be possible to get.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Man, 1% is like 10 million people.

That's more than the population of most states.

That means circa 10 million people who thought that IE was the ONLY way to get on the net, found new browsers and installed the. And that's with no TV or Magazine advertising. That's amazing.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[next1]

and of course it mustn't be forgotten that this swing has occurred without the marketing power of a giant like MS, and without having it bundled in windows (which of course is the OS the majority of users use).

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[Jeff DeMaagd]

That is nice, but how do they track this? The stats for my web site showed that 10% of visitors use some variant of Mozilla. And I don't run a linux site, or have any more than one page about Firefox.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[KjetilK]

Well, it has to be statistically significant to be a big deal. If it isn't statistically significant it just means it is likely to be a fluctuation of unknown cause, perhaps a measurement error or some kind of bias (for example a few articles praising Mozilla highly would attract many Mozilla users). It could be back to normal next month and nobody would care.

But a change of 1% could well be statistically significant if the errors are even smaller. And from the story, it sounds like it is.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[yelvington]

My point is that it's not a survey, it's not supposed to be projectible, and therefore should not be expected to be expressed with a margin of error disclaimer. It's an actual count of all users of finite set of sites. Using the term "sample" is misleading; neither WebSideStory nor the PC World article portrays this as anything other than measurement of the WSS customer base. Any projection onto the general Internet population is entirely in the mind of the reader.

Most of the sites actually are very mainstream. The WebSideStory site has a list of their major customers, and while Cisco and Autodesk are included, so are the entire Walt Disney group and SignOnSanDiego.com -- high-traffic general consumer sites that are not exactly aimed at the slashdot crowd.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[arvindn]

If it were a random glitch, it should have happened before. But, according to the article, it hasn't. Plus, it comes precisely at a time when attacks against MSIE have peaked. Which makes it highly likely that there is a causation.

IE marketshare going below 60% is never going to happen. But if it goes below 90% that's still a huge win, since no one will be able to make IE-only web pages and get away with it.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[Chess_the_cat]

But it's not a trend. It's a one time jump. Let's see what happens next month.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[killbill!]

Where I work (Porsche, Germany. Ok, not this large a corporation, but still larger than a mom-and-pop company), using IE is deemed a major security risk and thus forbidden.
We are all using Netscape 7 as our main browser.

So yes, sensible corporations have been listening.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[Gilmoure]

So yes, sensible corporations have been listening.

Do the women wear sensible shoes there?

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[bubkus_jones]

Yeah, we have to see if this keeps going, but all trends start with jumps.

On a personal note, I've converted almost 30 people in the last year from IE to Mozilla/Firefox

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Ah, you funny Euopeans! Allways using your heads to solve a problem! Microsoft must not have paid of your IT execs.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[Apathetic1]

At my corporation (the one where I work, that is) a lot of people are installing Mozilla or Firefox despite corporate policy. Sooner or later corporate's going to have to catch on and either clamp down or make it official policy that we can use either or both.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[jayaramk]

One percent is not much in no. terms for IE.It does mean a lot for other browsers like Opera and Mozilla.Mozilla iirc has recorded a rise of 26% as compared to last years user base.Opera too has recorded a jump in the last few months although I dont know the exact figures. More than anything this only shows how bad a monopoly can be.M$'s monopoly in the browser market is unquestionable.Inspite of IE not being even close to either opera or mozilla in terms of performance or security ,IE still commands the market.M$ is using its monopoly to dump a useless option onto the home users.An option that even the FBI has warned against using!

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[brunokummel]

yeah , i have to agree with you that is hard to believe in numbers thrown randomly in the middle of the text just like this one. So just let me just point out on thing :

If they dont give us the margin of error, we cant be sure of how many people , in the worst case, have actually changed browsers. if they margin of error is plus or minus 1% , Microsofts IE had actually an increase in use rather than a decrease

But if you are an optimist (like me =D ), you have to consider how big that really is, considering that is really difficult for regular people (grandmas, grandpas, regular joes , non-geeks in general) to change their old computer habits.
I mean that they are willing to sacrifice:
not only their access to some sites that only support I.E., but also Microsoft support for problems that they may actually have with the new browser.
I do think that, if the decrease is actually real, it is a giant leap. Try to look at the bright side :regular users are beginning to be conscious that Microsoft is not the only solution for web browsing.

Today I.E, Tomorrow Windows , then the world! =P

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[golgotha007]

I'll bet MS considers it significant also.

hold on, something is seriously amiss here. why am i not seeing MS advertising about IE? i'm surprised i haven't read 'independent' studies showing IE being faster and more secure and more advanced...or more something

why does it seem like MS is more than willing to lose web client marketshare? what's up their sleaves this time?
that's the question we should be asking ourselves.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[3ryon]

Corporate migrations are unlikely until someone fixes this bug. You can't surf to a server inside your firewall that uses a NetBIOS name (instead of a DNS name) if you also have a proxy enabled. Very common issue for corporations.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[3ryon]

Corporate migrations are unlikely until someone fixes this bug. You can't surf to a server inside your firewall that uses a NetBIOS name (instead of a DNS name) if you also have a proxy enabled. Very common issue for corporations.

The fix would just be to ignore the proxy when there is no '.' in the server's name. My non-programmer mind would think this is a simple fix, but the bug has been open for > 48 months!

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[D'Sphitz]

What likely happened is normal people using IE got out of the house during the holiday weekend, while Mozilla using geeks sat glued to their computer screen.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[mbourgon]

It's over two days. THAT'S what's significant. They lost 1% in TWO DAYS.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[fermion]

Actually, the numbers may be in worse shape that you suggest. Most browsers, other than IE, allow you to specify your preferred agent identifier. Additionally most modern browsers, other than IE, can be easily set up to reject certain cookies of images. Therefore if the count depends on the id tag, or acceptance of a cookie, or the loading of an image, certain users will not be counted correctly. These systematic errors in methodology will tend to over-count the IE user, or the non tech savvy user that will tend not set these limits. In the end, one has to assume that the IE share has never been as high as the surveys suggest. One can also infer that the increase points to an increase in the number of average users switching to Mozilla, which is especially good news.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[sushi5000]

Could be a glitch...or just the dozens of people I've told just how much Firefox *rocks* since I've used it for the first time (by the time it still went by the name of Firebird).

Winning the browser war in the end is all about word-to-mouth-to-word-to-mouth (and secretly installing the fox on all your friends' boxes, ehehe).

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[iamacat]

Netscape 7 is old, has too many plugins and is no longer actively supported by vendor. Why not Firefox or Opera?

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[vondo]

in that context a one percent shift is really a one percent shift, not one percent plus or minus something.

No, you still have a statistical effect if you want to draw any conclusions. Maybe no one switched and mozilla people clicked more and IE people clicked less. In any kind of counting experiment, the error on the number of counts is the square root of the number of counts. So, if you have a million page clicks, you can measure the share of browsers down to about 0.1%. For the 0.01% accuracy they seem to claim, it's 100 million hits.

Obviously, collecting a million browser clicks is pretty easy. Polling a million people on which deodorant they prefer is a lot more difficult, so these guys can have a small margin of error. But it can never actually be zero.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[Thoguth]

You might be more interested in the w3schools survey, which from July last year to July this year shows IE down 7% (from 87% to ~80%) and Mozilla up about that much (from ~5% to 12%).

This isn't a one time, one month anomaly. It's a trend, and the w3school's survey is probably showing it ahead of WebTrends because w3schools is more likely to attract site developers, and what site devleopers use, site visitors use too, after a while. The browser wars are back on.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[1u3hr]

Mozilla's relative gain was 26%. That's significant.

A loss of 1 percent of the market may not mean much to Microsoft, but it translates into a large growth, proportionately, in the number of users running Mozilla and Netscape-based browsers. Mozilla and Netscape's combined market share has increased by 26 percent, rising from 3.21 percent of the market in June to 4.05 percent in July, Johnston said.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[Douglas Simmons]

In the world of millions of websurfers examined over five years, any deceleration (or in this case a loss) of marketshare of even 1% is indeed huge. As much as I love this word Wooptyshit, this is impressive. But does this consider Firefox as Mozilla? Because I would be using Mozilla if I weren't using Mozilla Firefox. If this survey is considering Firefox as separate, then Firefox is Nader'ing Mozilla!

To wrap up, 1% is big, and that enough people have seen this major shift into the red of marketshare gain for Microsoft will spook it into dropping even more, and that will be compounded by the original reasons this dropped in the first place (my guess being the extreme amount of recent IE fuckups, the DoJ, CERT, and even Microsoft themselves saying maybe IE isn't the best choice). I'd say we've got the start of a trend, and as they say on Wall Street, the trend is your friend.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[1u3hr]

why am i not seeing MS advertising about IE?

Because they don't sell it. And advertising it would only raise the profile of alternative products -- they've got a large number of users who can't imagine there is any other way to access the web.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[Anonymous Coward]

I imagine the marketing blitz will start for XP SP2.

Also, the changes so far are insignificant, especially among the people who pay $$$ for MS enterprise software. Don't forget that IE "won the browser war" with only 75% marketshare.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[wkitchen]

One percent wouldn't mean much over a year, but this is one percent in one month, and a 26% gain for alternative browsers, mostly Mozilla/Firebird. Not a big shift in the balance of power, but very significant as trend. Continue at the same rate for a year and you have a 12% decline for IE, and a 312% gain for Mozilla.

Of course, it probably won't sustain that same rate. But half, or even 1/4, of that would be enough to get noticed. A 3% decline in IE would be a 78% increase in alternative browser usage. And given the significant advantages these browsers offer, the increased visibility may accelerate the trend. It may have spent a long time playing catch-up, but now Mozilla blows IE away. And unlike IE, Mozilla/Firebird/Opera/Safari/etc. show no signs of stopping to rest on their laurels.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[TheSpoom]

I'm beginning to casually mention that I use Firefox on my tech support calls now, and giving out the URL to its product page. I would say Internet Explorer problems related to spyware installed in the browser make up at least 30% of the calls I take for HP / Compaq desktops, probably more like 40%.

And the parent's comment is correct: very few of my callers have any idea that there are other browsers out there that don't have the problems they're calling in about.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[bigredlinux]

Let me explain something that a lot of people are missing here. The percentage scale of market share is NOT linear. The innovation curve that has proved most realistic has two inflection points, one at 10% and the other at 90%. The slope of the curve from 10 - 90 is VERY steep. That means that if Mozilla gets to 10% market share, it won't be long before it is the most dominant browser in the marketplace.

This curve has proven true for many industries, including the browser industry itself. IE overtook Netscape very quickly back in the day. Other industries that proved this trend were the adaptation of cell phones and long before that, cars (as shown the curve below).

The worst thing to do when you above the 90% market is to look down on those below 10% and say that they are far away.

The Great Boom Curve

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

"Sorry, links to Bugzilla from Slashdot are disabled."

Must be running on a... Oh nevermind.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[msoftsucks]

First of all, NETBIOS is once again M$'s crappy software. NETBIOS is a kludge that M$ developed in order to identify its machines on the network. It's so bad that even M$ decided to scrap it and develop Active Directory, which is based on DNS. Bad nonstandard networking schemes should not be propagated. Firefox should not implement this. If you are still running M$ server software, you can properly access your internal servers using a DNS name. If you can't, then your network is not properly set up. Once again, M$'s trolls are trying to force Firefox to play its games. Firefox is much better than IE, because it doesn't. It doesn't implement ActiveX, it doesn't implement IE's nonstandard JSCRIPT and DOM, and it doesn't implement NETBIOS.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[typhoonius]

Most sites have access to their server access logs and then use a program such as Webalizer or AWStats to turn them into useful statistics. The type of people who'd use WebSideStory are the type who have their sites hosted on Geocities or such.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[Anonymous Coward]

A non-anonymous coward writes:

"It's still small, though, and is yet more evidence that people do not behave rationally."

And I guess drinking beer is evidence that there are people that do not behave rationally ... ? Or maybe - GASP - they just like beer?

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[Anonymous Coward]

The bug really has absolutely nothing to do with NETBIOS. It has to do with special handling for "local" non-fully-qualified addresses. It affects Unix and Mac as much as it affects Windows. man resolv.conf

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[The Meshback]

Just curious, but you don't happen to hate Microsoft do you?

You know, I was just wondering.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[M. Baranczak]

If they were testing the entire web-browsing population, then you'd be right, but they're not. In fact, this is probably LESS accurate than a survey, since the sample isn't selected randomly.

Also, browser-detecting code is NEVER 100% accurate.

I'm guessing their margin of error is a lot higher than 1%.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[vsprintf]

I would say Internet Explorer problems related to spyware installed in the browser make up at least 30% of the calls I take for HP / Compaq desktops, probably more like 40%.

I use Firebird at work (yeah, I know it's dated). One of my co-workers (a major MS fan) has claimed in the past that it is impossible to pick up malware from web browsing unless you do something stupid. He was using IE (as usual) last week and brought a virus into the building. He's looking a little sheepish lately. Unfortunately, our security guy doesn't seem inclined to change the default browser, even after the CERT advisory and some pointed suggestions that he do so.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[Nurf]

They claim to get their data from a sample of 30 million broswers a day. With that large a sample, 1% is very significant, as we are talking about an error bar somewhere down around 0.01%. It might not be significant by another measure, but it is "statistically significant".

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[Crayon Kid]

Netscape 7 is old, has too many plugins and is no longer actively supported by vendor. Why not Firefox or Opera?

Netscape 7 is in fact Mozilla with a certain skin and Netscape/AOL stuff slapped on it. There wasn't a "real" Netscape browser ever since 4 (version 5 never made it out the door before Netscape went downhill). All Netscape versions from 6 up are actually Mozilla. In fact, pretty soon we'll see AOL shipping yet another "Netscape" browser, probably as soon as Mozilla 1.8 stable comes out.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[Mycroft_VIII]

I aslo so a brief 'tech segment' on the local news about 6 weeks ago that covered some of the 'free alternatives to popular software' they covered mozilla/firfox/thunderbird and Open Office Org.
Thier assesment was that Mozilla and co were worthwile, but not entirely 'up to snuff' (they mentioned a few websites might not work then did a poor job of saying why) and that Open Office was every bit as good as MSOffice except that it looked kinda grey and bland.
The local station in question is in St. Louis and a major network affiliate so it hit about 2-3 million homes at a guess, possibly more in the fringes of it's area.

Mycroft

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[Anonymous Coward]

No it doesn't. I'm sure most of the people who changed at least knew of other browsers...

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[Anonymous Coward]

If it *were* a random sample, the margin of error would be really, really small. Political campaign polls for instance have sample sizes in the thousands and often claim margins of error 5%, 19 times out of 20.

It's not a random sample, of course, so you're quite right it shouldn't be taken as all that accurate. Even between competing "polls" both measuring millions of visitors, there's often a large difference in results when it comes to web browser stats. This particular report has it about the highest I've seen at around 95%. All I can say is that it's somewhere between 85 and 95% world-wide.

Still, with a sample this large, a 1-point drop in IE market share is significant. It may not be all that accurate, but it is precise. It's not just a glitch; they aren't rounding to the nearest 1% or anything.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[joeljkp]

They article says that they track it every day. So that's a 30-day continual trend, not a 1-month jump.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[AstroDrabb]

Do some math. The article said that the stats are for about 30,000,000 users. 1% of 30,000,000 = 300,000. 300,000 new mozilla/firefox users is not a bad gain for one month!

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[Evil Adrian]

Can we please have some evidence that Microsoft pays IT execs off to recommend their products? Your little claim there sure sounds slanderous.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[Jesus_666]

I'm responsible for an undead anti-IE campaign in a medium-sized forum... Even after I stopped the campaign itself, the campaign's banner occasionally still shows up in sigs. Even though I love negative publicity for the IE it's kind of creepy to see my dead campaign live on and on.

BTW, does anyone know where w3schools.com get their data from? Their statistic shows a steady increase in Mozilla use with a July/2004 value of 12.2%. I'd really like to see figures like those applied to the 'Net as a whole.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if they don't 'pay them off' per-se, you have to admit that just about every big company's sales droids come in and wine-n-dine the execs. Take them out to expensive meals, take them golfing, buy them gifts, etc. And Microsoft has more money to throw around than just about anyone else.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[Citizen of Earth]

But it's not a trend. It's a one time jump. Let's see what happens next month.

I'd bet that it is a trend. Who are those 1% of converts? It's not Joe Sixpack; it's the innovative early adopters. After the switch, these people aren't likely to turn back, and more likely they will convert other people. And it's not like Microsoft is able to fix its problems. That company is past its peak. Dr. Seldon, the Empire is crumbling.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[pklinken]

Also, 'Nadering' in dutch sortof means 'to approach'

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's still small, though, and is yet more evidence that people do not behave rationally.

However more secure it may be (which to many is still a matter of opinion, the fact that it is put out by MS means alot), calling people stupid for not switching to somthing that is difficult to switch to (in the sense that is not allready there) and put out by a bunch of nonames (the average person doesn't know how to look for a backdoor in source code). To me, it makes sense for the average user to continue to use IE. Mozilla doesn't really offer any new browsing experiences over IE, and for those who arn't quite so anal about their security that they run everything over https, it works just fine. Remember, MS eventually corrects it's prolems too.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[Joey7F]

I don't know, have you seen some of the beer people are drinking these days? Michelob Ultra? What the hell is that? If you are going to drink beer, drink beer. If you are going to drink water, drink water. If you are going to drink beer flavored water then drink Michelob-Freaking-Ultra.

Oh fwiw, I use Mozilla exclusively now :)

--Joey

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[Melantha_Bacchae]

I saw the St. Louis tech segments (one was also on the Gimp). Personally, considering an audience that is not very computer literate and ignorant of open source, I thought they did a pretty good job. What you neglected to mention was that they said very clearly that the Open Source apps were plenty good enough for home use, and the price (free) was great.

Considering the bad economic crunch around here (plainly visible in all that empty parking lot space at Six Flags at the height of summer - usually people are parking on the grass with a full lot at this time), having usable and free (as in beer as well as otherwise) software for families to use is great. No one now has the bucks to buy Office or Photo-anything for the home.

Godzilla has been doing his part too. An old and dear friend of the Mac (still used to make his movies - last I heard), Godzilla has since discovered open source (but then, so has Apple). Most computer displays in his last few movies now have a window of source code scrolling past (not the usual method of distribution and sans license, but hey, it's a movie). "Godzilla vs. Megagiras" also featured Kudo's Original OS, which could debug the Dimension Tide's OS ten times faster than any other OS, including the buggy mess Dimension Tide was running on (referring to an old claim of Linux being 10 times faster than Windows 3.1).

"At this moment, it has control of systems all over the world. ...
There is one flaw in its plan: Godzilla."
Shinoda: "Godzilla 2000 Millennium" (Japanese version)

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[DMUTPeregrine]

Actually, it's probably 1% - something. Think of the number of mozilla users spoofing their UA to be IE. Think of the number of IE users spoofing. Oh wait, they can't. So it's probably actually more than 1%

Go Mozilla!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a long way, good to see that the first step has been made.

Ha!

[WebCrapper]

I'm sorry, but 1% isn't that much when you consider how many windows boxen there are...

The madness will continue for years to come...

Re:Ha!

[ScrewMaster]

Actually, you're looking at this the wrong way. 1% is absolutely huge when you consider how many Windows machines are out there.

Re:Ha!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but then again, since there are so many Windows "boxen" (BTW: WTF??), and since it's only 1%, it means that 99% still use IE. Of course, this is if we ignore the statistical margin of error, which is probably larger than 1%, which means IE might have gained for all we know.

Re:Ha!

[Anonymous Coward]

VAXen, boxen... there's your explanation. Sorry if that goes over your head.

Re:Ha!

[Anonymous Coward]

The only thing that goes over my head is you as I throw you over the bar. I pity the fools!

Re:Ha!

[Anonymous Coward]

Boxen is one of those made up words geeks think are so clever like "virii".

If I hear one more geek loser tell me how if I was a latin studying genius like him I would know that the plural of virus is virii I will smash something. (The plural of virus is viruses btw)

Re:Ha!

[foidulus]

I'm sorry, but 1% isn't that much when you consider how many windows boxen there are...
You are also forgetting the power of word of mouth. From my personal experience anyway, the main reason that people use IE is because a) they don't know there is an alternative and b) they are afraid(unrationally so, but again, this is just my opinion on my personal experiences) they won't be able to use a new browser. If people start helping others by installing mozilla, it's growth could really take off.
Kind of like the ol' MCI commericial; If you help 2 friends ditch IE, and then they help 2 firends, and then they help 2 friends...

Re:Ha!

[Anonymous Coward]

VAXen, boxen... there's your explanation. Sorry if that goes over your head.

We all get it, but it's not 1987 anymore. Time to let it go man.

Re:Ha!

[Anonymous Coward]

In *nix land, it's still 1987. Just look at the enduring popularity of the command line.

Re:Ha!

[Anonymous Coward]

Use Firefox to avoid wormii installations!

Re:Ha!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah I hate those fucking geeks with their made up words.

