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Mozilla Usage Doubles in 9 Months

TheBadger writes "Thanks to the success of Firefox, Mozilla now appears to have 14.9% of the browser share, double that of 9 months ago. Let this be a lesson in complacency."

26 of 773 comments (clear)

  1. In a perfect world... by Izago909 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The anti-trust suits against Microsoft would have resulted in at least one of two things. The first would be removing IE so the person has to manually install it from the CD or download it after install. Second, force all of Microsoft's web development tools to be 100% standards compliant. Instead, the Bush administration gives them a get out of jail free pass and California accepts coupons for MS products which is the anti-solution for software monoculture in schools.

    How much longer will people vote for politicians who let corporations shit all over consumers in the name of profit?

    1. Re:In a perfect world... by argent · · Score: 3, Insightful

      IE isn't some horrible virus MS installs by defauly on everyone's computer

      No, IE bears the same relationship to computer viruses and spyware that dirty needles do to AIDS. It's a kind of Typhod Mary of computer software, especially in its incarnation as the Microsoft HTML control that Outlook uses to display email.

      I'm not kidding. I banned IE and all other mail and internet programs that use the MS HTML control about seven years ago, after they integrated IE and the desktop. I could see that this was an incredibly stupid move back then... I didn't know what the results would be, but I knew they would be bad. After Melissa hit, I figured Microsoft would voluntarily undo the damage[1]. After a few years I realised they didn't care, that IE would never be acceptable, and they were probably criminally negligent for using this design.

      Seven years no, and we had ZERO large scale virus problems despite not using any standard antivirus software at all for years. It wasn't until our parent company dcided to merge our networks and force us to switch back to IE that we started getting real virus and spyware problems.

      So, yes, really, IE is worse than some horrible virus. You don't even have to use IE or Outlook to get all the resulting spam[2] and viruses flooding your mail server. This is like a virus that makes their victims actively seek out uninfected strangers and try to sell them viagra and vacation timeshares.

      [1] Boy, was I naive, I really did believe they were just unaware of the problems they were courting and really cares about security: remember, they'd just released NT and it actually had a good security model.

      [2] Spammers are using viruses to take over people's computers and send spam for them.

  2. IE6 went down and IE5 went up? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It looks like the percentage of users using IE6 went down while the percetnage for IE5 went up. I can't quite figure out what to make of this.

    1. Re:IE6 went down and IE5 went up? by ciroknight · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Less users using IE 6, more using Moz/Firefox with the extension that allows it to look like IE.

      --
      "Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
  3. Re:Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics by JoshMooney · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Unfortunatly, your non-techy websites don't represnet the entire web. Perhaps if you gave us a link, we could judge better. From my point of view, many "average" users are switching to Firefox. My mother and father (no, I don't live with them) have recently switched to Firefox on my suggestion and have thanked me for that suggestion. So, from my usage viewpoint, Forefox usage increased 100%. Its all relative.

  4. Re:Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You missed the point completely. I can give you the stats for my site, w3schools can give you the stats for their site, but none of them really mean anything. Only a major site like Google that attracts users of all types can really tell us anything.

  5. Security being mentioned on the news perhaps? by Billly+Gates · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Firefox is fairly new to most non nerd consumers. I never even tried it until about 5 months ago.

    The news over last summer with banking information being stolen convinced my old man to ask my about alternative browsers. I burned him a cd with firefox since the New York times mentioned it.

    My gf uses firefox on her old pc because she is worried about security after the scare this summer and due to the fact its an older machine and firefox is snappy on old hardware.

    People prefer IE but if something like online trading and banking flaws get involved all of the sudden switching may not be such a bad idea.

