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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.
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.
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"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!
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
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.
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
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.
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
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 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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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".