Say though. what is the plural of 'btw'?

Re:Ha!

[rd4tech]

bitiwiti

Re:Ha!

[Anonymous Coward]

Better than the 2000BC cave paintings of GUI land. Seriously, us grownups use words. The GUI is for interactions with the computer on the level of a toddler pointing to ice cream and going "WANT!!!".

Re:Ha!

[Anonymous Coward]

vs. what exactly?

$ cat ice-cream > /dev/mouth
$ cat ice-cream | /bin/eat

???

Bad analogy. Bad!

Re:Ha!

[miu]

In *nix land, it's still 1987

Well shit, that explains the high-larious Gallagher screen saver I have running.

Re:Ha!

[Anonymous Coward]

Dolt. That's describing a different action. But I note that it IS still more expressive - with the CLI, you construct sentences in a language. You chose particularly silly examples, but it is still more advanced that the average GUI interaction.

Re:Ha!

[Echnin]

The difference is that boxen is a word, and virii is not a word.

Re:Ha!

[Tim C]

Boxen is a word, but it means "made of box wood" - the other two sources, citing it as the plural of box, are both from the jargon file and both admit that it is "fanciful" - ie not real...

Re:Ha!

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny how i suck at programming while i'm good at this type of maths. Dear nerds, you're looking at it from the wrong point of view.

Hereunder follows a char which is a bit global. It's meant as a global indicator to make my point; thus not as non-fiction.

A = total market share (100%)
B = biggest client (96%)
C = competitor 1 (1%)
D = competitor 2 (1%)
E = competitor 3 (1%)
F = competitor 4 (1%)

(As i said it's not accurate i have no clue on competitors like KHTML, Opera)

Now, if C goes up by 1% while B goes down 1% that's not much: B went down from 95 to 94 which is ((95/100) - (94/100)). That's not much difference when you relevate it to 1/100 (1%). However, C raised to 2%: 1 to 2 which is ((1/100) - (2/100)) which is a whoppin' 100% increase, or 200% of the original worth.

Depending on the time rate between the 2 investigations, that's a fuckin' huge increase.

Leaving aside how unpopular things have hard times to grow, and leaving aside the whole MSIE by default installed debate... MS had these times with MSIE .. a while ago.

Re:Ha!

[WebCrapper]

The thing is, there are a lot of people who are too ignorant to actually switch - just like you said. Word of mouth is powerful, but these people will download something use it for 2 weeks and switch back because it doesn't have the "same" features and doesn't have the same bookmarks, certain websites (which are programmed badly) don't look the same, etc...

While 1% doesn't look like a lot, it is in this case, but I don't see it lasting long at all. There are too many, what I call AOL'ers, out there to really sway anything. these people are described in the above paragraph. Watch the numbers, I'm sure in 2 weeks, they'll go right back up 1%...

Re:Ha!

[ScrewMaster]

Yes, but what browser is AOL shipping nowadays?

dear god

[mateomiguel]

an article with no comments? can such a thing be?

In all seriousness I don't understand why Mozilla hasn't taken over the browser market already. It has all the features that anyone would want in a web browser and I've been using it for years. Why doesn't...

Oh, right. I remember my mother, the standard by which all computer users can be compared. I can't even imagine trying to explain to her what an internet browser is, much less explain that there are better ones around. This is the woman that once asked me in a panic-stricken voice "where's the K key, I can't find the K key!" while trying to give her a walkthrough on how to use Microsoft Publisher.

I love her to death, but she is the bane of technological civilization.

Re:dear god

[Weh]

maybe because ie comes standard and is the default browser on all machines running windows? Do most users actually know what a browser is? Or is it just internet explorer, just like you have windows explorer?

Re:dear god

[miu]

In all seriousness I don't understand why Mozilla hasn't taken over the browser market already.

Because, as the article pointed out, it is very difficult to get someone to change their browser. Once IE was integrated into Windows most users became very resistant to using anything else, they'd as soon adjust their virtual memory settings as use a non-standard OS component. The fact that people are switching despite the barriers (perceived and real) means that the constant publicized security failures on the part of IE has irritated people enough to make them change.

Re:dear god

[rd4tech]

something like the average user learning that there *gasp* can be other thingies to browse the net? Dear god where will that lead... :)
What's next, them demanding more rights in the OSS movement? :)

Re:dear god

[Ender Ryan]

Along with excessive popup ads, annoying active X controls, et cetera. So all of us who support Mozilla (and KHTML), have moron executives who continue to add more and more ads to websites, like it's an addiction, to thank for the increasing acceptance of "alternative" browsers.

We have several "normal" computer users at the office. When having one of them try Firefox, because she was frustrated with popups, the first day she said, "I don't like Firefox, can't you just fix the Internet?" The second day, after she figured out tabs, popup blocking, and even the speed, she said, "Firefox is so much better. Why would anyone still use Internet Explorer."

Before, she didn't understand the difference between "The Internet" and "Internet Explorer". After 1 single day using Firefox, some things clicked in her head, and she is now a much more saavy Internet user, requiring much less support from our technical staff, ie. me.

Re:dear god

[Hortensia Patel]

an article with no comments? can such a thing be?

You misspelled "Frist psot!".

Re:dear god

[sosegumu]

In all seriousness I don't understand why Mozilla hasn't taken over the browser market already.

I am absolutely in love with Firefox and I use it almost exclusively, but I'm sitting here looking at slashdot and parts of the stories overlap the menus on the left. Not so in IE. If you want to see a *really* egregious example of this, go to liquidations.com.

Now I don't know a thing about why this is (if there is some adjustment that I can make to fix it, I'd love to know), but if that happens with slashdot--which is ALL ABOUT open source--what do we expect?

Re:dear god

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are you using java applets for navagation buttons? Use an onmouseover and have some mercy for my cpu please.

Re:dear god

[Anonymous Coward]

they won't take as much market share as ya want for a long time....

though 1% increase ta me means the cert announcement has been a wakeup call to alot of IE users...myself included

Re:dear god

[bedouin]

maybe because ie comes standard and is the default browser on all machines running windows? Do most users actually know what a browser is?

I don't know about other languages, but the localized Arabic version of Windows XP (and probably versions before it) labeled the Internet Explorer desktop icon as simply "The Internet." I always found that disturbing, especially in a market where many individuals are just getting to know computers.

Re:dear god

[Jugalator]

In all seriousness I don't understand why Mozilla hasn't taken over the browser market already. It has all the features that anyone would want in a web browser and I've been using it for years. Why doesn't...

I try to explain this to people, and actually many of them then switch (far more than 1%) but those who don't say that IE is good enough for them and have all features they want. They might have installed the Google Bar to avoid popups and don't see the point of tabs since they haven't tried them out to see their advantages. "But I can already switch between browser windows in the task bar" is a common opinion. I think this is a big part of the "problem"; since they haven't got anything to compare with before having switched, they think IE is OK and hesitate before going through all the hassle of switching and learning to use a new browser to its full potential. This is probably not restricted to web browsers either, but programs in general.

And then you have to majority that don't even read computer news and know about Mozilla.

Re:dear god

[Anonymous Coward]

not even a karma point? geez!

Re:dear god

[antoy]

Maybe it's because we, the Mozilla-using public, are not doing what we should do.

Next time you help a friend install Windows, make sure the first thing you do once it's running is a Firefox install.

Family now uses Firefox, because it's there. Father uses Firefox at work, because Internet Explorer trojans were constantly changing his home page (he asked me how to fix it, I said Firefox of course. :-)

Re:dear god

[FrenZon]

In all seriousness I don't understand why Mozilla hasn't taken over the browser market already

It's like how every time the subject of a competitor to Google comes up, many highly-modded comments are along the lines of 'Oh, Google's entrenched, any new product has to be at least 10x better to get people to switch.'.

Now, I know it's an unpopular opinion, but when you think about it, Mozilla is not ten times better than Internet Explorer. It's better, but not THAT MUCH better, not even in the same way that IE was better than NS4

Heck, I develop CSS/JS-rich front-ends for a living, and to the horror of my peers, I still use IE as my primary browser. Why? Because aside from its nice JS debugger, which only gets pulled out when I'm testing, Mozilla offers no GREAT reason to switch. I keep my system patched, the recent FireFoxes have crashed on me more often than IE ever has, I prefer spatial+visible window organisation, and IE still opens faster*.

The other major good points behind Mozilla (ie Standards Compliant Rendering) are of little consequence to the end-user in an IE-dominated world.

* I know there are counterpoints to all of these, I've heard them, believe me.

Re:dear god

[Genom]

IE3 and IIRC early versions of IE4 also carried the "The Internet" icon title in the english version.

I was doing tech support at the time, and it wasn't uncommon to hear users complain "The Internet is broken!" when something was b0rked with IE. Some were completely amazed when told they could simply use Netscape instead... Sad but true.

Re:dear god

[slimyrubber]

"I don't like Firefox, can't you just fix the Internet?" The second day, after she figured out tabs, popup blocking, and even the speed, she said, "Firefox is so much better. Why would anyone still use Internet Explorer."

Wait, she went from being a dumb whore to an elite user, by using firefox.. in just one day!?
They should probably force britney spears to use firefox then!

Re:dear god

[cREW oNE]

In all seriousness I don't understand why Mozilla hasn't taken over the browser market already. It has all the features that anyone would want in a web browser and I've been using it for years. Why doesn't...

Do you know large multinations take YEARS to verify and test their software. Large customers of our company (I'm talking hundred-thousands of people) still use NT4.0 with IE5.5. How they even survive on the net, beats me, but they do, and they're not willing to upgrade anytime soon.

Did you know that some large corporations depend heavily on Microsoft's MSXML/XSLT, HTA and HTC technologies? Mozilla has no equivalent that I know of.

When I put my intranet-webapplication-designer-hat on, Mozilla isn't even close to the level of functionality that IE is on. I wish it was.

Re:dear god

[nametaken]

I see a million posts on /. about how people try to migrate their parents over to diffent software, but I usually try not to change anything on my folks. They're very shaky when it comes to seeing something different.

However, this time my parents came to ME. They spend alot of time in the car (to and from work) listening to AM radio, and with the most recent spike in IE problems they started getting nervous. Rightfully so. They asked if there are any better options that they should be using, and I was happy to provide them with one.

I also have to say, Firefox was far-and-away the least painful switch my parents have ever had to make. I just installed the browser on their three machines, let the firstrun import their bookmarks, changed the shortcut name from Mozilla Firefox to "Internet", and never heard another word from them about it. For me, that's a very successful switch-out.

Next might be Thunderbird, though the idea scares me a little. I DO expect a few phone calls from my mother on that one, but they'll appreciate the spam filtering and not having to worry about worms quite so much.

Re:dear god

[trashme]

That has to be one of the worst and most obnoxious web sites I have ever seen. An absolute poster child for how not to design a web site:
* Irritating spinning images everywhere.
* Java buttons (ick, why does anyone do this?)

As for the text overlap problem on Slashdot, I only get the problem occasionally, and it is fixed with a page refresh. I have no idea what causes the problem though, since I can't reliably reproduce it.

Re:dear god

[Xepo]

Dude, XSLT has been working *fine* in Firefox since it was named phoenix, like, version 0.5 or so. Make sure you have your MIME types set up correctly, and the appropriate XML headers. If what you created was standards-compliant, it'd work fine in firefox.

I did a search to find out what HTAs are:
"HTML Applications (HTAs) behave like any other applications on your computer, whether they are written in C++, Visual Basic, or J++. HTAs are like a dream come true for programmers who want the power of Internet Explorer without its strict security model and user interface. Now you can create browser-dependent applications that display themselves to your users as a plain window, without any resemblance to Internet Explorer's window." (Emphasis mine)

Sounds like a security hazard to me, plus it sounds like they were meant to be browser dependent. Ever heard of this thing called Java? You can create your own windows, and applications, and have them on the web. Not only that, but the applications created with it will run on almost any operating system. If Java doesn't suit you, why not just use standard EXEs, developed in some standard language? Use an open-source exe packaging tool to package all of the necessary files along with it, and the user wouldn't even notice a difference I bet. It's not like you're gaining any security from using HTAs.

And in regards to HTC...I've obviously never used the technology, but after some preliminary searching, it sounds like yet another activeX style feature. Use java, flash, or something cross-browser. There's no reason to use HTAs, or HTCs, you can get the same functionality, and ease of use, using standards-compliant, cross-browser functionality. It's your(or, those large corporations') choice to use microsoft's technology, but don't say it simply can't be done in other browsers, because it most likely can.

Re:dear god

[trashme]

I've always been a huge advocate of Firefox and try to get people to switch, but often it's not so easy.

I have a friend that is too lazy to switch. Yes, I know how simple the install process is, but he just doesn't care enough to bother.

Other people are just addicted to IE. A friend of mine had IE stop working on his computer. He came to me for help with fixing the problem, but I haven't really worked with windows for years.The easiest solution I could think of was to show him how to install Firefox. A couple of weeks later he again asks me to help him fix IE. He couldn't give me a reason why he wanted IE back. He didn't cite any real problems with Firefox or advantages for IE. He just wanted IE back.

Re:dear god

[parksie]

The text overlap on /. is known about:

bugzilla

They don't like /. referrers though, so you'll have to go to the URL yourself.

Re:dear god

[jez9999]

What's next, them demanding more rights in the OSS movement?

Maybe them learning that they're browsing the web instead of the net?

Re:dear god

[Anonymous Coward]

This is bad. Real Bad. If firefox is responsible for the decline of dumb whores in the workplace then i say we stick with IE. I dont want to jeapordize my supply of cheap blow jobs.

Re:dear god

[Anonymous Coward]

HTAs themselves aren't any more of a security hazard than C++ or VB applications. It's a local app, you run it with the user's rights. Apple even copied the idea with "dashboard". (And HTML/Javascript IS a standard language, moreso than VB, Python, and Perl, and one that's quick to develop for. Which is exactly why HTAs were a good idea.)

However, the HTA feature is the main source of IE Internet security problems. But not developing your own HTAs does nothing to make IE any better.

Futhermore, fuming about this technology is pointless. People use(d) it, they're locked into IE. End of story.

Re:dear god

[Xepo]

I'm not fuming about it, but the poster said that Mozilla didn't have any equivalent technologies, which is what I was debating.

Re:dear god

[Quarters]

In all seriousness I don't understand why Mozilla hasn't taken over the browser market already. It has all the features that anyone would want in a web browser and I've been using it for years...

I know, personally, that I've been waiting for the all-powerful, "mateomiguel (614660) uses it!" endorsement. Now I can switch.

Re:dear god

[Psycho_pr]

The real question is: Does she have a nice rack?

Re:dear god

[sploo22]

On Mac OS 9, the IE icon was labeled "Browse the Internet".

Re:dear god

[Anonymous Coward]

Point taken.

HTCs actually seem like a rather straight-forward extention of HTML to do "custom tags". Its a good idea, and one that could be adopted by other browsers, but generally folks do this on the server-side. (ASP.NET even does not use HTCs.)

Re:dear god

[PeterPumpkin]

If there is still overlap, you either don't have the latest version, or you didn't completely uninstall before your last. So take the following steps:

1. Download Firefox 0.9.2 binaries
2. Save your bookmarks
3. Uninstall old Firefox
4. Delete your profile (Windows - C:\Docs & Sets\Your_Login\(phoenix or mozilla or firefox) (Linux - /home/your_login/(.mozilla or .firefox or .phoenix or .firebird)
5. Install Firefox 0.9.2
6. Put bookmarks back, reinstall Flash and Java if you use them.

The overlap had been fixed so more than likely you're using 0.9 or a pre-0.9 nightly

Re:dear god

[PeterPumpkin]

BTW this won't help liquidations.com, it was designed with Microsoft Word. Nothing can help that site render properly save for a complete redesign.

Re:dear god

[jesser]

I don't think Firefox 0.9.2 includes the fix for the Slashdot rendering bug.

Re:dear god

[Moby Cock]

I am running 0.9.2 and I get the /. render problem mentioned above. It goes away if you increase and the decrease the font size. So, back to the drawing board...

Re:dear god

[mrchaotica]

That was true in the English versions of Win95 and Win98. I don't know about 2000 or ME.

Re:dear god

[cREW oNE]

Think of HTC's of creating your own HTML tags in HTML.

There are a ton of disadvatages of doing this on the server side. If you do this on the client side the client can cache individual components, even re-use (multi-thread if you will) multiple instances of the same component on a single page.

And my original point was that a lot of large corporations are tied in with MS because they have been using these technologies for years now. Have been using them before Mozilla even existed. At the time IE was the best on the market, and now there's not enough reason to spend a fortune rewriting software just because Mozilla came out. That explains why some corporations can not switch browsers that easily, which in turn adresses the original posters question why firefox hasn't conquered the world yet. Capiche?

As for ASP.NET not using HTC's, it can. Microsoft does it in their own software written with ASP.NET. (CRM, just to name one example.)

Re:dear god

[mrchaotica]

I went to the site and immediately suspected that the markup sucked (because the design was so amateurish). So I did a "view source," and sure enough:

<html xmlns:v="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml"
xmlns:o=" urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office"
xmlns:w= "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:word"
xmlns="ht tp://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40">

<head>
<met a http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<meta name=ProgId content=FrontPage.Editor.Document>
<meta name=Generator content="Microsoft FrontPage 6.0">
<meta name=Originator content="Microsoft Word 9">
<link rel=Edit-Time-Data href="./index_files/editdata.mso">

Also, if you look at the horrible nested tables and divs and stuff (including specifying styles and such per element) that it uses, it's no surprise that there might be an error in the (353KB worth of) source code somewhere (especially considering only two of the tables had overlapping errors: "Input Devices" and "Networking"). The only error that could possibly be actually Firefox's fault (using 0.8 on a Mac by the way) is the fact that some of those javascript buttons are "bleeding though" to my slashdot page, even though they are in another tab.

Re:dear god

[onco_p53]

HTML Tidy says:

451 warnings, 11 errors were found!

Re:dear god

[bedouin]

On Mac OS 9, the IE icon was labeled "Browse the Internet".

I think OS 9's "Browse the Internet" icon would actually load whatever your default browser happened to be. Not sure about that, though.

Re:dear god

[juhaz]

The overlap had been fixed so more than likely you're using 0.9 or a pre-0.9 nightly

The /. overlap has been fixed but it caused a regression and was backed out from 0.9 branch, so no, the fix is NOT included in 0.9 or 0.91 (only difference in 0.92 is the shell: security issue)

Moz vs. IE

[chunkwhite86]

I think another reason moz is gaining on IE is that many banks and financial institutions are starting to get a clue and are coding their web pages to be compatible on multiple platforms. For a while, IE was a requirement to log into any sort of on-line banking. I guess this last wave of IE vulnerabilities was the straw that broke the camels back, and people are finally deciding to switch.

Re:Moz vs. IE

[barzok]

I wish one of the companies we "partner" with would get on the ball here. 2 1/2 years ago I hounded them about not supporting Netscape 6 as our site does support it and we have clients using it - they'd be SOL using the partner's site. They stalled for a while, claimed it was "too hard" or "too much work" and eventually said they'd put it on the to-do list. We delayed a rollout of our the link-up between our site and theirs for months while we fought over just getting that.

2 weeks ago, we got an email from a client using this system asking when we'd upgrade so that he can use Netscape 7. This company still does not support Netscape > 4.x or any other browser. We had to tell him (and CC'd the person responsible for the relationship with this "partner" that it wasn't our site, it was this 3rd party's site, and we've been trying for a long time to get them on track.

Re:Moz vs. IE

[beacher]

There's afunny bit about the article - "Once people start examining the features of Mozilla versus Internet Explorer instead of looking at a brand name . . . I think they'll see there's a lot more value".. So the article links to a review of Steve Bass's browser comparisons.. He doesn't demarkate between IE broswer shells and true standalone browsers at all and he didn't like Mozilla or Firefox because it looked like "corporate Netscape". HELLO?!?! Theme Manager! You can make it look like IE!

Liked the article, thought the followup linkto was asinine. -B

Re:Moz vs. IE

[Anonymous Coward]

"For a while, IE was a requirement to log into any sort of on-line banking."

This is simply incorrect. I have been using several Finnish online banks since 1999 and all of them were compatible with different browsers and platforms. They required only things like SSL, cookies and maybe JavaScript.

Re:Moz vs. IE

[tech_guru5182]

I disagree completely also. I have used Konqueror ever since I switched to slack (circa 4 yrs ago) and never had a problem accessing the online banking from Charter One

Re:Moz vs. IE

[aldoman]

No, sadly you don't have a clue about how the real world works. I used to work for a insurance broker doing general computer support work, and they now exclusively use an ActiveX control for all of their insurance work that will only run on IE.

They will never be able to switch over to Mozilla now (at least until they rewrote it as XUL or something, but that's unlikley). The amount of effort that was put into transfer the masses of data over to this new system is incredible. They can't just drop it all, sadly...

Re:Moz vs. IE

[letxa2000]

For some reason I can't login to Scottrade with Opera. Well, I can, but the main window gets displayed as HTML source code instead of the rendered page. Works fine under Mozilla, though.