  6. Re:Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Google isn't major? What site is major then?

  7. Something to note by iamdrscience · · Score: 4, Insightful

    In those statistics (and really any browser statistics like them) Opera's numbers are unfairly represented because Opera allows you to change what header it sends out allowing you to spoof other browsers such as IE or netscape. I, like many other Opera users, generally have my user-agent set to IE. This is useful in the case of sites that (stupidly) limit your ability to access a page based on what browser you're using. For example, when I go to staples.com in Opera with my user-agent header set to Opera, it tells me I don't have cookies enabled (yeah, WTF?) but if I change my user-agent to IE, I can browse the whole site perfectly.

  8. Re:14% marketshare at w3schools.com by maxwell+demon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Increase of Mozilla/Firefox use for web designers is indeed very good news, because it means that more web sites will be browsable with those (a typical web desigher surely wouldn't design a web page he can't access with his standard browser, would he?).

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  9. Re:Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics by jericho4.0 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    You don't need to sample _everyone_ to get valid data. That's the point of statistics.

    I would guess that google is a little skewed, though. People not useing google are probably useing the default search in their browser, ie; IE. People visiting w3 are probably more net savvy than others, which would also skew the numbers.

    I'd say a general interest site like ebay would give a close to accurate picture.

    --
    "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
  10. Re:Opera? by servoled · · Score: 4, Insightful

    meh.. firefox is free without any catches. Plus, it has a very nice adblocking extension that makes browsing much less painful.

    Just browsing the features listed on the Opera page I don't see much that firefox doesn't offer natively or by installing an extension, so I see no real reason to switch and a few good resons not to.

    --
    "I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
  11. Re:Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics by NutscrapeSucks · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Google may not be the best site from which to gather browser usage statistics, but I think it's probably _one_ of the best ones these days.

    Depending if you are counting unique users or hits. I might hit Google 10-20 a day -- while the average person maybe only runs 1-2 searches a week. So Google would be highly biased towards people doing research, or trying to find answers to technical questions.

    I think you'd probably get the best stats from a general interest news site or perhaps mail.yahoo.com.

    --
    Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
  12. Re:Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics by Tim+C · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Actually 9.274 or 10% (like in your case) isn't very far off from 15%.

    Not far off? It's 50% off...

    (ie to go from a market share of 10% to 15%, you have to increase your install base by 50% - that's a pretty big leap)

  13. Temporary Speedbump by salesgeek · · Score: 3, Insightful

    No one will really notice until Mozilla browsers have 20%+ of the market. Then MS will announce that the next version of IE will:

    * do all the stuff mozilla does
    * works with dot net better
    * never gets dull, and can slice a tomato perfectly after trimming 4" off your car's muffler
    * is a free download
    * but wait... there's more (tm) ms will throw in MR. Paperclip browsing buddie at no cost to you.

    --
    -- $G
  14. I switched BACK from Firefox to IE by callipygian-showsyst · · Score: 3, Insightful
    I switched to Mozilla Firefox a couple of months ago only to switch back. Why? It was too buggy!

    The most interesting thing is that slashdot is one of the sites it has the most trouble with. Take a look at the screenshot on this page! Most of the time it will render /. like that until I hit reload and that will fix it.

    I've seen this behavior on Mac, Windows, and Linux. And there's a bug posted on it in the Firefox bug database. What perplexes me is why the /. folks with the necessary skills haven't fixed this problem yet!

  15. Re:Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics by penguinoid · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Strange, the statistics for kernel.org showed that IE had a market share of only 2%.

    Or did you think that geeks would be visiting some large entertainment company's website (unless it was pr0n, of course)

    --
    Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
  16. Re:Did you believe the parent? by Curtman · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I think he's just appealing to the groupthink mods.

    I think you're in denial.

  17. Re:Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics by Curtman · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Keeping Windows up to date is the admin's job. Not something the users should ever do, or have access to in the first place.

  18. Where the firefox people came from by cgenman · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If you look closely, you'll see that internet explorer 6 usage has been pretty level, but internet explorer 5 usage plumetted in almost exactly the same proportion that firefox / moz increased.

    It appears, then, that these are people with old machines who won't put up with an increasingly exploited browser but who can't run I.E. 6... either from a power standpoint or an access standpoint. Windows 98 usage only dropped 3% in that time, so nearly all of the converts must be running the older platform.

