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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
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.
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.
Actually I read that as if the market share dropped to 1%... :)
For a moment I was completely stunned.
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 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 -->
"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. :-)
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.
"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!
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.
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
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.
It's like deja vu all over again.
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.
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.
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...
"(Posting AC for obvious reasons.)"
;-)
That's o.k. Mr. Gates, we understand.
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 :)"
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
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.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
bitiwiti
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
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.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
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.
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
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
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
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!"
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.
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.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
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
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.
Vote Quimby!
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.
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
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
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?
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
You betcha Microsoft considers losing 1% of its marketshare as a big deal. Microsoft is the underdog, remember?
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.
it'll come out the same day he asks for it, first he needs to learn how to talk....
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
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.
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.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
"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.
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.
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.
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?
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".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.
---
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!
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.