Any reason for this? The Scottrade page is being produced by an ASP that dumps its source to my window rather than producing an HTML page, but I've connected to many other ASP-based sites that render just fine.

Anyone have any idea what's going on?

Re:Moz vs. IE

[Micah]

Nope.

I've been using MBNA's net payment for a while. It had always worked with Mozilla just fine.

Then, a few months ago, they switched to some other payment service. It said I either needed up upgrade my Netscape (I was using the latest Mozilla!) or switch to IE.

I downloaded Firefox and installed the User Agent Switcher plugin, and it worked just fine.

Fortunately, since then, they have started allowing connections with regular Mozilla, so everything is good! I didn't even have to complain, though I likely would have eventually.

Re:Moz vs. IE

[Anonymous Coward]

Shame that this can't be said of HSBC Australia, whose online banking only supports IE or Netscape 4.7(!) on Win and Mac, and refuses to work with any browsers on Linux (except IE in Wine of course!).

Which Advancement?

[soloport]

Are we sure it isn't because Mozilla actually has advanced in features and functions? When I go back to using IE, I feel crippled! No one I know uses IE, unless they have to.

Re:Which Advancement?

[rd4tech]

From time to time I have to go to IE or Netscape. Being a bif fan on the mouse gestures, I'm constantly finding myself drawing D to close the tab (which there isn't), or L to back. My next thought is usually, "oh, I should install it here too :)"

Re:Which Advancement?

[eelke_klein]

If it was because of mozilla's features people would have been switching a long time agoo. Ofcourse it is thanks to mozilla features that people do not switch to such an ugly browser as Opera.

To all Opera users! Don't flame me because I do not like Opera, if you like Opera just continue using it your on the right track...

Re:Which Advancement?

[Anonymous Coward]

you're an idiot.

Re:Which Advancement?

[eelke_klein]

That's still better then being an anonymous coward!

Re:Which Advancement?

[mikael]

I've switched over from using IE to Mozilla in the past month. The features I like:

Tabbed windows

Pop-up control (not sure about pop-unders though).

Download manager.

No preinstalled ActiveX component downloading

It gives me a warm fuzzy feeling to visit a web site, and see the covert attempt to download an ActiveX component being trapped by Mozilla and highlighted in a popup window, with the message "Mozilla has detected an attempt to download the file xxxxxx. What would you Mozilla to do with this file?".

When I see this message, the only other feature I think could be added to Mozilla involves the use of medical robotics, so I doubt it will ever be implemented.

Re:Which Advancement?

[Anonymous Coward]

You *have to* use IE to download the fixes from Microsoft. I use IE with the download site set as the home page (trusted site) and all other sites set to "high security".

Yes, Microsoft should get slapped around for producing such a sloppy browser and such sloppy operating systems.

The only good thing I can think of to say about Microsoft is that they have popularized personal computing to such an extent that good equipment now costs next to nothing. Do you remember when those old 8088/8086 computers used to cost *thousands* of dollars? How about 10 meg disk drive that cost a thousand dollars?

Re:Which Advancement?

[Shaklee39]

When I go from slimbrowser to firefox I feel crippled. The lack of features like mouse gestures are enough to keep me away from mozilla.

Re:Which Advancement?

[Shadeborn]

The lack of features like mouse gestures are enough to keep me away from mozilla.

Both gestures and pie menus are available as add-ons.

Re:Which Advancement?

[mnewton32]

the only other feature I think could be added to Mozilla involves the use of medical robotics, so I doubt it will ever be implemented.

Well that's the joy of open source software! Do it yourself or find some other, um, medical roboticist with the knowledge to do it. Then you can make an extension and voila...

It probably is a sign...

[rd4tech]

of most of the /.ers switching to it...

Dropped to...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually I read that as if the market share dropped to 1%...
For a moment I was completely stunned. :)

wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

The finest example yet of the MS-bashing, open source-zealousy on slashdot. IE is down 1%, nothing is said in the summary about whether or not Mozilla gained anything... And it's still treated like news, and interpreted as if it was a glorious victory for Mozilla. Holy Crap.

That said, I have completely migrated to Mozilla and have no plans to return to IE anytime soon. Mozilla rocks. So I'm not some sort of MSIE drone.

(Posting AC for obvious reasons.)

Re:wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

nothing is said in the summary about whether or not Mozilla gained anything

If you read the friendly article you see that there was a 26% share increase for mozilla (from 3.21 to 4.05).

Posted anon cause whores quoting the article getting insightful annoy me.

Re:wow.

[Prod_Deity]

"(Posting AC for obvious reasons.)"

That's o.k. Mr. Gates, we understand. ;-)

Re:wow.

[OneDeeTenTee]

I'm guessing that the gains are in Mac folks using Safari.

They have several percent of the computer market and they arn't shipping IE anymore.

Movin' On Up!!

[deflin39]

After a year and a half of getting on my family about the serious security holes IE contains, they finally have switched to Firefox. I think the ball is in motion. You must keep in mind that my family cares little or nothing about M$ vs. World, but even they are starting to catch on. Lets hope this movement continues!!!

deflin39

Change IS Change

[eSims]

I am not a statistician and therefore am not going to discuss the merits of 1%, but Change IS Change.

While Mom and Pop (tm) may still use whatever is default for some time to come, just keep passing out CDs and downloading it for friends... it IS catching on.

I just burned a CD for a friend stuck on dialup. She is a school teacher in NYC and could care less about mozilla/ie/netscape/blah, BUT she has adware/spyware clogging her computer. So I burn a CD with adaware, spybot, AND Firefox along with a text file telling her how and what to do.

Voila... another Mozilla user!

Re:Change IS Change

[GoofyBoy]

>the merits of 1%, but Change IS Change.

The point is that is 1% large enough to be considered change, so there might not have even been change at all.

Re:Change IS Change

[schuster]

It doen't even have to be mozilla. Any standard-compliant web browser will do just fine. The goal isn't for mozilla/firefox to take over the world, the goal is simply standards-compliant web-sites.

Re:Change IS Change

[Anonymous Coward]

Speak for yourself. :)

Re:Change IS Change

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey man, if you read this, could you post the contents of that text file? I have a similar CD I give to people I know with computer trubbles, but I'm awful at writing instructions...

Great news

[gusnz]

I see a lot of posts complaining "blah, 1% is nothing" but hey, it's a good start, especially for one month! Lots of websites and forums I frequent are now sporting "Get Firefox" buttons, so this comes as no real surprise -- awareness of Mozilla and other alternative browsers is slowly seeping into the mainstream.

Here's hoping that over the next few years Mozilla usage will increase to around 15-20% market share or so. We need more standards-compliant browsers out there if the web is ever going to move forward from IE6-compatible site layouts (allowing things like translucent PNGs and CSS2), and the sooner we start the better. Plus, it'll help stop the proliferation of IE-only sites.

Re:Great news

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll add such a button when java and flash plugins are as easy to install as the extensions. Actually, that might be a really good idea for an extension, an easy plugin installer/manager, though it would be preferable for it to actually be built in.

Yes, Whooptyshit, one percent gain against MS

[MooseByte]

"but one percentage point is simply not statistically significant."

It's extrememly significant. When is the last time a dominant MS end-user product *lost* marketshare? Coming at a time when the "Life Around MS Campus Is Going To Get Tough" memo is released, I think it shows that MS is for once (and largely thanks to open source) finding itself with an actual fight on its hands.

Go penguins! And little BSD daemons. And that... Mozilla lizard thing. :-)

Re:Yes, Whooptyshit, one percent gain against MS

[vsprintf]

Go penguins! And little BSD daemons. And that... Mozilla lizard thing. :-)

Quick, get Peter Jackson to work on this. Imagine the battle scene: Little red guys with pitchforks mounted on Mozillards charging forward as chain-mailed penguins scale the walls of Redmonds Deep.

Re:Yes, Whooptyshit, one percent gain against MS

[Mycroft_VIII]

Now that is an amusing mental picture. I'd actualy like to see someone do somthing like this as a little short. If I had the skills I'd try it myself, but anything biological I try to do looks seriously mutated and twisted.

Mycroft

Re:dear god (or dear devil?)

[Jorgensen]

Of course Mozilla hasn't taken over the browser market.

Mozilla is technically superior. But inferior when it comes to marketing and (especially) *access* to the market.

Nearly *everybody* gets IE pre-installed. The vast majority of PC users will happily go with what's installed already, rather than having to "open the bonnet and get their hands dirty". Most Windows users with a bit of experience will know that installing/removing software will tend break things.

Now... If some large OEM was to pre-install Firefox, then the picture would really start to change. But I doubt whether their contracts with Microsoft *allow* them to do that.

Remember: A *person* may well be intelligent, but *people* are stupid. All generalisations are false.

I just switched to all opera

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using IE all along. I frequent about a dozen web sites and largely confine myself there. In the last month I've been delivered spyware twice and I HAVE NOT changed my surfing habits. Yesterday something from Fark installed TV Media which installed cleverIEhooker.jeired and tryed to download some trojan. After spending half an afternoon cleaning up my machine and learning more about URLsearchhooks and BHOs than I ever care to know, I gave up. This crap has finally entered my world. I use opera all the time to proof web pages, but today it is my default browser for surfing. It's not even about operas feature set, only its limited market share that protects me. This malicious spyware crap has ruined IE where it's lack of standards compliance and reliability I could live with, this I cannot.

Re:I just switched to all opera

[cyclocommuter]

The safest way to surf those "Boobies" links at Fark is to use Firefox running on Linux... this way (hopefully), the only infection your PC will be remnants of cookies from those nasty sites.

What about these ...

[Anonymous Coward]

What about this enormous list of bugs and broken functionaility.

Re:What about these ...

[seanvaandering]

Connecting to 142.168.125.99...

Re:What about these ...

[An Onerous Coward]

Indeed. Tis a crappy, crippled browser that refuses to connect to any website critical of it. It sits there, pretending to load, but I know deep down that it's snickering at me.

Curse you, Firefox. Curse you.

1% +

[mst76]

I was taught in statistics class that estimates should come with standard deviations (or standard errors)

Re:1% +

[Anonymous Coward]

I was taught in statistics class that estimates should come with standard deviations (or standard errors)

This isn't an estimate, it's a straight reading from the server logs of the site in question. They have announced that the number of visitors to their site using a browser which claims to be IE has fallen by 1%, and that is by definition +/- 0.

Re:1% +

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't an estimate, it's a straight reading from the server logs of the site in question.

Which is an estimate of general browser usage, unless one is only interested in the site in question.

Re:1% +

[jfengel]

When your sample size is large enough, your error margin gets vanishingly small. They can look at the logs of important web sites and see what browsers are hitting them; that way they can "survey" a million users, which makes the sampling error .1%. And they number is probably more like 10 million.

That assumes, of course, that their methodology for picking users is correct. If last month they chose MSN.com, and this month they swapped it out for slashdot, that would skew their results far more than the sampling error would. But methodological errors are hard to put error bars on.

Nice features.

[jb_02_98]

"Once people start examining the features of Mozilla versus Internet Explorer instead of looking at a brand name . . . I think they'll see there's a lot more value," he said. - quoted from article.

Yeah... it even blocked the pop up that pcworld tried to through at me. YAY for features!

Re:Nice features.

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be "throw at me."

Re:Nice features.

[jb_02_98]

Thanks for the correction. So the whole spanish thing is getting to me. (I haven't really spoken english in a few years.)

It still was nice that it blocked the pop-up ad. That has to be one of the best features out there. It simply blocks them but allows a way to show the good pop-ups. Just with that feature, you could overtake the IE market...

We just have to make sure that they can spell better than me.

Depends where you look

[linuxci]

Different sites attract different audiences. w3schools.com has a much higher percentage climb for Mozilla based browsers and Opera which is good because it means web development types are starting to prefer (and test their sites in) alternative browsers.

Google is also showing a slow and steady climb of Mozilla based browsers. It seems that the only people who are moving to IE6 are ones upgrading from 5.x.

It doesn't look that much when you see how much IE is used but I'd say we're getting to the stage where there's enough users of alternative browsers that any company would be crazy to ignore them.

Once Firefox 1.0 is released I'd expect to see even more people using it.

Re:Depends where you look

[randomized]

I suppose percent of Internet Explorer would be somehow less if Opera didn't set it's default user agent string to MSIE 6.0. Why they did that is beyond me, it definitely mangles the statistics out there.

Re:Depends where you look

[civman2]

Ugh, the very page about browser statistics you link to is a .asp I don't believe they named them after a poisonous snake for nothing...

Re:Depends where you look

[Anonymous Coward]

It does it because of those stupid sites that give an error if you use anything else.

Re:Depends where you look

[jfengel]

Good point. I'll be a lot more comfortable recommending Firefox when it's no longer classified as a "technology preview". I am comfortable upgrading my software every few weeks, but many users are perfectly content with what they have. I'll install version 1.0, or more likely 1.02, for non-geek users, and it'll make them happy for a long, long time.

Me, I've been using Firefox since it was Phoenix, and there are still copies of Phoenix running around my computer somewhere (since one of the things it lacked at the time was an uninstaller, and I'd always add the new system without deleting the old one on the off chance the new one was worse.)

Re:Depends where you look

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera's useragent string still says "Opera" and therefore is identified in stats software.

Time to put this to rest -- Opera really does have less than 1% marketshare.

Re:Depends where you look

[danharan]

Do note that the article mentions a 1 point drop for IE in june, but the last Zeitgeist browser stats are for May. I'll be happy if Google's June stats confirm the trend, otherwise it's too early to tell.

A change is afoot

[foobybletch]

I Think I first really noticed that Mozilla and Firebird were making an impact, when finally my bank actually supported a browser other than Internet Exploder for their online service, and specifically mentioned support for Mozilla!

I guess that if (some) online service providers can be bothered to support a significant minority of users (e.g. Mac users, no flames here!), then support for another browser should be possible, and especially in their enlightened self interest

-Fooby

Re:A change is afoot

[Jorgensen]

Your bank supports non-IE browsers!?

ye Gods!

Isn't there where you should mention the name of the bank? (don't worry about account numbers though)

I'm sure that others would be interested in using that bank!

Re:A change is afoot

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know what bank the grandparent poster was using, but my bank (Bank of America) works fine with the new version of Firefox - if you were interested in looking for a bank that supports it. I haven't actually tested all their features with Firefox but can login and access my account statements fine with it.

Just for the laugh of it

[rd4tech]

Straight from the article:
Microsoft has yet to release a comprehensive fix for Download.Ject, but the company is providing customers with "prescriptive guidance to help mitigate these issues" on the Microsoft.com Web site, he said

Stats

[Sunspire]

Check out the W3Schools browser statistics. Mozilla based browsers have grown from just a few percents to over 12% in a little over year with steady increases every month. Now W3Schools is hardly your average Joe's website, but they are pretty representative of average Joe web developer I'd say.

I'm also seeing Firefox evanglism and enthusiasm in new places all the time, on gamer boards (Shacknews) and other unlikely places. It's because Firefox is the new cool thing, something regular Mozilla never achieved. The Firefox branding effort has paid of big time. Having the best browser doesn't bring in the users, having the best browser with a slick look does.

Re:Stats

[EpsCylonB]

The Firefox branding effort has paid of big time. Having the best browser doesn't bring in the users, having the best browser with a slick look does.

I wouldn't say its down purely to the look or style, Firefox is feature rich compared to IE (tabbed browsing, extensible, ect). The truth is that the success of firefox is partly due the idiotic decision by microsoft to stop updating IE (at least until their new OS is released).

But it does have style, plus with recent versions it's become very fast, I think most developers would be surprised at just how much users value resposiveness (is that a word ?) in the applications they use.

New MS legal argument

[Alain Williams]

Is MS going to use that as ''proof'' that the browser market does have competition and thus MS is not a monopolistic company ?

Mind you: it doesn't really need to do that since it got let off the hook when Bush got elected.

Re:New MS legal argument

[Anonymous Coward]

Mind you: it doesn't really need to do that since it got let off the hook when Bush got elected.

While I hate Bush as much as the next socialist, I have to say that I really don't think a Gore administration would have treated MS any different. The problem lies in the whole US system; the Democrats are in hock to big business just as much as the Republicans.

Clinton could afford to show some teeth to MS, because he knew that he didn't need them any more - Clinton would look good for standing up for the little guy, and his successor, from whichever party, could reverse the process quietly and make big business happy too. Win/win for politicians and corporations, lose/lose for ordinary citizens - that's the American way of life, folks!

Re:New MS legal argument

[Zepalesque]

"Mind you: it doesn't really need to do that since it got let off the hook when Bush got elected."

Just as a reminder:
Bush was not elected. He was selected by the supreme court.

Re:New MS legal argument

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft abused its OS monopoly to push MS Internet Explorer. Browser market share only matters as a measurement of the result of these tactics. You could actually argue that, since Microsoft now offers an accessible way to change the default browser, the decline proves that users do use other browsers if they get a chance and Microsoft has indeed abused its OS monopoly.

Re:New MS legal argument

[Anonymous Coward]

Nitpicking maybe, but technically the Supreme Court ruling favoured a recount, provided it could be conducted in ten minutes (or some impossibly short time). They favoured the institutional time table over democratic principal. If the 2004 election is as close as 2000, democratic principal could be shafted again, but if the Dems get majorities large enough to render recounts pointless, then they'll win.

Would that be bad for Microsoft? No. It just determines the 'pay to' and 'amount' fields on some cheques.

Google Zeitgeist tells a different story

[GillBates0]

Google Zeitgeist graphs don't show an appreciable increase (ofcourse 1% would be hard to notice on that graph).

I remember an earlier story about browser stats tracked by some independent study using hits on their website. I would tend to go with Google on this one - their statistics probably tell the most accurate story.

Re:Google Zeitgeist tells a different story

[Anonymous Coward]

The story is about an increase in the last month. The Google graph only runs until May.

Re:Google Zeitgeist tells a different story

[Anonymous Coward]

Google Zeitgeist graphs don't show an appreciable increase (ofcourse 1% would be hard to notice on that graph).

You have to look really hard at that May
graph to see the results for June, which
is what the article was talking about.

Re:Google Zeitgeist tells a different story

[eelke_klein]

If you had actually taken a GOOD look at the graphs on this site you would have noticed that the browser graph has the following caption:

Web Browsers Used to Access Google
March 2001 - May 2004

As the article is talking about the last month (june) you couldn't really expect it to show up. However you are right that 1 percent will not be very obvious on the graph.

Re:Google Zeitgeist tells a different story

[GreatDrok]

If you look at the line for Netscape 5+ you will see an appreciable uptick. Also, the figures from google are not recent enough to include the latest bunch of security related defections.

Re:Google Zeitgeist tells a different story

[HeghmoH]

Considering that Mozilla browsers default to a Google search (at least FireFox does, and I assume the others do as well because it's just so damned useful), and IE defaults to MSN search, I think Google would show many more Mozilla users than there really are.

How do you really measure it?

[jdhutchins]

What's the right way to measure browser usage? They said they picked X many (30,000?) sites and surveyed their browser usage. They didn't take into account the number of faked browser strings, I'll bet. And certain website will skew things drastically, such as Windows Update, well duh, it's going to be 100% IE. If you looked at sites like kernel.org, slashdot, etc, then that'd skew it in the opposite direction. I have a feeling that many of the sites they use ignore most of the geek population, which would probably add another percent or two to Mozilla.

Re:How do you really measure it?

[drekmonger]

>If you looked at sites like kernel.org,
>slashdot, etc, then that'd skew it in the opposite
>direction

Let's look at slashdot then. How many people use IE to read slashdot? It wouldn't surprise me if the numbers were near identical to the general population.

Re:How do you really measure it?

[linuxci]

If you looked at sites like kernel.org, slashdot, etc, then that'd skew it in the opposite direction

In the distant past when Netscape was king slashdot used to print browser statistics on one of their pages. They stopped doing so when IE's share started to get embarrassingly big.

No we've got superb browsers like Firefox, Opera and Mozilla (each one different enough to suit different people) has the trend on slashdot been reversed? Can we have browser stats again on slashdot - it would be interesting.

As IE is so useless I can only imagine the MS fanboys on the site using IE unless it's forced on them at work. Personally I'm going to campaign for the default browser at work to become Firefox once 1.0 is released - I use Firefox at work at the moment but loads of people don't know what it is.

So who here still uses IE and why?

Re:How do you really measure it?

[ahziem]

In statistics what matters is choosing a random sample---an SRS (simple random sample). Sites such as windowsupdate and kernel.org don't matter. To choose a statistically-valid SRS, start by defining the population: all web sites on the Internet. Then choose a sample size n by random from these. Then determine the browser usage from the SRS. BTW, as the sample size n increases toward the size N of the population, the precision increases also.

Re:How do you really measure it?

[mattyrobinson69]

i would guess the browser statistics were taken off once there was no point showing them anymore - when one browser has well above three quarters of the market, there's no suprises

Re:How do you really measure it?

[SanGrail]

> As IE is so useless I can only imagine the MS fanboys on the site using IE unless it's forced on them at work.

