Slashdot Mirror
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."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
This is a completely non-story. W3Schools is a (good) site aimed at web developers, ones that actually understand and use HTML/CSS/etc rather than whatever Frontpage makes. Yes, it's good that more developers are using Firefox/Mozilla, but it is not indicative of average users. Google's Zeitgeist was a good measure of the average user, but they've dropped the browser stats. My non-techy websites get about 7% Firefox, and about another 3% of Mozilla/Netscape 6/7 users. Is Firefox/Mozilla usage increasing? Yes, but it is not at 15%.
Seriously? Hmm... they don't seem to have any category for Konquer/Safari users... or am I missing something? Either way nice to see Moz gaining ground... but... is this really true?
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.
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.
Personally, I keep an eye on thecounter.com to see how Mozilla's market share is doing. It's certainly more realistic than the linked article statistics page. Pity Google removed browser stats from the zeitgeist page.
--- There isn't any problem that can't be solved by a small, low yield nuclear device, is there??
The interesting this is that the browser with the biggest drop in usage from January to August is IE5. I wonder if this means that users of IE5 decided to switch rather than upgrade this year.
Complacency != Apathy
Whatever. Close enough.
And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced. But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird. The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire and thunder upon them. For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror.
from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15
Karma: Segmentation fault (tried to dereference a null post)
Um, your own chart shows that IE6 usage has barely budged in the past year and holds firm around 70%, near its high. Yes, Mozilla's increased, but at the expense of old IE5 installations only.
So, in this case, complacency is working fine.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
When I've checked my personal site's stats (small gardening site, roughly 400-500 page views per day) over the past couple months: I've been seeing roughly 70% Internet Explorer, 5% unknown, and the rest are mostly Mozilla/Netscape variants. Safari makes up just a couple percentage points.
About a year ago hits from IE were at about 90%.
#DeleteChrome
Here's some statistics from a different source (which actually presents stats from 5 sources), where Gecko (mozilla) ranges from 4% to 27% - it's clear that the stats greatly vary from site to site:
http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat.htm
Find free books.
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.
http://saveie6.com/
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.
Particularly since it shows Linux at 3% and Mac at 2.5%.
And it shows a fairly steady (if slow) increase.
"but we are also monitoring other sources around the Internet to assure the quality of these figures)"
is the rest of the parent's quote.
I run two web sites, one of which gets 3 million hits per day, neither of which are tech-oriented, and have seen very similar results to W3schools. In January, 7% Firefox/Mozilla and 85% IE. In August, 15% Firefox/Mozilla and 74% IE.
I should buy some cement.
If you went with the first answer rather than giving respondents two chances, I'd say you would have had a lot more that answered, "I dunno, what's a browser", and another 30% that answered, "Windows."
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.
I'm looking at btowser stats for seifried.org, averaging 70,000 visits a month in the security area and I'm not seeing even a hint of firefox in the top 15 browsers for any month, "MSIE 6.0; Windows X" and googlebot are the clear winners. You think people interested in computer security and UNIX would have a tendancy to use FireFox or Mozilla but IE is still kicking their butts.
36.97%=Mozilla/5.0 ; 33.65%=MSIE 6.0 ; 6.45%=Pompos/1.3 http://dir.com/pompos.html ; 6.40%=msnbot/0.11 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm) ; 2.71%=Opera 7.5 ; 2.46%=Yahoo! Slurp ; 2.41%=Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html) ; 1.93%=psbot/0.1 (+http://www.picsearch.com/bot.html) ; 1.49%=MSIE 5.5 ; 0.87%=Konqueror/3.2 ; 0.80%=Mozilla/3.01 (compatible;) ; 0.56%=Konqueror/3.3 ; 0.50%=MSIE 5.0 ; 0.43%=Konqueror/3.1 ; 0.41%=Opera 7.2
Here are the more normal Aug. results with about 0% hits coming from slashdot:
46.89%=MSIE 6.0 ; 16.82%=Mozilla/5.0 ; 7.92%=msnbot/0.11 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm) ; 6.50%=Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html) ; 3.55%=Ask Jeeves/Teoma)" ; 3.14%=MSIE 5.0 ; 2.67%=Pompos/1.3 http://dir.com/pompos.html ; 1.86%=MSIE 5.5 ; 1.82%=psbot/0.1 (+http://www.picsearch.com/bot.html) ; 1.27%=HTTrack 3.0 ; 1.05%=Yahoo! Slurp ; 0.93%=Mozilla/3.01 (compatible;) ; 0.88%=Opera 7.5
Unfair! Many IE users are forced to spoof their user-agent strings to represent themselves as Mozilla/FireFox users to make themselves looks hip and socially conscious.
Or not.
DCMonkey
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".
Most people who visit w3schools.com are not the average user, they are developers: early adopters. It would take at least another 9 months for global Mozilla usage to reach half these levels.
I prefer to go by the stats published by OneStat.com in their Pressbox.
However, I do think the rest of the year will bring a significant change in browser usage.
Schools and companies are the places where there are a huge number of computers. Those are the places where Mozilla can make inroads for quick jumps in market share. My school finally dropped Netscape 4 and is offering a custom Mozilla browser with its logo to every student. How long before others follow?
Not to Firefox troll, but I think everyone should make an effort to switch at least one person over to firefox. Then, see if they can switch at least one person.
I was happy using Mozilla, but since I switched to Firefox... I've been thrilled.
