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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)"
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.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
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.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
Actually, you're looking at this the wrong way. 1% is absolutely huge when you consider how many Windows machines are out there.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.)
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?
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.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
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.
<!-- DHTML / JavaScript menu, popup tooltip, Ajax scripts -->
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.
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?
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.
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.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
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...
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.
-- shortcut - the longest distance between two points.
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.
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.
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
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.
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.
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.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Microsoft would start charging the OEMs more for their OS software if the OEMs started bundling Mozilla with their systems.
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.
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.
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.
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."
/. geek that likes trying new things - even if said new things are much better.
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
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
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".
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.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
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
"1% is not really any news. Seriously, it is pathetic that
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.
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.
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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".
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.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.
> 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?