Well... I'm not so sure that's true. Despite the zealotry, on my computer IE is still usually much faster and doesn't use as much memory.

Sometimes I feel like I'm just using Firefox to prove a point. Because while I go on about tabbed browsing and pop-up blocking, my ie geek friends are just using myie2, or googlebar (meanwhile, I'm not using googlebar, which drives me nuts, but the Firefox was using an insane amount of memory, and I think it was googlebar).

I support Firefox because I believe it has the potential to be a much better browser - but in the meantime, all Microsoft would have to do to crush Mozilla et al all over again, would be to implement tabs & popup-blocking. That would be enough for most people to not bother switching, or even go back.

(Sorry about the uncharacteristically depressive anti-geekness...)

Re:dear god (or dear devil?)

[slavetrade55]

Now... If some large OEM was to pre-install Firefox, then the picture would really start to change. But I doubt whether their contracts with Microsoft *allow* them to do that.

Sure they'd be allowed, they'd just have to pay retail price for Windows. If Firefox is really hot shit (I certainly think it is), then people will be willing to pay the extra cost. And if they aren't, well tough tits for them. ("tough tits" is my favorite phrase lately.)

netscape

[dncsky1530]

Just as Mozilla gains market share, I am starting to see Netscape re-apear in my server logs, Mine aren't public but these guys are.

If MS doesn't issue a quick fix for IE then people may perminately switch to Mozilla or Opera. As many companies know, customers don't think about product loyalty when a better cheaper product comes around.

This time MSIE is so far behind, And people are beginning to know, when your average joe (for whom your product is designed) decided not to use, or more importantly buy your product, then you have a problem.

Calm down, think ti through logically...

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

What he's say (albeit in a definite "troll" like way) is that 1% is statistically insignificant in that such a small margin is generally thought to be more likely the normal variation in sampling procedures and techniques. And, he's probably right.

But it's emotionally uplifting all the same.

Re:Calm down, think ti through logically...

[CritterNYC]

What he's say (albeit in a definite "troll" like way) is that 1% is statistically insignificant in that such a small margin is generally thought to be more likely the normal variation in sampling procedures and techniques. And, he's probably right.

That would apply to a survey, but that doesn't apply hear. These are the *actual* visitors to the websites that WebSideStory tracks. And it has held steady at 95.7% for quite a while.

Re:Calm down, think ti through logically...

[eaolson]

That would apply to a survey, but that doesn't apply hear. These are the *actual* visitors to the websites that WebSideStory tracks. And it has held steady at 95.7% for quite a while.

Of course it applies here. All measurements have some margin of error. If the change is large with respect to your error bar, then the change is statistically significant. If it's not, then it's not.

I can't find any information on how they've collected these statistics, but this change could just be a change in the number of people that are spoofing the user-agent string. It could be some email circulating telling people to visit WebSideStory or one of the sites they track.

Without some measure of the accuracy of that 1% figure, it's hard to judge how significant this report is.

Re:Calm down, think ti through logically...

[Nurf]

Of course it applies here. All measurements have some margin of error. If the change is large with respect to your error bar, then the change is statistically significant. If it's not, then it's not.

In the article, they claim that they sample 30 million browsers daily, which puts their error bar down in the 0.01% region (making some assumptions putting it similar to a random sample). Even if the bar itself is much larger than that, they are measuring something statistically significant. Of course, as you said, we don't really know what that something is. :-)

Why users don't switch?

[Alwin Henseler]

I've been using Mozilla (Firefox lately) for a long time now, and it simply rules. There are some sites that don't work properly, but they're very rare. Using Firefox as your primary browser doesn't limit your movement around the web.

I used IE a while ago, and was immediately annoyed by pop-ups, and a bunch of other little irritating things. And ofcourse, we all know the endless stream of security problems, some of which aren't even fixed at all. So why won't users switch?

If you ask random IE users, the answer mostly comes down to that they didn't know other 'serious' browsers exist, think it's too much hassle to download/install/configure, or they're not bothered enough by IE's problems, to make a switch.

I'm sure that if all users would base their choices only on technical merits, Mozilla & friends would have far bigger market share (and open source, as well).

So that leaves the conclusion that throwing in software with new PC's, giving a 'default' to use, really IS a powerful way to push software around. Open source developers should be aware of that, and not underestimate that power. Having a comparable alternative isn't good enough, you really need added value.

Ofcouse, removing $$$ price tags, and having stuff that's more fun and reliable to work with, helps a lot

free software

[dncsky1530]

About 20 percent of the computers Duncan administers at the college now use Mozilla-based browsers, Duncan said, and the main impediment to more widespread adoption is user perception, he said. "They have this perception that open source software can't be worth anything because it's free."

isn't this why the name was changed from 'free software' to open-source? Free as in Speech, not as in Free Beer.

I would like to know where this perception came from. People love free things, even if they are completely worthless people will still try them. Why doesn't that extend into the software arena?

Re:free software

[Anonymous Coward]

Well maybe it came from the fact that IE is "free", but completely worthless.

Re:free software

[RedBear]

isn't this why the name was changed from 'free software' to open-source?

No, from what I understand Free Software (the capitalized version) and Open Source are two different things. Open Source may also be Free Software, in the same way that a rectangle may also be a square, but not necessarily. Software that is given away for "free" as in beer doesn't necessarily have anything to do with either Free Software or Open Source. There are all kinds of closed source and proprietary software that is given away free, but the real Free Software has always been Free Software, capitalized, and free as in speech. Its name has not been changed to Open Source, that concept is philosophically separate, even though they do often exist in the same time at the same place. There exists proprietary software that is non-free (and non-Free) and yet is Open Source. The nature of Free Software being what it is, I think that all Free Software must be Open Source. The reverse is definitely not true.

It would behoove us all to better understand the differences between these two concepts. In my humble opinion, that is.

Citibank recommends non-IE browsers.

[MongooseCN]

When I log into citibankcards.com (using mozilla of course) there is a message in bright red that comes up warning users that they should not use IE. It seems to come up no matter what browser I use.

Re:Citibank recommends non-IE browsers.

[Frambooz]

"When I log into citibankcards.com (using mozilla of course) there is a message in bright red that comes up warning users that they should not use IE."

Funny thing: there's a .NET login button at the top right on citibankcards.com.

Re:Citibank recommends non-IE browsers.

[killbill!]

Information Week had an article last week about banks urging IT companies to take security seriously, or else...
Security-related claims are estimated to cost up to $1bn a year to the financial industry. No wonder they were getting pissed.

Which is a good thing, because MS is a 800lb gorilla in the IT industry, but a midget compared to Bank of America or Citigroup. Hence MS has got to listen when their industry-wide e-commerce arm (the BITS) speaks up.

Re:Citibank recommends non-IE browsers.

[jodo]

I wonder if the banks themselves are leery of liability and use this disclaimor to aid in a potential defense.
Banking security is the tipping point. Money talks and ie walks.

Re:Citibank recommends non-IE browsers.

[upsidedown_duck]

When I log into citibankcards.com (using mozilla of course) there is a message in bright red that comes up warning users that they should not use IE. It seems to come up no matter what browser I use.

This is probably because Citibank was specifically targeted by that password-sniffing exploit of IE that came up recently. The exploit installed something via IE that send passwords directly via HTTP, which would bypass firewalls entirely. The security problems in IE have finally become dangerous to their users--this is beyond simple spyware or adware, this is real no-holds-barred computer crime.

Re:Citibank recommends non-IE browsers.

[Micah]

Which is a good thing, because MS is a 800lb gorilla in the IT industry, but a midget compared to Bank of America or Citigroup.

Microsoft's market cap: $300 billion
Bank of America: $171 billion
Citigroup: $232 billion

Re:Citibank recommends non-IE browsers.

[Stray7Xi]

I just went to that site and saw no such warning. Furthermore they had a link to sign-in to passport. Does the warning come up only after you login? (doesn't that defeat the purpose of the warning)

Please provide a specific link as well as username/password.

Re:Citibank recommends non-IE browsers.

[srenker]

Maybe billg reads /. and called up Citibank's CEO for a chit-chat.

Re:Citibank recommends non-IE browsers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you forgot to put on your tinfoil hat and take your medication.

Re:Citibank recommends non-IE browsers.

[jesser]

I'd like to post a screenshot on my blog. Can you provide one?

Re:Citibank recommends non-IE browsers.

[mdfst13]

Market cap is not as important as "assets controlled" or total revenue. Market cap is based on profits rather than on having a large amount of assets/revenue (and affect on the market). Microsoft has a much larger market cap than its size would justify.

Re:Citibank recommends non-IE browsers.

[DMUTPeregrine]

Ys, but people listen to their banks. Banks have thier money. Especially if they have a "You could loose everything..." type message.

IE doesn't have 95% by any stretch

[GreatDrok]

The stats I have seen show IE having at best 90% but more like 80% of the browser market. Some even show lower than that. Of course, it very much depends on the web sites demographic. The Google zeitgeist is pretty good and it certainly shows a significant uptick in Mozilla usage of late. I would trust Google more than any other site as it is a site that anyone on any platform will find useful so should be more reliable.

Re:IE doesn't have 95% by any stretch

[mdfst13]

The Google zeitgeist ( http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html ) shows *IE6* with more than 80% of the market (about 86% to my eye: anyone have actual numbers for Google?). IE5 and IE5.5 both still have more market share than either "Other" or Mozilla based browsers. Note that 4.5% for each would be sufficient to give 95% (with 86% for IE6). It looks consistent with the stats in this article (i.e. if you graph the stats given by the article, I think that they will look a lot like the zeitgeist graph). Note that with a 3% market share, a .8% increase is "a significant uptick."

Re:IE doesn't have 95% by any stretch

[GreatDrok]

Bear in mind that the figures on Google are at least two months out of date now. I have seen other sites with more recent data that show the continuing movement in favour of Mozilla as a result of all the security scares. I'm very interested to see what the next google zeitgeist shows for Mozilla but as I said, if you look at the purple line it was steadily increasing but then recently the increase stepped up its pace. This looks like the precursor to what other sites are reporting. Some sites have reported an increase from 4% this time to last year to 20% this year which is an amazing jump. I prefer to wait and see what Google has to say though as some other sites are going to be less general and thus biased.

Even MSN's Slate magazine backs Mozilla....

[kerika]

Slate recently (June 30) had an article on how Mozilla's Firefox "trumps" Internet Explorer, which was enough to convince me to switch browsers.

It's an interesting read... the real selling point to me, frankly, wasn't the increased security (which I can get through a good firewall), but the TAB feature. The ability to open links as a tab within the current page is a true browser innovation for which there is no IE equivalent or patch.

Re:Even MSN's Slate magazine backs Mozilla....

[mr_jim83]

The ability to open links as a tab within the current page is a true browser innovation for which there is no IE equivalent or patch.

Tabbed browsing is't really a Mozilla innovation, since Opera had it first. But I do like Firefox a lot more than Opera. Either way, once you start using a tabbed browser, it's painful to use one without tabs.

Re:dear god (or dear devil?)

[rd4tech]

hmmm... so take that 'lite' version of windows, and install firefox, thunderbird, and winamp on it? start to look atractive...

In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

A study of 100 people showed that 1 user switched to netscape last month.

Everything is easy

[linuxci]

Every so often when I need to log into the office and I've not got my laptop I go to easyInternet Cafe which is one of the tacky cut price business ideas of Stelios the easyJet guy. However, they're quite handy - loads of them around the city.

Their setup is Windows 98 and IE6, you can install what you want on the machines because they get automatically reimaged after you log out (or it crashes). Their motto is cheap, they won't do anything they don't have to if it costs money (there's no staff on site), but adding Firefox to their images wouldn't cost them anything, they seem to update IE when required.

After emailing their customer services requesting firefox, I got an email back saying they had no plans to put it on the default image, but I had a good taste in browsers and they knew a lot of their customers downloaded and used it (presumably looking at the logs in the proxy server).

So if you ever have to use that place, let them know you use Firefox and you'd rather not have to download it each time.

Re:Everything is easy

[Anonymous Coward]

Carry your complete Firefox install on your USB stick, from which it will run fine.

Re:Everything is easy

[linuxci]

Carry your complete Firefox install on your USB stick, from which it will run fine.

I do have firefox on a USB key and I find it handy to have at times. This is excellent advice in most situations and therefore anyone who'd interested in doing so I point to the Firefox help site

Unfortunately, due to the cheapskates that they are - easyinternetcafe does not support USB and a lot of locations their USB ports have been disabled so in these cases a download of the fox is the only thing to do.

Chain mail

[gr8_phk]

I sent an email to a few people pointing to the articles (not /.) about the Dept of Homeland security saying IE is insecure. I also included links to the popular and more safe alternative Mozilla. (Sorry other browsers, I didn't want them to be lost in options) I did suggest getting OOo while they're at it. Then, for the first time in my life I added a bit about sending to everyone you know :-)

Short and sweet: IE is bad, use this instead, tell people.

It probably didn't circulate too widely, so perhaps you all should do the same - use variations to ensure proper natural selection.

Re:Chain mail

[kiddailey]

Perhaps not, but I sent my immediate family a similar message. Yours in itself may not have circulated very much, but I'm sure at least a few hundred of us did start spreading the word (something that should have happened long ago)

Is your mother really THAT stupid? Probibly not.

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Oh, right. I remember my mother, the standard by which all computer users can be compared. I can't even imagine trying to explain to her what an internet browser is...

This is a worn out argument. It simply isn't true for most people in a general sense. While it may be true that the "average" non'techie does not know the under-the-hood differences between browsers, they generally DO know that IE is not Windows (well, actually it is, but we'll avoid that can of worms for now...), they do know that it is "program" that you run on Windows (well, not really, but we'll avoid that can of worms...).

As I have said before, for these people ("Joe Sixpack" if you like, although that's a bit insulting) the problem is not the issue of what is or is not a "part" of Windows, the problem is that OSS browsers like Mozilla do not have a powerful marketing machine pushing them to the public. HELLO?

Hoist by their own petard?

[Mark_in_Brazil]

My favorite part of the PCWorld article is this:

Robert Duncan III, a technologist at Bacone College, in Muskogee, Oklahoma, switched to Firefox recently, attracted by the software's wide variety of plug-ins and new features, as well as the fact that Mozilla is less integrated with the computer's operating system than is Internet Explorer.

"Since Mozilla is completely isolated from the operating system, I know that if the browser gets completely hijacked and obliterated that the program is not going to completely destroy everything I've got on disk," he said.

If this argument takes hold and people use it as a reason to switch to other browsers, it will be very interesting to see if the folks in Redmond hold to their "party line" about the impossibility of separating the Internet Exploder from the Operating System...

--Mark

Firefox software updates

[GordoSlasher]

Count me as one who just recently switched from IE to Firefox (actually count me as two since I switched both my computers). In the early years I ran Mosaic and Netscape but switched to IE because I was tired of Netscape's constant crashes. IE was the least of all evils at that time, and everytime I went back to take a peek at Netscape's latest version it was still buggier and slower than IE.

So far Firefox seems ok and renders all the websites I visit properly. It still seems to render slower than IE but with faster computers now it's not such a noticeable difference. I see a few bugs but I'll wait for version 1.0 before passing serious judgement.

The most severe bug however is the Software Update feature. I installed 0.9.1 last week and almost immediately I saw an article on Slashdot about a Firefox security hole and fix. I didn't immediately attempt to install the fix. So a few days later I went to mozilla.org and saw that 0.9.2 was the latest version. Help->About shows I'm still at 0.9.1. OK, no problem, the automatic update probably checks once a month. I click "Update Now" and Firefox tells me that no updates are available. WTF? Seems like this is an ideal time to show that, not only does Firefox fix the bugs faster than IE, but they have an infrastructure to get the fixes out to the users. If a security bug were actively being exploited, I'd want it to be fixed ASAP without me having to proactively surf the geek sites like Slashdot to find out about the fix, and then manually go to mozilla.org to find, download, and install the fix. Your momma ain't gonna be so proactive.

As I said, I realize it's prerelease so I'm not passing serious judgement yet, but the update technology had better work by the time they get to 1.0 if they expect to be a serious contender.

Re:Firefox software updates

[linuxci]

The most severe bug however is the Software Update feature. I installed 0.9.1 last week and almost immediately I saw an article on Slashdot about a Firefox security hole and fix. I didn't immediately attempt to install the fix. So a few days later I went to mozilla.org and saw that 0.9.2 was the latest version. Help->About shows I'm still at 0.9.1.

The software update feature was first introduced in 0.9 and therefore probably has bugs of its own, the good thing is that all the problems with the automatic update are being found quickly and will be fixed for 1.0

You don't need 0.9.2 - it's just 0.9.1 with the security patch applied. If you've applied the patch you don't need to upgrade as there's no other differences

Re:Firefox software updates

[Anonymous Coward]

IE was the least of all evils at that time, and everytime I went back to take a peek at Netscape's latest version it was still buggier and slower than IE.
So far Firefox seems ok and renders all the websites I visit properly. It still seems to render slower than IE but with faster computers now it's not such a noticeable difference. I see a few bugs but I'll wait for version 1.0 before passing serious judgement.

If you believe that Netscape was slower than IE (each browser on its own), grap a 16-bit copy of IE 4 (the last one I know that had a 16-bit version) and a 16-bit copy of Netscape Navigator 4, and a copy of MicroSoft Windows 3.x.

Netscape was noticeably faster (although horribly slow on a 386 with 16MB of RAM). While Navigator was usable once loaded, IE was another story entirely. Once you began using MicroSoft Windows 4.x, parts of IE were loaded whether you wanted them to be or not which created the appearance that it was less resource intensive (which worked, since that's all people cared about, and it was too difficult to prevent it from doing so). Mozilla addressed this on MicroSoft platforms by doing something similar, by having it launch at start up and stay in the tray (although this can be enabled/disabled easily).

Re:Firefox software updates

[Anonymous Coward]

IE was noticibly faster than Netscape on NT 4.0, which had none of the integration tricks found on Win9x.

Re:Firefox software updates

[Anonymous Coward]

Just for the sake of karma whoring, here are the instructions for patching Mozilla and Firefox.

Remember that this is only for those folks running Windows 2000 or Windows XP.

Re:Firefox software updates

[Anonymous Coward]

The auto update system has many issues.

I got 0.9, was never notified about 0.9.1 until I told it to check.

DL'ed & installed 091, and now the auto update tells me there is a new verson. The new version is 091! It has never told me to get 092. I just installed the fix extension.

Re:Firefox software updates

[Anonymous Coward]

Just for the sake of karma whoring,

Karma whoring works best when you post under your pseudonym. :-p

Sample bias

[nuggz]

Yes google is great.
However many people just use the default search option in their browser.
I think specifically going to google to search is already above many users.

When I use IE, I even tend to use the default search when the website isn't found.

Re: Slashdot crowd will probably bumb that 1% ...

[xmas2003]

My guess is that WebSideStory's statistics may show an increase next month, since /.'ers will be checking out their site (I assume they use data from their own site) ... and the /. sample base is HEAVILY biased toward Mozilla/Firefox/etc.

Re: Stupid companies are still out there

[Alwin Henseler]

enough users of alternative browsers that any company would be crazy to ignore them

There's still some around, like this webshop near where I live (navigation buttons don't work in Mozilla/Opera/Konquerer, making their site useless for non-IE users).

Frankly, I don't give a damn. I'll just make a buy elsewhere, so that shop loses my business. If they can afford to lose 3% of potential clients, let them. But with that percentage growing, and narrow profit margins to work with, their stupidity is increasing with time, and if they ignore that, they'll just go out of business. Put your money where your mouth is, that'll do it in the long term.

Once Firefox 1.0 is released (..)

It's out NOW, somebody just goofed with the version numbers ;-)

Re:Is your mother really THAT stupid? Probibly not

[GreatDrok]

I got my mother to switch to Mozilla about 6 months back and she has been thrilled with it. She started using it for the spam filtering and stayed for the browser itself. The other day I phoned her to tell her to upgrade mozilla because of the shell:// problem and she had already done it! I think she may actually be getting it.

There is more than meets the eye here

[bigbigbison]

I think there is more to browser usage than just the raw numbers. I know that according to my web site stats more than half of my visitors use some version of mozilla. My blog appeals to a pretty small niche of people who are generally tech savy and so this leads me to beleive that the power users are using Mozilla much more than the average users.

The signifigance of that s that the power users are the people that non-tech people turn to as well as the people who are more likely to contact a non-moz friendly web site and complain. So what I'm saying is that 1% may be a small amount of change, but the movers and shakers have already moved in much larger numbers.

Re:There is more than meets the eye here

[pe1chl]

I can second that. At work we have a website that is visited by "average users", people working at small and medium sized companies, governmental agencies, etc. We have 97-98% IE users. The remainder has to be shared between all the others, including Safari, Opera, Mozilla, Firefox, Konqueror etc.

Internally we use Mozilla. Lots of our employees and relations fight with viruses, worms and spyware. But when suggesting Mozilla, they usually take the suggestion but do not change, maybe later ask about "Mozarella" or mention that they read in the local paper that it is a safer browser.

