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.

[garnetridge]

"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.

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.

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

It could simply be a single large-scale corporate migration to Mozilla...

Now that would be significant...

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.

[avdp]

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).

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[next1]

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.

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.

[Chess_the_cat]

But it's not a trend. It's a one time jump. Let's see what happens next month.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[killbill!]

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.

Re:Whooptyshit, one percent.

[fermion]

Actually, the numbers may be in worse shape that you suggest. Most browsers, other than IE, allow you to specify your preferred agent identifier. Additionally most modern browsers, other than IE, can be easily set up to reject certain cookies of images. Therefore if the count depends on the id tag, or acceptance of a cookie, or the loading of an image, certain users will not be counted correctly. These systematic errors in methodology will tend to over-count the IE user, or the non tech savvy user that will tend not set these limits. In the end, one has to assume that the IE share has never been as high as the surveys suggest. One can also infer that the increase points to an increase in the number of average users switching to Mozilla, which is especially good news.

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.

dear god

[mateomiguel]

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.

Re:dear god

[Weh]

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?

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.

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.

Re:dear god

[sosegumu]

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?

Re:dear god

[bedouin]

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.

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.

Change IS Change

[eSims]

I am not a statistician and therefore am not going to discuss the merits of 1%, but Change IS Change.

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!

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.

Yes, Whooptyshit, one percent gain against MS

[MooseByte]

"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. :-)

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.

Nice features.

[jb_02_98]

"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!

Depends where you look

[linuxci]

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.

A change is afoot

[foobybletch]

I Think I first really noticed that Mozilla and Firebird were making an impact, when finally my bank actually supported a browser other than Internet Exploder for their online service, and specifically mentioned support for Mozilla!

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

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:wow.

[Prod_Deity]

"(Posting AC for obvious reasons.)"

That's o.k. Mr. Gates, we understand. ;-)

Re:How do you really measure it?

[linuxci]

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?

Re:Calm down, think ti through logically...

[CritterNYC]

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.

Citibank recommends non-IE browsers.

[MongooseCN]

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.

Re:Citibank recommends non-IE browsers.

[upsidedown_duck]

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.

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

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:Firefox software updates

[linuxci]

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

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:Is your mother really THAT stupid? Probibly not

[GreatDrok]

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.

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.

Significant

[twitter]

...one percentage point is simply not statistically significant.

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.

Re:Significant

[PhoenixFlare]

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.

Return of the browser wars

[TrixX]

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 finally switched for one reason.........

[g0hare]

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.

Re:1% +

[jfengel]

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.

It's like Safe Sex...

[Otis_INF]

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 ;)

IE's dominance is supported by *us*

[claar]

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..

In numbers

[Dexter77]

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.

Mozilla finally is useful.

[MtViewGuy]

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.

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:Which Advancement?

[mikael]

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.

Re:annoying old active x

[linuxci]

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% Pathetic, 14%, not so pathetic

[3770]

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%

Re:1% Pathetic, 14%, not so pathetic

[lifebouy]

No, it is news. Assuming it isn't an error, Microsoft losing a 1% of the market share means that 1 out of every hundred people got so fed up with IE being taken over by popup scripts and everything else wrong with it, that they decided change was in order. Most people loathe the idea of change, especially when it comes to the computer. So this is very significant, if it is accurate. Dropping one percent so quickly is a serious threat to dominance and make no mistake that Bill is concerned. Also keep in mind that this change is mostly home computers, not businesses. Businesses do not change unless they absolutely must, most of the time. So that 1% likely translates to 2 or 3% of home users. Which would mean that 1 out of possibly every 33 homes stopped using IE. You bet your ass Bill has a committee researching this one as we type.

Re: Slashdot crowd will probably bumb that 1% ...

[SilentChris]

Uh, not really. Taco has always said that IE figures heavily into Slashdot's stats. Everyone at work, after all.

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.

Re:dear god (or dear devil?)

[Chris Carollo]

Mozilla is technically superior.

But is it really?

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.

Re:Confidence intervals

[Snorpus]

Intuition would say that the population size would have to matter, but in fact it does not.

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

1. You want a higher confidence level
2. The sample standard deviation is larger
3. 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".

Re:Calm down, think ti through logically...

[Nurf]

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. :-)

Re:FIX THE CALENDAR

[EvilStein]

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.