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)"
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!
I
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
Line eater? What lin
Now that would be significant...
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
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?
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.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
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.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
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.
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..
I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous...
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.