But in the end they stick to IE and Outlook Express. And keep sending out Sober and Netsky messages.

Don't forget that having a virus or spyware program on the PC often does not cause too many problems for the owner, only for others. They are not too bothered by it.

Re:dear god (or dear devil?)

[Farmbubba]

It could be not a gain in Mozilla, but a drop in the number of IE machines that still function. IE lets so much adware/spyware in that a lot of machines will cease to function at all.

What I find most interesting...

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that the google zeitgeist is from May! A lot has happened since then (Home land Security of US recommending alternatives, CERT recommending moz and opera)

I'd love to see the google zeitgeist for July..

Wait, July isn't over yet! Doh!

Significant

[twitter]

...one percentage point is simply not statistically significant.

Of course it's statistically significant or they would not have reported it. It's the first time in five years they have notice such a decline. It might be because corporate users have been scared off the internet for a while or it might be due to the noted 25% rise in Mozilla usage, but it's real either way.

It's also socially significant either way. Both ways demonstrate that people no longer trust Microsoft junk when it counts. Adoption of Mozilla on a Windoze platform is even more significant. It shows that people are willing to go out of their way to get more trusted code and that they trust a free program more than they trust M$. It's very bad news for Microsoft.

It might also portend larger shift. It's about as easy to replace your whole M$ system as it is to swap out the browser. As people use Mozilla and realize just how much better it is, they will be tempted to try out distributions like Xandros, Mepis, Suse or Fedora. As more "normal" users make that swap and report how much better things are, we will see a much larger shift in statistics.

Everything is in place.

Re:Significant

[PhoenixFlare]

Adoption of Mozilla on a Windoze platform is even more significant. It shows that people are willing to go out of their way to get more trusted code and that they trust a free program more than they trust M$. It's very bad news for Microsoft. It might also portend larger shift.

Your logic seems a bit flawed here. I don't know how much experience you have doing actual user support, but among those i've worked with - if you switch a typical Windows user from IE to Mozilla because of problems, they will think "yay, the problems are gone!", see Mozilla as pretty cool....And get on with their lives. They are not going to think, "Golly gee, switching my web browser makes me want to abandon Windows."

It's about as easy to replace your whole M$ system as it is to swap out the browser.

No, for most "normal" home users, and even some geek types, it is not. I don't know why this has to keep being said over and over, but not everyone is using only easily swappable web browsing, office, development, or email applications with their systems.

There are many millions of people out there running games and other specialized apps that have no (equal) counterpart on Linux or a way to run the original program without major problems (like the thousands of games still not usable under Wine/WineX).

Until it is possible to run practically any Windows software under Linux with no problems, the most you are going out of the majority of home users is a dual-boot, if that. Certainly not complete swap-outs.

Maybe if Linux had been in wide use when Windows usage was ramping up, things would have been different, but it's too late now. Home users are tied to the vast library of Windows-only apps (again, often games) that simply have no equal on Linux.

Re:Significant

[magic fruit]

Home users are tied to the vast library of Windows-only apps (again, often games) that simply have no equal on Linux. This is the reason that I believe the shift to MS alternatives have to come from business users if there is going to be one. Businesses don't care if games don't work under Linux, infact it's a bonus. The priorities are key applications running on it, such as office productivity, e-mail/groupware, web browsers, etc. Once there is a reasonable migration to Linux by businesses, I think many of the users will consider using the same system they have at work. Once that has happened, and 20% of home users are running Linux, then there is ample reason for games companies to develop for Windows and Linux systems, in the same way that you can buy games on different console systems. The problem as far as an IE to Mozilla switch on Windows is concerned is that IE is so entwined in the operating system, that even if the user doesn't elect to browse with it half of IE is still loaded and the only way to stop it is to switch operating systems. Microsoft has even argued that the two are inseperable!

Re:Significant

[PhoenixFlare]

Definately agreed. As you say, when you shift to business users, many of the key applications are already there on Linux and working pretty well.

Not so sure about business use causing a change at home, though....Only time will tell if the built up inertia can be overcome, I guess.

Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe that the 1% is significant in respect to the fact that more corporations and individuals will be shifting to Mozzila driven Internet Browsers. I already have transitioned all the PCs in my house to Firefox and nobody seems to know the difference other than the different application icon.

Quite frankly, Microsoft dropped the ball when they allowed ActiveX controls to run in a non-sandboxed environment. Additionally the buffer overflow problems with the MS Scripting engine doesn't help either.

Could Microsoft's careless programming design and monopolistic attitudes finally be comming around to bite it in the ass? I think so- it already has.

Slightly lower

[nuggz]

I'd bet it is slightly lower ie usage.

I use galeon at home, but at work, I use IE.
Actually were not allowed to use anything better.

Grassroots marketing

[arvindn]

I bet a significant reason for the change is the grassroots marketing campaign started by some of the mozilla people a few weeks back. Here's your chance to help out. And don't forget to put the firefox promotional buttons on your site.

Re:Ha

[IamNotWitchboy]

If you had RTFA you would had surely noticed (in the third paragraph, no less) that the actual marketshare of IE had been quite stable over the course of two years and in the last month it has been declining consistently from 95.73 to 94.73. I believe you understand the significant difference (both relative and absolute) between 99% and 95%

I believe there's no need to further explain the difference between

Internet Explorer's share of the browser market has dropped 1%

and whatever it is you understood.

I just made a decision...

[Asprin]

I've been usin' FF since 0.2 and I just implemented a new "no IE" policy at my office. Everyone is installing FF over the next few days.

I didn't do it for any particularly idealistic reasons, just because IE isn't worth the problems anymore.

You should have seen the looks on people's places when I told them about the IIS/IE attacks that were uncovered last week.

Re:I just made a decision...

[rokzy]

YOU: ...because IE isn't worth the problems anymore.

I've been using Firefox for ages, and now:

ME: ..because Windows isn't worth the problems anymore.

not trying to be a linux zealot, just honestly seeing no reason to bother with MS at all any more. YMMV.

Re:I just made a decision...

[Asprin]

Almost all of the software we run requires Windows, and some of it also requires IE (so we actually will still be running IE, but only for approved applications and sites). That wasn't my decision, but the decision of the vendors we purchase from. We aren't anywhere near big enough to staff a dev dept to create this stuff in-house, and I'm not sure it would even come close to being cost effective if we did. I'm pushing vendors toward considering platform independent solutions whenever possible, but you have to understand that that is a ten-year decision for some of them, and they made committments (not just software purchases, but code base, training, employees) to MS that are not easily undone.

People are always posting comments like "Why does everyone still use MS when there are great tools like Linux, KDE, OpenOffice and Mozilla?" Well, it's because we can't run our business on just that. We need accounting software and lease management software and payroll software, and that means proprietary vendors who have made decisions in their self interest that force us to pick Windows.

If it makes you feel better, tho', I run our corporate intranet on Apache on Win2K and our mail server is currently, SunOS, and I'm switching it to debian Sarge in the fall.

annoying old active x

[way2trivial]

is what causes me to still NEED ie..

I need active X for some things, get it working on fire fox, I'm there- completely.

Re:annoying old active x

[Anonymous Coward]

i must say i find it hard to believe you *need* active x. however if you do, then why don't you use ie for that and firefox for everything else?

Re:annoying old active x

[linuxci]

Heep an eye on the Mozilla ActiveX project. On there is a number of things:
- An activex plugin that lets you run activex controls in Mozilla (be very careful with this, read the docs - you can lock it down to host just the controls you need)
- A way of embedding Mozilla into other browsers using activex
- A means of making IE support Netscape type plugins (which it used to at one time)
- An activex plugin for legacy browsers like Netscape 4

Unfortunately they're having problems getting this to work in Firefox 0.9 but keep an eye on that page for what you want.

Re:annoying old active x

[Ender Ryan]

That is a bad idea. ActiveX is and always has been an insecure piece of shit. Furthermore, it is Wintel only. ActiveX is a patently ridiculous web technology. Why the hell would anyone want things on the web to be tied to a specific operating system and processor? One of Mozilla's goals is cross-platform compatibility, why would they cripple that with a seriously flawed component such as ActiveX.

Of course, there's no reason someone couldn't write an ActiveX plugin for Mozilla... but I for one would rather see ActiveX die a quick death.

Re:annoying old active x

[Tandoori Haggis]

I had a some preparatory course material which required Active-X on IE. Our corporate security policy prohibts the use of Active-X.

So I took the CD's home and used them with Firefox.

As far as I'm concerened, websites built soley for use by IE with Active-X enabled are asking to lose business to sites that are built to recognised standards.

I only use IE at work because I have to.

Re:annoying old active x

[msoftsucks]

Take a look at this. This can help you run Firefox in that environment.

Re:annoying old active x

[mattyrobinson69]

there was a project hosted on kde.org a few years ago to get activeX plugins to run (using wine) in konqueror.

I spent ages searching for a download last year but i couldn't find it anywhere (just the kde announcement)

i needed to use msn chat (website) too - had to use windows|vmware instead :(

Re:annoying old active x

[Tandoori Haggis]

Thanks. I saw this earlier today. Very interesting too.

Re:annoying old active x

[Dwonis]

Crossover Office from CodeWeavers has some support for ActiveX. It's proprietary, but you might still want to look at it. I have Crossover Office, and I can say that I'm satisfied with it, but I've never tried the ActiveX part of it.

Return of the browser wars

[TrixX]

Not all that is gold does <BLINK>
Not all those who are open are lost.
The lizard that's strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the exploits.

From the ashes a phoenix^Wfirebird^Wfirefox shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring.
Renewed shall be Netscape (that was broken),
The crownless again shall be king

Re:Return of the browser wars

[bheer]

Not all that is gold does BLINK

Good verse, except that Moz does BLINK, and IE doesn't (it mercifully didn't implement BLINK. It did introduce MARQUEE though, and may eternal hellfire await the inventor of that).

Re:Return of the browser wars

[TrixX]

Now that you said so, I checked and it's true. I checked before writing with Galeon, I thought that behavior came frm Mozilla... I guess it has probably a modified stylesheet.

Anyway... you get the idea :)

Re:Return of the browser wars

[thinkninja]

And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced. But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird. The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire and thunder upon them. For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror.

from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15

I finally switched for one reason.........

[g0hare]

I can turn off flash in FIrefox and it won't ever ask me to install it again except for the first time. Just a nice icon I can click if I ever need annoying flash crud. Google toolbar worked for popups, and I keep IE patched. I don't even use an antivirus, and I haven't had a virus since 1997. I still have to use IE to get full Microsoft support functionality.

Mozilla feeling lucky..

[Anonymous Coward]

Just for shits and giggles I tried this.

I really would've thought IE would be first. Sign of the times, I suppose.

Re:Mozilla feeling lucky..

[nutznboltz]

Try this: http://www.google.com/search?q=mega+patch+problems

It's like Safe Sex...

[Otis_INF]

I always say to people wondering why they should use another browser than IE: do you think safe sex is a wise thing to do when you jump into the sack with a stranger? Well, if you think it is, why are you surfing the internet totally unprotected using the most unsafe browser there is: IE?

However, people who say "It's Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' in full effect!" do have a point ;)

Re:It's like Safe Sex...

[-kertrats-]

using the most unsafe browser there is: IE

I'd like to protest that. You must not have been around in the mid-1990's. IE was actually the top of the heap at that point (is that a compliment? Probably not, as its hardly changed since then).

Re:It's like Safe Sex...

[ttfkam]

I don't know about that. I was "around" in the mid-90s. Yes, Netscape had its share of exploits (mostly Javascript), but Netscape's main faults were crashing and lack of features (like good CSS support).

On the other hand, MSIE has had more than its share of scripting exploits. In addition, ActiveX has been a massive security hole since day one. I remember soon after ActiveX was announced, some professor using it to shut your computer down. If that doesn't sound like a big deal, it was since he could have done anything, but shutting the system down was the least damaging action he could think of that still drove home the point that it was a major problem. So MS introduced signing. Oops! That didn't stop folks from futher exploits. So they put in some extra dialog box confirmations. Oops! The dialog boxes were silently bypassed.

Saying that MSIE was (is) the top of the heap is easy. But to say that MSIE is the top of the heap in security? What? Using the grandparent's metaphor for safe sex...

Netscape crashes were like being with a premature ejaculator. "Hey asshole! I wasn't even close to done yet!"

MSIE on the other hand was a great lover. And then you found out later that you have chlamydia (spyware), ghonorrea (viruses), and syphilis (worms).

And that's not even covering when your lover squats over you and takes a dump all over you without even asking first (popups). Sure it won't kill you, but do you really need a few years of this to realize that most people don't like it? Why would anyone continue to torment their partner if they actually believed they would leave them? Better make sure they are otherwise dependent upon you.

The only reasons I can see most people putting up with it are battered spouse syndrome and/or ignorance that there are alternative choices available. Hmmm... Sounds like a typical MSIE user to me.

Re:It's like Safe Sex...

[LordLucless]

However, people who say "It's Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' in full effect!" do have a point ;)

No they don't. Because you can't get the neighbourhood geek to come around and fix your syphilis problem.

Re:It's like Safe Sex...

[LordLucless]

There's such a thing as stretching a metaphor, and you just took it waaaaay too far.

Re: Slashdot crowd will probably bumb that 1% ...

[next1]

they may or may not include their own site's data but that would account for only a small percentage of the overall data they are basing these numbers on. this is because they would have relatively small traffic compared to some of their (huge) clients and also the fact that they have a large number of clients.

Re: Stupid companies are still out there

[nusuth]

You are a member of a minority who won't use IE no matter what. The three percent figure pertains to a bigger group of people, who doesn't use IE by default. While the three percent figure will keep increasing, I doubt that number of diehard non-IE users will increase at all. As long as numer of Windows users does not decline, IE will be a readily available option to use with sites not compatible with their favorite browser.

IE's dominance is supported by *us*

[claar]

I think many of we geeks have taken a lackluster stance on the browser issue; I know I have. I think it's time that all of us actively influence all of those that we support to move to an alternate browser.

In my estimation, almost every computer is supported by an IT geek at some point, and if every geek converted as many computers as possible, we could really make a dent in these stats.

Unfortunately, I think it's practically impossible to motivate IT people as a whole to action. We're all so self-motivated and anti-groupthink (not to mention a touch of laziness in many of us), that I think our inaction will continue to support Microsoft's stronghold for some time to come. c'est la vie..

Re:IE's dominance is supported by *us*

[Azghoul]

Well, you're right on one hand, but on the other, any "IT geek" who's helping his friends, associates, parents, and small business partners and saying "Yeah, just run IE, it's the best" is just an idiot.

Re:IE's dominance is supported by *us*

[Coryoth]

Already done. Everyone I know uses something else. My friends use firefox, my mother uses mozilla (it looks like netscape), my father uses opera (he just preferred it), my girlfriend uses firefox... It's surprisingly easy to do as well. Not being overzealous about it is probably good. I just pointed out to my girlfriend that there was another browser to try, so she downloaded it and, regardless of popup blocking or tabs, decided it was much nicer simply on look and feel. Once she got used to the search box, the tabs and the lack of popups she went to some effort to remove IE from her machine totally - no prompting. Now she's trying to convert her office mates over, with some success (again, it's been a try it and decide its better pretty much straight away). Sometimes you just need to point out the options and (more importantly) make sure they know it isn't s huge change (it is change that people mostly fear) then let them work it out in their own time.

Jedidiah.

Re:IE's dominance is supported by *us*

[Anonymous Coward]

It's unclear if you emerged from your basement and switched your mom's browser, or if you are really talking about IT pros. Anyway:

1) IT Janitors don't set standards, IT Mangement does.
2) The full Mozilla suite is really seen as an unpleasant application by many users. Ugly + bloated.
3) Tough to stick your neck out for 0.9 software like Firefox.
4) Moz/FireFox doesn't have the network rollout and management tools that IE has.
5) Intranet and vertical stuff tends to abuse IE features (activex, rds, etc)

Re:IE's dominance is supported by *us*

[kiddailey]

She's a keeper ;)

The problem is ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft would start charging the OEMs more for their OS software if the OEMs started bundling Mozilla with their systems.

Re:The problem is ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong, the antitrust settlement prohibits this.

(For example, Dell ships machines with RealPlayer set as the default media player.)

Re:The problem is ...

[Anonymous Coward]

The antitrust settlement prohibits it in the US. There are many more countries in the world, and the european union alone is double the size of the US now, let alone the tech-savvy billions in south-east asia, many of whom make the average american geek look like an AOLer. Microsoft can punish multinational OEMs worldwide with impunity.

In numbers

[Dexter77]

Statistically 1% isn't much, but let's look at the numbers. There are almost 500 million web users in the world. Thereby 1% means five million people. That's more than a small country!

If five million isn't significant, then what is? How many software products you know that has more than five million ACTIVE users in total?

Five million people have lots of friends. If those friends are introduced to Firefox the number will double soon. In my opinion, this is just the beginning. Snowball has started to roll.

Re:In numbers

[kryptKnight]

"If five million isn't significant, then what is?" 5,000,000 is far from signifigant, 5,000,001 however is an entirely different story...

It's happened

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla has become apple.

1% drop?

[Trevin]

So, IE now has only 94.7% of the browser market instead of 95.7%? Gee, I feel sorry for them. :-P

At this rate, how long is it going to take until we see some competitive market shares, like < 70%?

1% is not the important figure

[ignavusincognitus]

A 1% drop in IE usage, in itself, does not necessarily mean people are switching to mozilla. People could be using other things besides moz, including the "browsers" which are just a new skin on IE plus a tabbed interface. They all rely on IE technology so it's hardly a security improvement or a boon to standard compliance.

The important number in that report is the 26% (relative) increase for mozilla. This means there are many more people viewing sites with it, complaning to webmasters (or just to the helpdesk) about problems, and spreading the word.

Another thing we can conclude - the 100% spike in downloads around the security advisories is not all due to new users. Probably a large part of that is people getting firefox 0.9.1 after downloading 0.9 and having problems with it. And then getting 0.9.2 for windows after it came out.

Mozilla finally is useful.

[MtViewGuy]

I think the main reason why Mozilla browser usage increased lately is that since Mozilla 1.6 came out early this year, the Mozilla web browser finally has the ability to render most web pages accurately in addition to all the good things we've already expected from Mozilla, namely built-in pop-up window control and less likely chance to get spyware installed. Mozilla 1.7.x versions improve on Mozilla 1.6 with even better page rendering accuracy and also faster operation, too.

Your statistics are belong to us

[DarkL]

Valid statistics should be based on facts and these are hard to gather in the browser market simply because most non-IE browsers have to identify themselves as the MS product in order to gain access to many web sites. The default for Opera is MS IE. Same for OmniWeb and many other popular browsers for the Mac platform. In fact, there is such a browser spoofing feature in just about every browser I know, including Safari, OmniWeb, Opera, iCab, etc.

So, what is being counted as MS IE may not really be IE. I'm sure their real numbers are much, much lower.

Why Free Doesn't Sell. Really :-)

[Venner]

I would like to know where this perception came from. People love free things, even if they are completely worthless people will still try them. Why doesn't that extend into the software arena?

It is because people tend to be suspicious of free things too. I remember reading an article in some science magazine a while back about the perception of "free" things.

The testers put food, lemonade, and bottles of water on a table on a busy street corner on a hot day and put a free sign on it. Relatively few people came by and took anything. But when they put up a sign that said, "Cookies, Water, and Lemonade, $0.25 each" up, they sold everything within a matter of minutes. (It was one-to-a-customer in the both the "free" and "$0.25" case.)

As a more humorous example, a guy I know from Germany was telling me about some of the difficulties Walmart had getting established over there. You know how they have Greeters and such here in the USA? Apparently, over there, people distrusted Walmart because the employees were always smiling too much and hence must be either cheating them or ridiculing them! Apparently, Walmart had to give their employees "de-sensivity training" to learn not to bother customers.

Effect of Windows XP Service Pack 2.

[MtViewGuy]

I think another thing that will affect browser market share is the impending release of Windows XP Service Pack 2, which is due within the next few months.

Remember, there are considerable changes in terms of security controls on the Internet Explorer (and Internet connections in general) that are part of WinXP SP2, changes that will essentially kibosh most pop-up windows and could likely reduce the chance to having spyware installed and viruses coming through. With these changes (and Microsoft offering their own antivirus program for likely very low cost), the rate of virus and spyware infections among Windows users will probably go down quite a bit.

Re:Effect of Windows XP Service Pack 2.

[msoftsucks]

Once again, M$'s current line is: our current shit is broken, but just wait until our next version.

I agree that SP2 will improve the situation, but not as much as you think. We have been testing SP2, and have found that it leaves alot to be desired. We have identified about 9 ways that WinBlows machines get infected. Out of 9, SP2 only blocked 6. The other 3 ways still infected the machines, even with SP2 applied. The reality is that there are over 50 critical security bugs in IE, that M$ and the world have known about for over a year. Yet M$ has done nothing to fix them. These bugs are being exploited, and SP2 will not do anything to stop them. Only when M$ gets off the pot, and seriously addresses these security issues, will IE security improve.

