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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

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: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: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.

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: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.

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: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.

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: 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: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.

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.

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

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.