Slashdot Mirror
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)"
"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. :-)
"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.
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.
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?
It's easier to wear the spandex than to do the crunches. --David Lee Roth
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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%
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
Uh, not really. Taco has always said that IE figures heavily into Slashdot's stats. Everyone at work, after all.
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.
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
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
- You want a higher confidence level
- The sample standard deviation is larger
- 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".