Re:Effect of Windows XP Service Pack 2.

[jerw134]

Wow. I'm definitely going to have to trust msoftsucks, who uses the terms "WinBlows" and "M$" over countless security experts. Who needs things like facts, when msoftsucks can tell you that SP2 can be exploited in 3 out of 9 ways! Thanks for the great info msoftsucks!

Complain

[pjbgravely]

I just sent Liquidations an email saying their site does not render properly. If everyone did this with every non compliant web site maybe they will start writing good HTML. If I see the problem in /. I will write them too.

Why doesn't that extend into the software arena?

[nlinecomputers]

isn't this why the name was changed from 'free software' to open-source? Free as in Speech, not as in Free Beer.

I would like to know where this perception came from. People love free things, even if they are completely worthless people will still try them. Why doesn't that extend into the software arena?

The problem is that most free items are offered as a loss leader, promotional item, or has some other limits to get you to try and then buy the product. Once I have Mozilla there is nothing else to buy. People expect some kind of "catch" so they are put off and frightened when they find there isn't one. It sounds too good to be true.

I have a piece of hardware

[way2trivial]

veo observer..

let's me look in on my son while he's in his room someone is working on an activeX plugin for mozilla, does not for for firefox at present..

Re:I have a piece of hardware

[Ender Ryan]

Well that's neat and all, but there should be a better way of using it than ActiveX. They could use Java, plain ol' streaming video, animated GIF, et cetera.

Anyway, I hope you find a solution; perhaps you should pester the company that makes the device to provide a better solution. Tell them you got a Mac, or can't use IE because of company policy or something :D

Cheers.

Re:I have a piece of hardware

[jez9999]

You spy on your son in his room with a webcam, X10-style? I think that's rather sad.

I'm glad I'm not your son.

Re:I have a piece of hardware

[way2trivial]

he's 13 months old, and it's the only damn way I get to see him most days.....

it'll come out the same day he asks for it, first he needs to learn how to talk....

Browser Identification - A warning...

[GLevangelist]

Personally, I wouldn't consider using anything other than Opera. The 7 series is near perfect.

That said, Opera identifies itself as Internet Explorer 6 by default. As much as I would like to see these surveys reflecting an increase in its market share (as is surely happening, just inconspicuously), the developer's paranoia about the recent MSN style-sheet incident isn't helping in this respect.

New Opera users who are unaware of this setting can change it by pressing F12 and selecting 'Identify as Opera'.

Re:Browser Identification - A warning...

[bunratty]

But Opera is always very easy to detect, even when identifying as IE 6. You see, Opera always contains the text "Opera" in its user agent string. Can you give any evidence that Opera really is being undercounted by the major browser stats sites?

Decline started earlier

[bertboerland]

I know, lies damn lies and statistics. and IE has more than 110% of the browsermarket and all that.

But according to w3schools the decline of IE (hence: the rise of mozilla) started a couple of month ago, in may.

Moz is gaining between 0.5 - 0.8 per month and IE is losing 0.2 per month. But then again, just wait untill Bill sees this...

See also rant about Moz on my blog

Change the internet?

[AssFace]

On the little office network that I admin, I would say 90% of the users there, when telling someone that they need to open a web page, they will say "okay, now open up the internet."

By this, they mean "Okay, you will need to view a web page, so open up a web browser so that I can tell you what URL to go to."

But MS has caused them to think that IE is in fact some sort of portal into "the internet".

If you want people to get away from IE, you have to make them understand that the web is 1) not all of the internet, and 2) not only accessible through that "blue e swirly icon thing".

I have gotten the 10% of the users in the office who can grasp such a thing to switch to FireFox.
The rest nearly shit themselves when I upgraded Outlook 2000 to Outlook 2003 and every single one of them demanded that I "ruined their system" and wanted me to change it back.
(perhaps they had a point there)

"Change is bad" to most of the world - not everyone is a /. geek that likes trying new things - even if said new things are much better.

more surveys confirm

[ignavusincognitus]

Just picking random user-agent tracker pages, this trend is confirmed. The base portion for mozilla varies, but the 1% increase in the last month or two is confirmed. See here and here

Question:

[Kjella]

1.0% or the 0.000002% between 94.499999% and 94.500001%? Don't read too much into this...

Re:Question:

[Anonymous Coward]

RTFA

RTFA

RTFA

RTFA

95.73 down to 94.73

1% Pathetic, 14%, not so pathetic

[3770]

1% is not really any news. Seriously, it is pathetic that /. is jumping up and down, all giddy, for one percentage point.

If you like rejoicing over a diminishing marketshare for Microsoft, then you should go here.

IIS had its record market share some time around april 2002, and has since lost about 14%, mostly to Apache.

IIS has 35% and went down to 21%, Apache had 56% and went up to 67%

Re:1% Pathetic, 14%, not so pathetic

[Anonymous Coward]

A percentage drop in a monopoly marketshare is far more significant than a percentage gained for a competitor.

If you claimed Moz had a 1% gain in its numbers, that's 1% of a small (compared to IE) number of browsers. On the other hand, IE losing 1% of it's huge number of browsers is a big fucking deal. This stuff is "how to lie with stats 101".

Re:1% Pathetic, 14%, not so pathetic

[lifebouy]

No, it is news. Assuming it isn't an error, Microsoft losing a 1% of the market share means that 1 out of every hundred people got so fed up with IE being taken over by popup scripts and everything else wrong with it, that they decided change was in order. Most people loathe the idea of change, especially when it comes to the computer. So this is very significant, if it is accurate. Dropping one percent so quickly is a serious threat to dominance and make no mistake that Bill is concerned. Also keep in mind that this change is mostly home computers, not businesses. Businesses do not change unless they absolutely must, most of the time. So that 1% likely translates to 2 or 3% of home users. Which would mean that 1 out of possibly every 33 homes stopped using IE. You bet your ass Bill has a committee researching this one as we type.

Re:1% Pathetic, 14%, not so pathetic

[Hans Lehmann]

Read the article...

"A loss of 1 percent of the market may not mean much to Microsoft, but it translates into a large growth, proportionately, in the number of users running Mozilla and Netscape-based browsers. Mozilla and Netscape's combined market share has increased by 26 percent, rising from 3.21 percent of the market in June to 4.05 percent in July"

That 1% (0.84% actually) is not the change in the number of users that are using Mozilla, but rather the additional portion of the entire market that is now using Mozilla.

If I sold widgets to 10% of the planet last month, but sold them to 11% of the planet this month, I've still increased the number of customers by 60,000,000.

Re:1% Pathetic, 14%, not so pathetic

[Jesus_666]

The committee will probably return one of these two:
- "What do you expect? The last version of IE was released three $expletive years ago!"
- "We are utterly incompetent, but you will probably believe us when we tell you that it's a PR problem. Suckers."

MS needs to take responsibility for it's crap OS

[jdfight]

I think there should be a class action lawsuit against Microsoft for incorporating IE into Windows, opening every security hole imaginable by default. How many people have lost important data because of Internet Explorer security holes? Unfortunately, most people use factory default settings on their computers and are not likely to use an alternative browser. It is great news that Mozilla and Firefox are gaining popularity, but I don't think they'll pose a serious challenge to IE any time soon. I personally use firefox on my system. It works perfectly. Every browser should support tabbed browsing. Why hasn't MS incorporated this into IE?

i started deploying firefox..

[perler]

although it may be a statistical glitch, it fits with my own experience, since firefox 0.9 i install it on almost all of my clients pc's. reason is the similarity in the UI, the flawless import of all bookmarks, cookies and preferences and the huge amount of new security holes in IE.

Re:i started deploying firefox..

[4Lorn]

Oh no...

There should be an option in Firefox NOT to import the new security holes from IE.

tells you less than you think

[raindrop#1]

Time for everyone to go back to school and retake all those classes about statistics.

These figures, produced by WebSideStory, tell you only that 94.73% of visitors to a given list of sites use IE. It tells you nothing reliable about browser usage as a whole. To do that you would have to put together a list of sites that will provide you with a representative sample of internet users. Only then can you draw any conclusions about browser usage as a whole.

WebSideStory's sample is based upon "thousands of sites" that are all customers of one company. This is a tiny fraction of the total sites out there and it is extremely unlikely to be a representative sample of the web as a whole.

The tell-tale giveaway with WebSideStory's statistics is that they do not state a "margin of error". As their approach does not give you results that can be reliably extrapolated, the margin of error for any such extrapolation is effectively 100%.

Usually I scream: "MOZILLA" in their ears

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm no IT-expert, but since I'm running BSD everyone thinks I am,
and lately I've had a lot of questions about how to browse the internet without getting a virus.
Usually I scream:
"MOZILLA"
in their ears,
and it seems that not only have they heard it, but also downloaded it and are very happily using it.

Best of all, I didn't have to help them, it seems "non-techies" can find their way.

It was the DOJ

[Sfing_ter]

Rummy and his buddies decided they liked the firefox skins better :)

TIA, the Only Way

[handy_vandal]

The only way to be *sure* of anything on the web is to monitor all packets at all times using behavioral profiling programs.

We could call the system TIA, for Timely Ignorance Abatement ....

-kgj

"losing" marketshare

[cgenman]

It's extrememly significant. When is the last time a dominant MS end-user product *lost* marketshare?

Hmm... When you have 100% of anything, there's only one way to go. When you have essentially 100% of anything, and have reached a state of rough equillibrium, there is going to be oscillations. 1% does not a fight make, especially if you look at where Mozilla / Netscape was four years ago. The fact that the descrease is statistical noise to I.E. and a huge boost to the Mozilla community should show that the Mozilla community is also very close to statistical noise to I.E.

Full Disclosure: I'm writing this through Opera.

1% is millions

[gad_zuki!]

Come on, lets not be pessimists here. That's a whole lot of people. A few percentage points more and business will not be able to ignore non-IE users. Do you want to be the guy telling your boss that 10% of your customers can't use the company website?

10% is doable and a realistic goal, possibly within a year.

On top of it all, Moz users simply don't have to deal with ActiveX and pop-ups thus lowering their chances of getting crapware on their machines. You bet their friends are going to notice.

Is it just me or is SP2 a big stopgap fix mainly for spyware and security? Considering the #1 WAN app is IE, it seems that this is directly or indirectly a response to Moz's success.

MUHUHAHAHAHAAAAAA!!!!

[Zen Punk]

That's right, Microsoft....today, 1% of the browser market...tomorrow..ummm........2%. Mu. Ha.

Confidence intervals

[Snorpus]

I seem to remember from Statistics class that the confidence interval of an estimate (aka "margin of error") depends solely on the sample size, and not the population size.

Millions of web users should be enough to get the CI down to less than 0.1%, but nothing will cure the fact that it's not a random sample.

Re:Confidence intervals

[cbr2702]

I seem to remember from Statistics class that the confidence interval of an estimate (aka "margin of error") depends solely on the sample size, and not the population size.

So you are saying that if I conduct some survey and ask 1000 people out of 100,000, my confidence interval is the same as if I ask 1000 people out of 1000? I would expect it to depend roughly on the ratio of the sizes of the sample and the poplation.

Re:Confidence intervals

[Snorpus]

Intuition would say that the population size would have to matter, but in fact it does not.

Let s = sample standard deviation.
Let w = +/- width of the confidence interval.
Let n = sample size needed.
Let k = multiplier for the confidence level... Use 2 for 95% confidence, 3 for 99% confidence.

k(s/(n^0.5)) = w (for 95% C.I.)

Solving for n:
n = 4(s^2)/(w^2) (95% C.I.)
n = 9(s^2)/(w^2) (99% C.I.)

This result is also intuitively satisfying: You need a larger sample if

1. You want a higher confidence level
2. The sample standard deviation is larger
3. You want a smaller confidence interval

Source: Statistics, 4th Ed., McClave & Dietrich, Dellen Publishing Co., © 1988. Page 327, "Determining the Sample Size Necessary for Making Inferences About a Population Mean".

Re:Confidence intervals

[Carl T]

Go do the math - you'll find that the dependence on the population size is very weak once the population size gets much bigger than the sample size. Or in other words, when a normal distribution starts to be a good approximation of the Poisson distribution. Think of it like this: when the Poisson distribution gets close enough to the normal distribution, the size of the deviation isn't important anymore.

If I don't make much sense to you (frankly, I don't make much sense to me), head over to Mathworld where I'm sure they do a much better job of explaining this.

Re:Confidence intervals

[mysticgoat]

Intuition would say that the population size would have to matter, but in fact it does not...

You make some good points.

Another point that people are missing is that this 1% change is not based on a single statistical sample. It is a monthly aggregation of daily samples-- and the "statistical significance" people have been bandying about here applies only to each individual daily sample, not to an aggregate of 30 samples.

Also from the way the numbers are reported (to 0.01% significance), it appears that the normal daily variance websitestory sees is less than 1/5 of 1%. So the trend they are reporting is something like 5 times greater than the normal background noise they see.

And of course if story had been reported from the other viewpoint, no one would be questioning whether Mozilla's 26% gain was significant.

All of which just goes to show that correctly reading technical information requires skills other than simply being literate. From what people have written on this thread, I'd guess that most of the slashdot contributors are still developing a discipline of critical thinking. That's not a slam-- simply a recognition that someone in their teens or twenties can't bring a couple of decades of training and experience to their reading.

"If it isn't one thing, it's another..." --Gilda

What I want to know..

[bmantz65]

Why are people still using IE 4.0? Yikes.

Re:What I want to know..

[smash]

Its the installed browser in Windows 98.

Don't laugh, i think you'll find thats the reason :D

smash.

One percent /is/ significant

[Morosoph]

"95.73 percent on June 4 to 94.73 percent on July 6." Means that ~IE has gone from 4.27% to 5.27%.

If IE had 50%, you'd be right about the insignificance of 1%, which could easily be sampling error, but in this case, the 1% of the whole requires an awful lot of low-probability hits, since those without IE are relatively few. The growth in ~IE is roughly 23.4%!

MicroSoft says this isn't true

[nutznboltz]

After all having the most fixes makes you the most secure, right?

Does this make me a hero?

[Morgahastu]

2 years ago I slipped in Mozilla onto the image for all the laptops at a large college. So all the staff and teachers had a mozilla icon on their desktop but I don't know how many actually used it.

Proxy + NetBios

[cbr2702]

The '.' is used in the NetBIOS system to separate the name of the computer from the name of its domain. But this could work most of the time. Does anyone know how IE deals with this?

Re:Proxy + NetBios

[Anonymous Coward]

IE seems to just do the no period thing (optionally). NetBIOS isn't the real issue here -- you would have the same problem with DNS or just a hosts file that uses 'short' names.

http://foo/ -- skip the proxy
http://foo.mycompany.com/ -- go thru the proxy

Re: Slashdot crowd will probably bumb that 1% ...

[SilentChris]

Uh, not really. Taco has always said that IE figures heavily into Slashdot's stats. Everyone at work, after all.

Re:dear god (or dear devil?)

[Tofurkey]

...and often I wonder why the some of the best films are in the smallest theaters, the best books in specialty shops, and best food in holes-in-the-wall. What's good seldom equals what's popular.

Re: Slashdot crowd will probably bumb that 1% ...

[isorox]

They use data from their own site, and 5 million other sites. A few slashdotters (most of whom use IE anyway) wont make any difference

What I'd like to see...

[Grimster]

is some enterprising virus writer make one that when it infects a pc - downloads mozilla, installs it and then sets it as the default browser.

I suspect most Joe Sixpacks would see mozilla fire up the next time they clicked "the internet" and shrug and keep going.

Or make a spyware that pops up windows telling people to install Mozilla "Tired of Popups? Click here to download a free internet browser that STOPS POPUPS" or something like that.

Maybe not the most moral of approaches to it but jesus how much more spyware, viruses, popups, and crap can people take?

Sad thing is I keep a Windows/IE box around myself and one of the biggest uses I have for it is to open those links (typically to videos) that just won't play right or at all in Linux/Mozilla. That and GAMES of course, not that I have much time to play any but when I do it's probably not a game with a linux client.

1% = 7.9 million users

[CritterNYC]

For those that are writing this off, let's remember that 1.0% translates into about 7.9 million users (with 785.7 million total users.) And this probably doesn't include all those users that are faking their useragent string.

Of course, other places have differing numbers. Google Zeitgeist in May 2004 has total IE usage at about 89% and Mozilla usage at about 5% (if you zoom in on the graph and count up some pixels.)

Netscape up from 11.94 to 14.49...

[SwedishChef]

on my (admittedly small) web site between May and (so far, at least) July. This, after a steady under-12% usage for the past year. The site is the "home page" for our ISP and featured a story about the problems of MSIE with links to Opera and Mozilla so perhaps this might account for some of the increase. Interesting, however.

Four principle rendering engines.

[CdBee]

As I see it there are for principle rendering engines in use today:

MSIE - used in IE, obviously, and several Win32 browsers which use IE's engine.
Gecko - Mozilla, F/Fox, K-Meleon, Galeon
KHTML - Konqueror, Safari
Opera - Opera and several mobile implementations thereof

Opera tends to be pretty standards-compliant, historically it had some CSS bugs but they're getting attention since the later 6.x builds. Gecko and KHTML are open-source and can share code. I don't know if they do, but they can, and this essentially means their further development will probably be relatively similar in its addressing of the issues faced by broswer architects, namely the occasionaly clashes between specifications for web code.

Small jumps like this in the use of one of the more visible browsers - (Firefox has been publicly recommended by official US bodies, this helps a lot. It could as easily have stayed in the shadow of K-Meleon which is a lightweight Win32 MFC-interface implementation of Gecko) - aren't just an indication of the end of IE, they're a warning to webdesigners to think about it.

I'm fairly sure there's a critical mass after which is becomes significantly easier to migrate browsers due to an over public demand for support in web sites. That's what's really good about these stats.

Whollyshit, one percent!!!

[fleener]

> Wake me when IE is down to 60% usage.

Wake up now. At my July 4 family reunion, my mother raised the issue of Windows and IE security flaws she keeps reading about in the newspaper. It turns out she, and I, were the only ones still using IE. My technophobe, technonoob brothers and sisters had already switched to Mozilla and Firefox. These are folks who blindly use Windows and usually need my help to do anything. It was a wake-up call that got me (and with my help) my mother switched to Firefox.

IE fans...

[KnightStalker]

All of you who still use IE, or were only recently persuaded to switch, why do/did you use it? I've seen a number of comments here that say "IE isn't worth the problems anymore" or "I could tolerate the non-standards-compliance and unreliability" etc. What makes it worth the problems? Is there something you actually like about it?

Re:IE fans...

[allanj]

No IE fan (I use Firefox when I can - like right now), but I *NEED* IE for my frequent visits to windowsupdate.microsoft.com. At work we use MS stuff almost exclusively, and need to keep our W2K/WXP boxens updated. At home, I've got an WXP box for telecommuting and the odd game - it needs its fair share of windowsupdate too. If an update came out that made windowsupdate work just as well in Firefox, I guess there'd be little or no reason to use IE anymore for me.

Re:IE fans...

[Anonymous Coward]

I recently switched to Firefox, because my IE is somehow corrupted, and I only get 400Kbps with it. With Firefox, I get my full 1.5Mbps that my ISP advertises. There's probably a solution to my IE problem (besides reinstalling the OS), but I prefer Firefox anyway. As for why I used IE before, it would have to be apathy.

Re:IE fans...

[scrytch]

> What makes it worth the problems? Is there something you actually like about it?

I like being able to save a whole page with all its contained objects (images, stylesheets), to a single .mht file. Before anyone goes off on a tear about how .mht is some proprietary MS thing, it's a real simple MIME multipart/related document -- as in, it uses an open standard the way it was intended to be.

I also like the ability to make bookmarks available offline with a single checkbox, and update them all through a single menu action.

DHTML behaviors are the bees knees, much easier to create and use than XBL.

Re:IE fans...

[DMUTPeregrine]

IE is the evil which is known. Though it has problems, people know what they are ( or think they know) They are afraid of change. Simple as that.

Mozilla/Firefox COULD get a larger market share

[Eric Pierce]

The places where I see Mozilla/Firefox making big inroads are companies that, by policy, switch everybody over to a new browser.

IBM is a perfect example. Aren't they in the middle of moving everybody's desktop to Linux?
They certainly won't be using IE anymore.

Re:dear god (or dear devil?)

[trashme]

People will not be willing to pay the extra price. Not when IE is free. Not when they think IE is already good enough. And most certainly not when they haven't even heard of Mozilla/Firefox.

I Don't Get It

[Blarfy_Snarflepoop]

So I rebuilt my wife's computer yesterday. It had been ravaged by spyware, and no amount of running ad-aware and that other program everyone recommends would clean it up. So I nuked it. On this rebuild, I installed Firefox for her, and "uninstalled" Internet Explorer (Funny, it's there when I click on 'windows update' - oh well). Anyways, she just told me that she hates firefox. I said "What's the difference?", to which she replied "I don't know, I just don't like it!".