It flies, it has some nice plugins (I recommend FTPsync and Browser Agent switching for those annoying sites) and my experience has been nothing but great.
Just because I occassionally switch my user agent string doesn't mean I don't complain. I recently submitted a complaint to yahooligans (A yahoo kids oreiented site).
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
As has been said in many previous posts, those stats JUST represent ONE site, and a tech-oriented one at that, making the results hugely biased.
1 03 09
For a comparison as to how useless those statistics are, I checked out the stats for the most popular site tracked by NedStatBasic. It's startpagina.nl with about 2.8 million pageviews per day.
Here are the browser stats:
IE 5/6: 96.7%
Mozilla: 2.7%
Other: 0.6%
You can see the stats here:
http://www.nedstatbasic.net/s?tab=1&link=5&id=7
When I've checked my personal site's stats (small gardening site...
400-500 hits a day, ehh?
Sounds like a:
M A R I J U A N A site to me
Sorry, lost my mind for a moment, please mod me down to preserve this fine news site from my abusive post.
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
Yeah, I see what you mean - clicking Reload is such a hassle!
This is hardly an unknown bug. It's been plaguing Firefox releases for various people for as long as I can remember, and it even has an entry on Bugzilla (#217527). It is, however, a little unpredictable. I ran into the problem very rarely until upgrading to 0.9, when it started popping up every time. Other people have said 0.9 has improved things, though.
I eventually had to switch to the trunk build, which has incorporated a fix for it (although is more of a work-in-progress than the branch build, in general). For those who only encounter it rarely, or aren't willing to bother with the trunk builds, the most reliable way I've found of "fixing" the page is to quickly increase or decrease text size (CTRL++/-). Reloading doesn't always work.
Sean Daugherty "I have walked in Eternity -- and Eternity weeps."
I think he's just appealing to the groupthink mods.
I think you're in denial.
We know that U.S Patent Office is notorious of issuing patents (particularly software patents) that are clearly unpatentable. But very few are aware that U.S. Patent Office is violating our constitutional right by promulgating and enforcing a Microsoft-IE-only policy.
This little-noticed law really makes me mad and feel like crying--why a government agency can be so stupid.
Basically, when you file a patent application, if the Patent Office thinks that your invention is not patentable because it is not novel or nonobvious, it will send you copies of prior art patents so you can rebut their rejection.
Now the Patent Office has changed its policy and will not send you those hard copies. Instead, it requires you to download those prior art reference on-line.
Under ordinary circumstances, this would not pose any problem, except that we are dealing with one of the most stupid government agencies in the history of mankind. The United States Patent Office, without much notice, now requires that, in order to download those references, you must register with the Patent Office, then the Patent Office will install a program ON YOUR MACHINE WHICH MUST BE RUNNING MICROSOFT INTERNET EXPLORER UNDER MICROSOFT WINDOWS to allow you to communicate with the Patent Office before you can download those prior art patents that our government must furnish you as a matter of our constitution right and as part of the filing fees paid to the Patent Office.
Thus, basically it has boiled down to this stupid law: if you want to receive a patent, you are now REQUIRED BY LAW to have a machine with Microsoft Windows running Internet Explorer in your office.
In other words, in order to exercise your constitutional rights, you must have a machine that runs Microsoft Windows and you must set Microsoft Internet Explorer as your default browser.
What kind of stupid government agency is this? I know many banks used to have the same requirement (i.e., using Microsoft IE running in Microsoft Windows), but they have got rid of this stupid policy because they have to compete in order to survive.
The United States Patent and Trademark can implement and insist such a stupid policy because it doesn't have to compete. But what about those 4000+ patent attorneys? How come all of them are so quiet? Are all of them idiots?
Even our HomeLand Security Department has changed its Microsoft-only policy. It appears that our Patent and Trademark Office is the only government agency in the whole world that requires its users to use Microsoft Windows. Unlike Homeland Security Department, the U.S. Patent Office has to account to no one!
Microsoft survives and propers exactly because our government agencies are unafraid to abuse their power and unashamed of being idiots.
Heh, no, not "adult".
www.nationstates.net
I should buy some cement.
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.
The ______ Agenda
It's been fixed in the trunk builds, so by 1.0 or whatever they are calling it (in the about section it says 0.10), it should be correct.
Although I think this is great, the statistics from some servers that I manage and run show different and it depends greatly on the type of site. For example this link to a stats report for a site that was Slashdotted shows Firefox users as 26.8% of visitors and Mozilla 16.7%, a grand total of 43.5% against IE, which got 40.7%. All I can say here is well done Slashdotters for using a decent, and probably the best browser - it's excellent.
Looking at another site, not slashdotted, of general interest for all sorts of users, the stats reveal 9.1% Firefox and 5.4% Mozilla, which comes to 14.5% - a figure very close to that posted in the article. Good.
However, it's very different when moving to a commercial site selling a commerical product. For example, on site reveals just 1.6% Mozilla & Firefox users against 96.6% IE users and another, selling Jazz and Latino records, has 4% Mozilla against 87.9% IE.
I reckon that it depends greatly upon who your audience is as to what statistics you extrapolate.
It is not a bug in Slashcode. It is a bug in the Gecko (the rendering portion of Mozilla) code related to incremental reflow. It has been fixed in Gecko, but the latest version of Gecko has not been rolled into Firefox.
(Courtesy of another Slashdotter in the know.)
I'm not sure what the schedule is on rolling in the fix.
May we never see th