    I'd be interested to see statistics correlating the two, and whether or not the people visiting w3 skew towards having older computers than the average surfers.

    Either way the conclusion is clear: Microsoft is losing people at the tail end of their product line, because they refuse to offer a low-power, efficient alternative for older platforms.

  19. Does the site require MSIE? by leonbrooks · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Or do some things work in MSIE but not in other browsers? Or will some things work better if they're told that the visitor is MSIE, even if it's really links or w3m?

    Any of this would slant the stats.

    --
    Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
  20. Bias Defined. by twitter · · Score: 3, Insightful
    BigAl, not from South Park, writes:

    Just one thing, w3schools.com is a site for people who write websites, so they'd naturally have a much higher percentage of non-IE browsers than the more general browsing population.

    Sure, people with the most basic web knowledge know to avoid IE. If you filter out people with a clue you are left with 99.999% winblows users. I'm happy the cluefull are migrating in increasing numbers. It shows that whatever real and perceived barriers there are to using non M$ software are going away.

    Do you suggest we get all our stats from the clueless and deluded? Perhaps we should just get the facts from Bill Gates.

    Oh yeah, this is what they claim about their study:

    The statistics above are extracted from W3Schools' log-files, but we are also monitoring other sources around the Internet to assure the quality of these figures.

    --

    Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.

  21. Re:Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics by utlemming · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I think that this is a tech trend that Microsoft is not paying attention to. With all the spyware/viruses that are out in the wild, I have installed, recommneded and even forced (if you don't use Firefox, I will not fix your computer again) people to switch to Firefox. In my college apartment, all of us are now using Firefox. And the funny thing is that they are all non-Geeks (music majors mostly) and they are recommending it to their friends too. Microsoft seems to have forgotten the economics of the browser wars. Just because they won over Netscape by using the operating system as a way to distribute, doesn't mean that they will nessasarily maintain. And the thing that is going to be difficult for them is to convince everyone that is using Mozilla to switch back. The lesson that MS needs to learn if they want to maintain the dominance is to produce a secure product that gives people what they want. Heck, when some of MS's own execs use Firefox then you know that something is up.

    --
    The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.
  22. Note the flux. by SharpFang · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "Yes, Mozilla's increased, but at the expense of old IE5 installations only."

    So you assume the IE6 number didn't change, but people upgrade from IE5 straight to Mozilla?
    Sorry, but this poll doesn't include "transition stats". What I imagine is that about the same number of people run Windows Update and have IE6 installed as a result (or get XP instead of 98SE) as those who change from IE6 to Mozilla. That should be the reason why the IE6 stats don't change much - it gains from one side just as much as it loses from the other, but it gains and loses a lot simultaneously.

    --
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  23. Re:Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics by Blic · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I feel for you. My company was a Netscape house for a long time, tried going to Mozilla because Netscape 4.X just wasn't cutting it, but around that time there was a sort of meltdown in IT and the new management pushed IE/Outlook on the company.

    Now they wonder why the help desk is inundated with spyware calls.

    Funny thing is the corporate mailserver is still IMAP. People who know use Firefox/Thunderbird and just keep quiet about it, but who knows how long that will last - more and more parts of the intranet are requiring IE, and I'm sure Exchange isn't that far off...

  24. Re:Biased source sorry by shish · · Score: 3, Insightful
    w3schools is a site for people *learning* to make websites. Back when I were a n00b I used IE and I visited w3schools. Now that I know what I'm doing I use firefox and reference my locally stored copies of all the w3c standards. Thus it could be argued that w3schools would have a /lower/ percentage of non-ie browsers.

    For what it's worth, my web server is used to show my avatar on the megatokyo forums, and that accounts for ~95% of my site hits. According to those stats Gecko has 50%, IE has 40% and others have 10%. Again, the stats you get really depend where you look for them...

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