Women. I thought I had 'em figured out.

Re:I Don't Get It

[jdfight]

Most likely, she doesn't like the Firefox skin... But show her how awesome tabbed browsing is and she might start to change her tune.

Not so simple

[iamacat]

Lots of people, including me, using Netscape 3.x or 4.x back in the days, went and downloaded IE overnight, through home dialup connections. At that time it was a better choice. It didn't crash as much as NS. It supported more powerful scripting. MS Java VM was faster. Outlook Express supported IMAP more cleanly. Frontpage Express worked with forms.

Now I moved to Safari at home and Opera at work. But apparently for most people on PC side new browsers are not attractive enough to download over their new cable connections. Maybe if you only go to well-known sites like CNN (or slashdot) and friend's home pages, adware and trojan hourses are not an issue. At least not until the last IIS-hijacking worm, which apparently did have an effect on market share. It's pr0n and wa13z search results that are really loaded.

What I don't understand is how people tolerate all the pop-ups/unders/overs, DHTML animations and unstoppable background sounds. Or on the OE side, worms that activate by simply viewing the message.

Re:Not so simple

[miu]

I remember the days of great switching too, I was running an ISP and had to watch the vast majority of my users switch to IE, often on my advice. I'd go so far as to say that IE was the best browser available from the time of NS 4.0 through the availability of Mozilla 0.6

My take on it was that NS 4.x sucked in ways that made users unhappy (slow, crash-prone, rendering bugs), while until very recently IE security bugs just haven't made users unhappy enough to switch.

Save our underdog!

[fleener]

You betcha Microsoft considers losing 1% of its marketshare as a big deal. Microsoft is the underdog, remember?

Tabs

[trashme]

The more I think about it the more I realize that tabs aren't all that different from multiple browsers windows. I don't use many of the advanced features like tab bookmark groups.

But there is one key difference: new tabs open in the background. It's what lets me read an article and open reference links in the background to be read later.

I haven't seen a way to do this by opening a new browser window.

Re:what a waste.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah yes, saturday afternoon... time to get drunk, is it, moderators?

Same in Poland

[Anonymous Coward]

I dont know how it is today, since I started building my own comps, but 3 years back every OEM comp sold in Poland came with a phat icon of IE labeled "The Internet"

Switching organizations...

[Micah]

I'm trying to talk my organization (about 750 desktops) into switching to Firefox as the standard.

Everyone in IT seems to agree that it's the better browser, but the resistance to switching mainly comes from having to install it on 750 boxes and training users. It doesn't seem to me like training should be that big a deal, since it's just a web browser, but some users tend to ask really stupid questions....

There's also the problem with it not working on some banking sites, but that can likely be resolved by the User Agent Switcher plugin.

I'd love to change, but I can't

[AbRASiON]

I'm I guess a more rare type of user here.

I'm an advanced IE user (wait I'm not finished here)
Using Netcaptor on the top of IE has been fantastic for me.

While it does have some flaws from Ie - security, performance and "weird" IE / explorer problems (opening pdf's - locking ALL tabs up when opening and similar symptoms with a slow ftp) it's still excellent.

Besides those 2 problems the feature set is humungous - it's brilliant and it's for advanced browsing types.

I tried Firefox on Thursday (It got a lot of hype that day, thought I'd give it another shot) but the plugins still don't cover half of what Netcaptor does (no I don't work for them) so while I can get a much better browser than IE with Firefox and plugins, I can not get a better browser than IE+Netcaptor with Firefox+Plugins.

(same goes for "MYIe2" - I'm not a fan of that package but a lot of the more technical geeks really love the features)

Family Network Upgrade

[ljavelin]

I upgraded my family network to Mozilla 1.6.

About 4 years ago I decided to experiment and gave everyone the same platform. Part of that platform was IE, Outlook Express, and McAfee VirusScan.

Thank goodness for the VirusScan and auto-update. And thank goodness I told everyone to never open email from people they don't know. And to never open attachments from anyone.

Happily, no one got a virus. But I did have to make sure that their PCs were up to date at least once a week... service patches, etc. Now let me offer some thanks to the VNC developers. (as the family network is distributed around the U.S.A.)

About a month ago, I decided "to hell" with IE and Outlook. In the end, it was an easy upgrade - replacing IE was easy, and everyone likes Mozilla better. Outlook was a little harder to replace, but now everyone is happy with Outlook after a little learning. Everyone LOVES Mozilla's junk mail handling.

The conclusion? Five more windows PCs now run Mozilla instead of IE/Outlook. No one is unhappy with the change. Everyone likes the new features, and now I don't have to spend a big chunk of my time keeping the world up to date.

PS- Everyone is running Windows - except for one Mac (Safari) and my Linux boxes (Mozilla 1.7).

I've seen thses numbers before

[Dracos]

OneStat has shown a 1% drop in IE usage in each of their last two reports, the most recent of which was issued on May 28, well before the lastest crop of reasons not to use IE (usage then: 93.9%).

With the recent Moz/FF download increases and FF1.0 in September/October, it would not surprise me if IE usage dropped to or below 90%, with Gecko usage sitting at about 5-6%, before the end of the year.

Re:Is your mother really THAT stupid? Probibly not

[Stray7Xi]

I finally convinced my mom to switch a few weeks ago (ok well maybe leo laport (sp?) did). First off she was expecting some big differences but thought it looked and felt the same. The main thing she misses is the autofill from google toolbar. Get this, she asked why there was no history button on the toolbar. So I said "I could fix that" but before I could steal the mouse away, she was already setting it up on her own... I was so proud *wipes tear from eye*

That being said, IE is still the default browser because of my dad. I know better then to give firefox to someone who hasn't mastered the intracacies of the right-click or double-click. Yes he has to take his hand off the mouse to find the right mouse button... *sigh*

The sad thing.. 25 years ago, my dad was doing some fortran programs (not as his job, but as a small part of his job) and little later we had an apple2 that he used to teach us kids some BASIC. Where do they go wrong...

Oh ya this was supposed to be about firefox.. well I've done my part in switching 3 people, where's my certificate and lapel pin.

Slashdot browser stats

[abrinton]

Does anyone know what breakdown of browser use for Slashdot is?

Right software for the right job.

[twitter]

No, for most "normal" home users, and even some geek types, it is not. I don't know why this has to keep being said over and over, but not everyone is using only easily swappable web browsing, office, development, or email applications with their systems.

Yeah, but everyone does that more than they do other things and should be using free software for it. Microsoft should not be used for anything that touches the web and should be run virtualized of firewalled heavily if not blinded to your network.

Dual booting solves the game problem and more often than not, the games are moving to Linux anyway. Dual booting is a pain and best done with bios or swapable hard drives unless Winblows requires a rebuild. At the same time, Windows gaming, with all of it's Direct X dll hell has always been a pain under winblows, so gamers should not have a big problem with your proposition.

Until it is possible to run practically any Windows software under Linux with no problems, the most you are going out of the majority of home users is a dual-boot, if that. Certainly not complete swap-outs.

Bah. I've been swapped out for years now. There's enough "good enough" free software for everything. Let me tell you, it all runs much more practically and easier than Windoze junk ever did.

A nice little program called Bosch can solve the rest of the world's windoze problems. Check out these screenshots for yourself:

Official shots
XP running in Bosch under Linux

It may be slow and hurt, but it's way easier to do that than it is to keep a real windoze machine going with email, web browsing and all of those other things Windoze is not good at.

Re:Right software for the right job.

[Jesus_666]

I have a dual-boot system and I have no idea what you are talking about. If you have some free HDD space to create a Linux parition in you can just take your Win box and put Linux on top of it. Grub takes care of all your booting needs. Easy as Dell.
Windows gaming is no pain either; in order to get a DirectX DLL Hell you have to mistreat your system in some way, for example by downgrading to a previous DX version. If you don't try anything fancy Win gaming is just a matter of having the latest DX (comes with every major game) and the drivers for your hardware installed.

If you use Linux for work/browsing/mail and Windows for gaming and (via Moz/FF) occasional browsing you should be perfectly fine. Behind a NAT router or something similar, that is. Less hassle and better performance than using a VM.

By the way, it's Bochs. Bosch is an electric drill manufacturer.

Re:Right software for the right job.

[PhoenixFlare]

Yeah, but everyone does that more than they do other things and should be using free software for it.

Microsoft should not be used for anything that touches the web and should be run virtualized of firewalled heavily if not blinded to your network.

It's like you're wearing blinders. With a little common sense, Windows can be very secure and very usable. You just have to do things like running a decent firewall, don't idiotically open strange attachments from anybody, run a decent virus scanner, keep reasonably up to date with the latest patches, etc. I have personally been using Windows and following such practices from 3.1 up to XP Pro, and have never been infected with any form of system-disabling virus, or for that matter, any viruses at all that were not immediately detected and quarantined.

Dual booting solves the game problem

Yes, more or less. Though if you're always booting into Windows, there's just no reason to start up into Linux in the first place after a while. As far as most everyday tasks go, Windows can do pretty much everything Linux can, especially with Mozilla/Firefox & co., OpenOffice, and other open-source programs being available for Windows these days.

more often than not, the games are moving to Linux anyway.

Evidence, please.

Sure, there's a smattering out there, but it's not even close to the point where you could walk into a store and know there's a good chance of a Linux version being there for new game X.

Bah. I've been swapped out for years now. There's enough "good enough" free software for everything.

Yet again, you personally having swapped out does not mean that the general population is ready for the same thing :)

Let me tell you, it all runs much more practically and easier than Windoze junk ever did.

I think I already addressed this.

It may be slow and hurt

As Yoda said, that...Is why you fail. "It may be slow and hurt" is not going to cut it.

Re:Right software for the right job.

[Bert64]

So you did recieve viruses, and got lucky that the antivirus developers got those viruses first and worked out how to detect them...
What if you got infected with something new that wasn't detected yet? Many viruses nowadays are designed to eliminate antivirus programs, and remember the antivirus programs will always be a step behind the virus authors.

Re:Right software for the right job.

[PhoenixFlare]

So you did recieve viruses, and got lucky that the antivirus developers got those viruses first and worked out how to detect them...

No argument there.

What if you got infected with something new that wasn't detected yet?

Then, I admit I could be in some trouble. But, as I was trying to say, if you follow safe practices in the first place, you will not find yourself in that situation.

Re:Right software for the right job.

[Bert64]

And what are safe practices, considering you can follow vendor supplied "safe" practices. visit a website and your os-integrated browser gets exploited via a vulnerability for which there is no patch available, and installs a new virus for which no antivirus definitions exist, and which disables whatever av you have so it won't update itself to detect the new virus.

Re:Right software for the right job.

[PhoenixFlare]

And what are safe practices

Even if you're just asking a rhetorical question, it still bears repeating yet again. As i've already said several times on this thread:

Don't use IE. Don't use Microsoft email clients without turning off the various "dangerous" aspects like auto-loading of images and such. Don't blindly open every strange attachment that floats its way into your inbox.

That right there will cut out probably 90% of the problems you will experience from viruses/spyware/malware. For the rest, buy some antivirus software or use one of the free online scans, and spend $40 to put the machine(s) behind a router with at least a basic built-in firewall.

And as I can already see the "but that takes so much time! Linux is so much better than all that M$ crap!!!"-type reply coming from someone else again, i'm done.

Have a nice life.

Re:Right software for the right job.

[Bert64]

But the fact is that, products marketted towards end users shouldn't need all this hardening and purchasing of additional third party products in order to make them safe to use online..
MacOS doesn't require such extreme procedures and is perfectly suited to end users, windows is unsafe to use online without higher levels of knowlege than joe public has and unix is too difficult to use without higher levels of knowlege than joe public has..
So, neither unix or windows are truly suitable for end users right now.

Re: Stupid companies are still out there

[jez9999]

OTOH, if someone is using Mozilla/Firefox as their regular browser and aren't technical, will they even know to switch to using IE for that particular site, or just think the site is broken?

A glimmer of hope for web developers

[yaphadam097]

I'd given up long ago, but perhaps now there really will be a day when we can code to a single open standard.

Also, I wanted to mention the main reason why I started using Firefox: better tools for developers. When you install it you can choose to install developer tools which has a nice simple Javascript console showing all the errors that Javascript produces when you execute a page. The view source function works even when there are errors (Which is arguably when it is needed most... at least for developers,) And browsing arbitrary XML content doesn't force you to use a crappy default stylesheet like MS does. All of these features are better than the analogous ones in Mozilla 1.x and legacy Netscape products, and there are no useful equivalents in IE.

That 1% comes out of an MS end-user base

[MooseByte]

"1% is not really any news. Seriously, it is pathetic that /. is jumping up and down, all giddy, for one percentage point."

It's the first loss in an MS-dominant end-user application. As in the masses. And that is extremely significant.

I'll guarantee you there is plenty of jumping up and down in Redmond over that 1%. And not celebratory. Fortune magazine had an article on IE slipping over security concerns. In my company alone I have far more leverage now to introduce Opera/Firefox/etc. than I did a month ago (test installations now in place). In other words, awareness is reaching the mainstream.

And as others have pointed out, simply knowing there are choices, not to mention better ones, is a huge step forward in the cosumer market. A corner is being turned here, sharp or wide we don't know, but again I guarantee that Redmond is NOT happy over this.

"IIS has 35% and went down to 21%, Apache had 56% and went up to 67%"

Also worth cheering, but those are server "geek" technologies, where there has long been an appreciation for ease of maintenance and reliability. Both set of stats together are no doubt making for a bad day on the MS campus.

Re:That 1% comes out of an MS end-user base

[numark]

The point that is being advanced by the grandfather post is that 1% is insignificant insofar as that it quite possibly reflects mere statistical noise. Especially with something that depends on counters on certain web pages, an increase in articles of interest to Mozilla users on those web pages could be reflecting a 1% increase, which actually turns out to be false. It could also reflect rounding errors. Basically, 1% shifts in statistics such as this are at risk of being just normal shifts, without any real progress being made one way or the other.

Re:That 1% comes out of an MS end-user base

[aztracker1]

I actually like IIS, and .Net ... but refuse to use IE as my main browser, and have gone so far as to block most IE users on my hobby site, citing security issues, and links to moz, ff and opera as better alternatives.

That's been in the numbers, tipping point is here.

[twitter]

It could be not a gain in Mozilla, but a drop in the number of IE machines that still function. IE lets so much adware/spyware in that a lot of machines will cease to function at all.

Nah, that's been going on for at least a year. Last summer, as more people picked up broadband, things really started to get ugly. I saw hundreds of broken windoze PCs brought into the retail shop where I worked. The answer was to adaware and spybot them if they booted ($40), rebuild them if they did not($75 if they had their original software). That answer would last a few months and they would be broken the same way. Non broadband users were not spared either, hackers were getting to them and they got porn dialers. So that kind of thing has been in the statistics for a while.

What's new is:

• Fewer people are first time computer owners. They have been on the upgrade train before and things are only getting worse.
• M$ does not have an "upgrade" that "fixes" things. They can't try that route even if they wanted to. XP gets nailed just as or more often than any other M$ junk.
• Free software is now vastly superior. It's not just Mozilla, but Mozilla is a nice introduction.

Mozilla is the thin wedge. Platform exploits will continue underneath it and people are going to start moving to free software.

Re:dear god (or dear devil?)

[Chris Carollo]

Mozilla is technically superior.

But is it really?

A few of my tech-savvy friends tried Mozilla/Firefox and ended up preferring to continue to use IE. From their point of view, a bunch of pages didn't work in Firefox/Mozilla and the bookmark management didn't work as well (no-drag-n-drop within the meny itself, can't get to the bookmark via the windows Favorites menu). They liked the addition of tabs, but didn't notice any speed difference. They have the google taskbar installed so they've already got popup blocking.

In the end, Firefox/Mozilla just had too many issues that were relevant to their day-to-day browsing, and didn't offer enough of an improvement for them to actually want to switch. One ended up using Maxthon and really loves it.

Personally, I'm a loyal Firefox user. I can't live without tabs and have learned to deal with the little ideosyncracies in certain pages.

There seems to be a general consensus here that if only people were exposed to other browsers they'd all pick Firefox/Mozilla...but until they get really really solid and eliminate all page compatibility issues, I don't think that's truthfully the case.

Re:dear god (or dear devil?)

[slavetrade55]

People will not be willing to pay the extra price. Not when IE is free. Not when they think IE is already good enough.

Well, IE isn't free; you have to pay for windows to get it. Unless you download it later on your own, in which case it's the same as downloading Mozilla/Firefox. And as far as them thinking it's good enough, well if it's good enough for people, then what reason do they have to use any thing else? And why should they? How is bundling something that is good enough for consumers a bad thing?

...That is, until they realize it blows in comparison to firefox. But it's not Microsoft's responsibility to point out the virtues of their competitors; that would be the job of the people trying to sell computers with Firefox preinstalled.

FIX THE CALENDAR

[EvilStein]

Yes, it's me again.

Want small businesses to move to Mozilla? It can happen, but the lack of a fully-featured calendar sticks them to Outlook.

Take a look at some of my prior comments. This is a huge issue. I do consulting on the side and you don't know how many times I hear:
"Can the Calendar in Mozilla act like Outlook?"
"Can it import Outlook meeting requests?"
"Can I sync it with my PDA?"
"Can I email requests to other users so they can just double-click it and add it to their Mozilla calendar?"

The answers to the above are pretty much NO.
Yet, there's time to bicker about the default theme for Firefox.
Screw themes. Let's work on functional features.

Small businesses just won't give a shit about Mozilla unless basic calendaring features like the above find their way into the software. Instead, they'll do what they've been doing - Windows Server 2003 Small Business Edition, and Outlook. Just to send calendar invites back & forth.

Sad, but true.

Netscape Calendar used to work well. What the hell happened?

Re:FIX THE CALENDAR

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Yet, there's time to bicker about the default theme for Firefox.
Screw themes. Let's work on functional features.

Heretic. YOU MUST BURN!

Re:FIX THE CALENDAR

[mnewton32]

Valid points perhaps, but we're talking about web browsers here, not mail programs.

Re:FIX THE CALENDAR

[pedersoj]

I'll bring another 1800 to the Mozilla game in a heartbeat with calendaring. It's the only thing stopping the move.

Re:FIX THE CALENDAR

[TRACK-YOUR-POSITION]

What stops you from using Outlook for mail/scheduling and Mozilla/Firefox for the web? Given recent security related events, the only correct answer to that is "insanity".

Re:FIX THE CALENDAR

[EvilStein]

When you use Outlook, you're pretty much tying yourself into Microsoft products. Outlook & Office very tightly integrate with IE (Mappoint, Infopath, etc..)

Yes, you could "just let them use Outlook" - but it's an image thing. Mozilla can't do a lot of the stuff Outlook can (Calendaring) - and if the allegedly superior/safer Open Source alternative can't, the Microsoft client can.

Having the two operating simultaneously can work, but not for average novice users. Outlook likes to pull up IE, regardless of what your default browser is set to. (At least with Outlook 2003..)
Give them Outlook, and they're right back to the Microsoft only landscape...IE included.

Re:FIX THE CALENDAR

[DMUTPeregrine]

which is why you make a simple app, called internet explorer.exe, which launches firefox.

M$ does not care...

[linuxhansl]

M$ is absolutely not interested in strong browser technology. The Internet is bad for Microsoft, it compromises their lock on the desktop.
M$ is interested in a bad browser experience so that people - especially enterprise user - revert back to fat clients, of course using Windows.

Just wait a bit, and M$ will have centrally administered applictions that install fat windows clients (just look at longhorn, avalon, etc).

So before we laugh at M$ for not fixing IE bugs, etc... That is their strategy!

Re: Slashdot crowd will probably bumb that 1% ...

[_xeno_]

Last time I posted a link in the comments, I got around 49% IE usage. Mozilla was around 19% at the time. That was in 2001.

Suffice it to say that while Internet Explorer use is fairly high on Slashdot, it's still used far less than average. I would expect Mozilla usage in Slashdot users to have increased since then.

Climbing the Mountain....

[The Foo]

Well, 1 percent is still 1 percent. You gotta take baby steps. Stuff like this takes time. Its still a gain.

My GRANDmother loves Mozilla

[BobBonobobo]

After slowly teaching her how to use the internet enough to get to Yahoo! Mail and forward on ponzi schemes, my Nana had it all. Then, Yahoo upgraded Mail to no longer support her config (Win95/IE4). She neither needs nor wants a new computer. She just wants to email relatives.

So, I remotely instructed my Dad to install Mozilla and set it up as her default browser, same home page and everything. Boom! Back in business. Firefox, wisely, doesn't support Win95, but I sure am glad Mozilla does.

What have you done?

[Anonymous Coward]

I explained to all my non technophile married buddies that the better security and popup blocker of Mozilla along with an after session cleanup procedure makes hiding your porn habits from the wife and kids a breeze. That's six converts who wouldn't have considered it otherwise by me.

IE Sucks

[toxique]

Yes.

I really hate the IE crap.
- i got tired of spyware, adware, hijacks, malicious activex & ocx shit, and whatever crap you imagine.
- it is bloated
- completely unstable
- i got it infected with any kind of shit which makes it clog my system and eventually freezes mi system all the time (Even running spybot, ad-aware, spyware blaster !!! there's no way to clean all the fuckin shit)

I switched to Mozilla. I use it 99% of the time. Man IT ROCKS!
- secure. no spyware. no adware.
- stable
- lightweight (not bloated at all)
- fast, a lot faster than IE

Anyway i have to use IE sometimes in order to correctly display pages with proprietary MS shit which causes pages not to display correctly in Firefox, for example when filling tax forms for our local IRS.

To clarify...

[KnightStalker]

I meant for normal browsing, non-work-required, etc. The number of sites that don't work properly with Gecko or KHTML (due to badly tested DHTML or whatever) is very small and shrinking all the time, so if people are aware of alternatives and capable of switching, I don't know why they wouldn't. Apathy? No need for extra features?

Feature on Mozilla in Globe and Mail

[guanno]

A recent Globe and Mail article features a favorable report on the turn around of Mozilla's bug trackers. Seems that Mozilla may also have plans to impliment an auto-update feature, or at least auto-notifications.

Re:Feature on Mozilla in Globe and Mail

[guanno]

Just found the page for Handling Mozilla Security Bugs.

Re: Slashdot crowd will probably bumb that 1% ...

[Anonymous Coward]

So, 50% IE users, but only 68% Windows users. The likely conclusion is that IE dominates for Windows-using Slashdotters.

Also, IE has an even higher overall marketshare now than back in 2001 (when there still was 5-10% for Netscape 4.)

Opera convert to Firefox, love them extensions

[jimcooncat]

A bit offtopic, I know, but the recent IE scares got me thinking about all my browser installations. I converted from the ad-based Opera to Firefox, as I found it was an (almost) good enough replacement. Now that Firefox allows me to easily uninstall extensions, it has become the best free (in context with my cold Michelob) browser out there.

My boss likes it better than IE, and I haven't shown him any of the neat tricks yet! Be sure to get the Tabbrowser Extensions by Shimoda Hiroshi, available with many others at texturizer.net, and check out the other cool toys there, too. Enough to keep folks busy playing with so they won't care about downloading spyware for a while.

Marketcap? Please (nt)

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think so.

That What the Logs Are Saying

[xcomm]

They are very right about the overall trend, it is to see since about a month or so.
But, it seems to be much more in percent as the article stated. The above results are from an international non IT page. So this means Mozilla's are gaining under the common users.

MS Internet Explorer 86
Mozilla 5
Netscape 4
FireFox 3
Opera, Unknown, Safari,Firebird for the rest.

Keep on walking Mozilla!

Mention on NPR?

[ddt]

I wonder if this has anything to do with the tech consultant on NPR who I'd say a week or two back explicitly recommend that people switch from IE to Firefox or Mozilla.

Re:dear god (or dear devil?)

[mforbes]

Maybe the strategy should be to encourage ISPs to include Firefox in their install cds (that are mostly useless anyway, but for some reason most people believe they need to install their provider's software...) instead of IE.

Re:dear god (or dear devil?)

[Anonymous Coward]

Page compatibility issues? Mozilla is far more standards compliant than IE, and you can get plug-ins for flash/java.... that only leaves horrible ASP sites that try to for you to ues IE or use some hideous DHTML

Anywho, do you have some links about these so called incompatible sites?

Install it as an unpriveledged user!

[JThundley]

If you won't get in trouble and don't have administrator on a work computer, you can install Firefox in My Documents. It works extremely well that way as a completely unpriviledged user. You can install themes and extensions too. I recommend it to those trapped at work ;)

Re:Install it as an unpriveledged user!

[poofyhairguy82]

Or put it on a pen drive. That's what I do, it works without a hitch. Also that way I can use the same bookmarks/pluggins at work.

Heh, 'redundant'.

[JessLeah]

You guys have a funny definition of 'redundant'. This was actually the first post on this thread. Idiots.

Firefox as a virus?

[Anonymous Coward]

Would it not be nice if a virus with the same spread as melissa, blaster or anything downloaded firefox or set it as the default browser :-) Perhaps we'd see 10% increase within a couple of days.

Re: Slashdot crowd will probably bumb that 1% ...

[mdfst13]

Your link is to KDE relevant content. I suspect that that biases the results more than the fact that the was posted on slashdot. Note that Konqueror is used by more people than Opera in your results...something else that I would expect from a crowd that is biased towards KDE.

A Statistical analysis of "one percent"

[FMRocks]

I used to be a student of statistics. I have seen a lot of prople argue here that WebSideStory's statistic may not be scientific or significant enough. Whether or not it is scientific enough remains to be debated. Yes it does use a sample size, but the sample can be assumed to be reasonably random, if only for its large size.

Now, the significance part. Some have argued 1% is not much. You just can't say that statistically. It depends on what the rangle of 95% confidence level (this 95% has NOTHING to do with MS's browser market share) is. And since the article clearly mentions that IE has been steady at 95.7% since June 2002. Then, the real situation is this: It has been 95.7% for 24 months, and then declined in ONE month to 94.7%. The estimated standard deviation is far less than 0.5% (I would estimate definitely no more than 0.05% by the way it is reported, only one place after decimal point). Therefore, any change of over 0.1% over one month is certainly statistically significant. 1% is 10 times that amount. It is a VERY significant change - more than most people realize.

The problem with looking at 95.7 and 1 is that 1 does look very insignificant. But when total amount of time, and other statistical analytical methods are taken into account, that 1 is more than enough to ring warning bells all over Redmond.

Re:A Statistical analysis of "one percent"

[FMRocks]

Oh, and I would also like to say that the change is likely greater than the reported 1% since both Opera and Mozilla browsers are capable of identifying themselves as MSIE.

Re:A Statistical analysis of "one percent"

[Xconnect]

I know you can do that on Opera through its options but how do you do that with Mozilla?

Evolution!

[mdfst13]

Mozilla Firefox is *not* an email or groupware client. It is a web browser. The open source email/groupware client is called Evolution (and there may be others as well). Evolution replaces Outlook; Firefox just replaces Internet Explorer.

This is presumably part of the reason why Mozilla came up with Firefox: to allow mix and match between browser and email clients. The Mozilla project provides an Outlook Express (email client) replacement in Mozilla Thunderbird, but it doesn't have a groupware (Outlook) replacement.

It's more than 1%

[plazman30]

Remember, most people who run Mozilla, Opera, or any other "alternative browser", have their ID string set to identify them as IE, to prevent certain sites from blocking them. I do this on my corporate intranet site, cause everything except IE is blocked. It's a shame we can't see how many browsers masquerade as IE. Perhaps another bit of Javascript code that identifies the REAL browser, so true statistics can be tracked.

I wounder how many people use fake UA under Mozill

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem i have is how many ie6 winXP are mozilla in hiding mode? Just so sites work with out complates. And are stuffing these figures up.

Re:Is your mother really THAT stupid? Probibly not

[jesser]

I filed bug 250797 for importing toolbar configuration from IE and quoted parts of your post.

Re:dear god (or dear devil?)

[mdfst13]

"Now... If some large OEM was to pre-install Firefox, then the picture would really start to change. But I doubt whether their contracts with Microsoft *allow* them to do that."

Microsoft contracts can not restrict OEM software installs of things that perform purposes available in the OS...it violates their agreement with the Department of Justice. Any provision about this in a Microsoft contract would be void and unenforceable (like a steamboat contract waiving the steamboat's responsibility for lost luggage if the steamboat blew up or a contract selling yourself into slavery; there are some things one cannot sign away).

Mozilla/Firefox as an IE plugin

[jesterzog]

Because, as the article pointed out, it is very difficult to get someone to change their browser. Once IE was integrated into Windows most users became very resistant to using anything else, they'd as soon adjust their virtual memory settings as use a non-standard OS component.

Perhaps Mozilla/Firefox should be marketed as a plug-in that somehow integrates into MSIE, and some people might be more open to installing it if and when required. :) (Of course, I'm not trying to suggest that it's a particularly polite or intelligent thing to do.)

It would just be amusing in many respects, but it's probably not possible for a plug-in to take over the IE rendering engine... then again...

Re:dear god (or dear devil?)

[Anonymous Coward]

> From their point of view, a bunch of pages didn't work in Firefox/Mozilla and the bookmark management didn't work as well (no-drag-n-drop within the meny itself, can't get to the bookmark via the windows Favorites menu)

I'm unable to drag folders. Bookmarks drag fine. Bookmarks are still primitive hacks tho, I don't see why they can't draw from diverse sources like bookmarks.html, the filesystem (IE favorites), RSS, a web service, etc. You can however drag them to the desktop or folders. I don't know anyone who actually uses bookmarks from the start menu, but I suppose they exist.

I think you hit on the major reason though: if it does exactly the same thing, why switch?

My web site stats show that...

[mdemirha]

I have a web site that I am selling automation programs for Windows. Thus all my visitors are Windows users. According to the web site stats, on September, October and December, 99.99% of all users use an IE based browser (IE, MyIE, Avant Browser, ...etc). Not looking at June 2004's stats, I see that 4% of the visitors are Mozilla users and 2% of the users are Opera users. If it grows like this, I bet IE will go down pretty soon. IE, YOU ARE GOING DOWN!!

Our stats show the same trend

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, this is if we ignore the statistical margin of error, which is probably larger than 1%, which means IE might have gained for all we know.

I'm tracking the browser and platforms used by visitors to our department website, (we get about 58,000 unique visitors a day) and I've seen Mozilla, Opera and other browsers slicing 1.5% off IE's market share over the last two months.

As for platforms, Windows XP is the fastest growing platform, but all Windows platforms combined is in decline. Linux has been growing constantly 0.1% per month over the last year. Right now it got a 2.9% share of the market.

I doubt that it's a statistical error...

Re:dear god (or dear devil?)

[Tenareth]

The problem is there are a ton of web developers out there that figure "if it works in IE, it's fine". IE lets developers be absolutely horrible and still render the page, breaking standards bad HTML form, etc.

What is interesting/important...

[AvantLegion]

... is the fact that it's quite possibly the start of a trend, not the end tally.

1% now gives way to 5% later, 10% later on, etc etc.

The important thing is the idea of breaking the mentality of "Internet Explorer" as being *the* gateway to the Web. That mindset has proven to be incredibly strong, and destroying it is important. IE need not die. Mozilla and others need only gain a very strong minority share, to the point where web developers can no longer ignore them. Then IE dependencies get further broken, allowing further easy adoption, etc.

Re:dear god (or dear devil?)

[Chris Carollo]

Page compatibility issues? Mozilla is far more standards compliant than IE, and you can get plug-ins for flash/java.... that only leaves horrible ASP sites that try to for you to ues IE or use some hideous DHTML

This is what I was telling them too, but the thing is, they just don't care. If a page works in IE and doesn't in Firefox/Mozilla, they're going to be unhappy with the browser, not the web page. From an enduser's point of view, all they care about is being able to browse with everything working. You can talk until you're blue in the face about Firefox's standards compliance, but when pages don't work, they're going to switch back.

waste of time.

[twitter]

It's like you're wearing blinders. With a little common sense, Windows can be very secure and very usable. You just have to do things like running a decent firewall, don't idiotically open strange attachments from anybody, run a decent virus scanner, keep reasonably up to date with the latest patches, etc.

I'm not wearing blinders, all of that is a pain in the ass. I've seen people try to do all of that. It eats up all of their time and fails anyway. I've got better things to do.

I have personally been using Windows and following such practices from 3.1 up to XP Pro, and have never been infected with any form of system-disabling virus, or for that matter, any viruses at all that were not immediately detected and quarantined.

Your experience is not typical. The hundreds of broken machines I've seen in retail repair are.

Re:waste of time.

[PhoenixFlare]

I'm not wearing blinders, all of that is a pain in the ass. I've seen people try to do all of that. It eats up all of their time and fails anyway. I've got better things to do.

Are you kidding?

Windows automatically updates itself.

The virus scanner automatically updates itself.

Software firewalls or router hardware can be installed, configured, and then left to run untouched for months on end with only a semi-automatic update now and then - i'm using a Linksys BEFSR41 router that I haven't had to touch since the day I hooked it up, besides a couple firmware updates that took about 5 minutes.

Maintaining a decently secured system for home or light work use is not a time-consuming task. If you think it is, then you either don't know what you should be doing, or you're setting your security standards much higher than they need to be.

Your experience is not typical. The hundreds of broken machines I've seen in retail repair are.

Is this really the fault of the browser/OS, or the fact that users aren't educated enough to know that you don't click on the flashing ad banners or open attachments on "I LOVE YOU" messages and so on?

With your attitude of "that is a pain in the ass. I've seen people try to do all of that. It eats up all of their time and fails anyway. I've got better things to do.", maybe I shouldn't be so suprised that many users can't perform such simple security tasks.

You'd be suprised how far 5 minutes of explanation or putting up posters or whatnot can go with even very non-technical users.

Re:dear god (or dear devil?)

[trashme]

Nearly all computer manufacturers out there only ship computers with Windows. The cost is rolled into the price of the computer. I'm not even sure people realize they are paying for Windows. As far as they are concerned, when you buy a computer it comes with Windows. Don't they all come with windows?

If Firefox is really hot shit (I certainly think it is), then people will be willing to pay the extra cost.

Do you really think if Dell had a build-to-order option to ship Firefox with your computer for another $50 that people would pay for it? I sure don't.

The simple fact is that the Mozilla Foundation does not have an easy job in advertising their browsers. Most people use IE and think it's good enough. I'm sure many people don't even know there are alternatives to IE. In the worst case, the most clueless computer users think IE is the Internet.

Maybe if popular print magazines or local newspapers ran stories on this wonderful little open source browser things will change. But as of now, it's only people in the know, the ones that actually browse computer tech sites that really know about Firefox.

Re: Stupid companies are still out there

[Alwin Henseler]

You are a member of a minority who won't use IE no matter what

Actually I think IE is a very capable browser. I just don't like a lot of minor, but important details. If it would be installed as an add-on program like any other, I would use Firefox and IE for different occasions, like I do with Firefox & Opera now.

Fully removing IE also kills some problems that you have with IE installed, even if you don't use it. My Win98SE install works more stable, eats less memory, and boots up faster because it doesn't load IE components at startup.

As a website designer you can't afford to ignore non-IE users, because they are among the visitors of your site, and their numbers seem to be growing. The biggest significance of Mozilla & friends is that they keep this variety in the market, so that users can choose whatever browser they like.

It's a fact...

[kwoff]

IE is dying.

Free Support

[rtb61]

I have made an adjustment as to what I will provide for free. I provide free support (browser and email) for all those people who do download and use firefox and thunderbird based upon my reccomendations and to those who use Lookout express or I.E. I just tell them they have been infected with what ever is going around and they will have to do a re-install (and recommend a safer browser and email client - if they swap they get help - if they don't bad luck - I am not wasting my time fixing the same problems over and over gain). Marketing done at a more direct level, with word of mouth beyond that. People love free support.

When will Slashdot support Mozilla?

[billstewart]

I've been using Firefox for a while, and eventually got fed up and shifted over to Mozilla, but Slashdot doesn't work right with either one of them. It's got something to do with vertically-aligned ads, I think. I'm assuming that the problem is that Slashdot's web pages aren't following HTML standards, as opposed to Mozilla not implementing them correctly, but somebody's messed up here, and it's really annoying that the big Anti-Microsoft Pro-Open-Source Discussion Site needs IE to render correctly....

don't blame the user and don't shit me.

[twitter]

Is this really the fault of the browser/OS, or the fact that users aren't educated enough to know that you don't click on the flashing ad banners or open attachments on "I LOVE YOU" messages and so on?

Those things should not be harmful and are not on my systems. Why do people like you continue to blame the user for Microsoft's poor design?

Windows automatically updates itself. The virus scanner automatically updates itself.

It's not that easy and you know it. Windoze updating and service packs that must be manually applied both break applications on your machine, so the user has to be very careful about applying each. Also, the user must manually click through a forest of tabs to turn off all sorts of junk that the update itself turns on. Everytime there's an exploit, some M$ apologist comes along and says that all you have to do is turn of X in configuration Y to stop the problem. Sometimes you get to hear about that setting before you get broken into, but this forces the user to slavishly follow the Wintel rags looking for every bit of such advice and having to decide which pieces of contradictory nonsense to use. Anti-virus software is just another patch for bad design. It works better than most M$ junk, but it costs money and the updates don't last forever. The upgrade train for most antivirus software is extreemly painful and the companies usually recomend that you buy a new PC! M$ users who go through all of that get nailed by something planted on their banks web site that has no fix anyway. That's a huge waste of time.

You can contrast this to the months of uptime the typical free software user gets without much effort at all. I've never had a Linux system violated or crash due to spyware or malware. It's time to move to Linux.

Re:don't blame the user and don't shit me.

[PhoenixFlare]

Well, it's quite obvious you're not going to listen no matter what I say.

I've tried to have a somewhat civil discussion, but you're bound and determined to stick to your own distorted vision of things and basically call me an idiot.

Have fun feeling superior and all that.

Re:Is your mother really THAT stupid? Probibly not

[Anonymous Coward]

know better then to give firefox to someone who hasn't mastered the intracacies of the right-click or double-click. Yes he has to take his hand off the mouse to find the right mouse button... *sigh*

The sad thing.. 25 years ago, my dad was doing some fortran programs (not as his job, but as a small part of his job) and little later we had an apple2 that he used to teach us kids some BASIC. Where do they go wrong...

GUIs are hard. My father also programmed computers a bit, back in the days before magnetic core memory was common (they used to use mercury delay lines), and he took programming classes for fun after he retired. He never did get used to the GUI.

A GUI is busy: there are multiple windows and you need to keep track of which one has focus. Messages pop up, and want you to click on them. Some of them matter, some of them don't, and some of them get lost behind another window when you accidently miss, click the wrong window and raise it. Furthermore, the fonts are typically too small for older eyes. Then, there's the problem of double-clicking with old, slow reflexes. Right-clicks bring up a context menu, and that's another problem: being contextual, it's different every time! That's a modal interface, and modal interfaces are confusing. The whole mess might seem ``intuitive'' to you if you've been using it long enough, but it's a miserable, confusing mess if you aren't used to it.

I found that as long as my father had a command line and a manual, he was fine. He could tell the machine exactly what to do, and it would do it. Typing ``man foo'' made good sense to him, and reading man pages wasn't a problem once I explained the meaning of the cryptic characters in the command synopsis. He could handle the computer just fine, but Mozilla (and also IE, when he tried Windows) was a source of problems.

Mean vs. Statistical Significance

[TPFH]

one percentage point is simply not statistically significant

This might be redundant, but hey, this article is 3 days old and almost no one seems to mod comments over 3 hours old, let alone 3 days. (And I did skim through this thread and didn't see this)

Also, this is only part of a pet peeve of mine about how most statistics quoted in the media are useless because they only tell you the mean (and refer to it as "average").

Statistical Significance is not determined by the mean alone!!!!!

(Let's see, five bangs, that might get me modded as troll or flamebait. Only time will tell.)

Or, now that I think about it, what Statistical Signicance means is the probability that there is (or is not) an error variance in your statistics. Of course this is refering to determining if a sample is representative of the entire population. I would imagine in the article refered to they have a very big sample size, and as such a high probability that their statistics are significant.

Some quotes from my Research Design textbook:

If a given result is not likely to have arisen by chance, the result is said to be statistically significant. This is just another way of saying that the results are probably due to the effect of the independent variable rather than to error variance. Another way of putting it is that the result is probably reliable.

Alpha Level The probability that an observed difference between means occured because of sampling error (chance). By convention, the maximum acceptable alpha level is 0.05.

F-ratio The test statistic computed when using an analysis of variance. It is the ratio of the between-groups variance to within-groups variance.

Mean The arithemetic average of the scores in a distribution. The most frequently reported measure of central tendency.

Median The middle score in an ordered distribution.

Mode The most frequent score in a distribution. The least informative measure of centeral endency.

Normal distribution A specific type of frequency distribution in which most scores fall around the middle category. Scores become less frequent as you move from the middle category. Also refered to as a bell-shaped curve.

Null hypothesis In inferential statistics, the hypothesis that population values do not differ (most often applied to population means).

p-value In a statistical test, the probability, estimated from the data, that an observed difference in sample values arose through sampling error. p must be less than or equal to the chosen alpha level for the difference to be statistically significant.

Standard deviation The most frequently reported measure of variability. The square root of the variance.

t-test An inferential statistic used to evaluate the reliability of a difference between two means. Versions exist for between-subjects and within-subjects designs, and for evaluating a difference between a sample mean and a population mean.

Variance A measure of variability. The averaged square deviation from the mean.

Note that this is only the very basics of statistics after I quickly looked up stuff in a book from a class I took years ago. Most statistics quoted in the media do not include the standard deviation, let alone the p-value. Why do we accept this? OK, because most people out in the real world don't know the first thing about real statistics, and don't care either. Ironic that they seem quite willing to quote them nonetheless.