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Firefox Browser On An Upward Trend
carbolic writes "The Firefox browser is ramping up as fast as Internet Explorer is ramping down. According to these stats posted from the Engadget logfiles, IE has dropped to 57% of all browsers used to visit the site, while Firefox is up to an amazing 18%! The Engadget stats reflect an early-adopter consumer crowd and backing those up, this chart from w3schools shows the same trend. I guess CERT's recommendation and a mature product are finally paying off for the Mozilla project. Less than 2 years ago, IE had a 95% lock on the market. Anyone else see a trend here?"
95% to 57% on one site? Trend? Where?
It's just a pity that 1.0PR (as announced yesterday) doesn't seem to like all the add-ons and themes it liked so much until 0.9
Trolling using another account since 2005.
The logfiles for a single site can hardly be used as proof of an overall trend throughout the Internet.
Microsoft's site can probably claim higher numbers of IE users.
RedHat's site can probably claim lower numbers of IE users
I have used Firefox for about 6 months, since it was recommended to me by a friend. I've enjoyed the useful features I never got from IE, the speed of page loads and the fact that whenever a new IE venerability is released I can simply say "Meh".
But am I alone in the (admittedly selfish) desire that Firefox / Mozilla doesn't become too mainstream? As the usage of Firefox goes up - so too does the interest from exploit kiddies. Can the Mozilla / Firefox team keep ahead of the net nasties when it attains the majority of Internet users?
I can see that an open source browser can respond to security threats quicker than Microsoft has - but will it remain quick enough?
I decided to check out Mozilla for the first time in quite some while.. I'm sitting here playing with font settings, not even 5 minutes in to the browser, and this story is listed.
Someone is trying to tell me something.
Great choice of site to sample all browsers. (not)
Anyone with OS X try making a pdf from firefox? This bug has been there since the start... It will only make a pdf of one page... when the html source may be any number of pages.
Still, nice browser.
I want a new camino.
I had an imaginary sig once, he said I was a loser and ran off.
I'm waiting for the CNN/Gallup Poll
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Especially now that even people at Microsoft are switching to Firefox, and IE has officially stopped supporting IE, it was bound to happen. You'll know, however, that firefox is really mainstream, when viruses, autodialers, and porn sites start popping up requests to install XPIs.
But I am using FireFox a lot more!
:-)
:-)
Actually, having used Mozilla a lot, the smaller size of FireFox has meant its adoption is easier. I have personally installed it:
At my dentists (removed two viruses, put zonealarm, slapped ie silly, put firefox, adaware, windows updates to auto (well, you can't be perfect!)
At all my friends, work mates
so I guess I am nearly 100% responsible for these stats
It will become the top browser, because it is ace. All those cute extensions.
Why else?
Microsoft state no more development on IE
No more upgrade runs for people, and they always look for now things.
It is snazzy amd sexy, and has a cute fox, so animal rights activitsts will like it, unless they think the firey tale is cruel...
the only problem is the 0.9, 0.9.1, 0.9.2, 0.9.3 - even I got tired, but I bet they just want to get the bets stuff out the door as quickly as possible.
Don't worry, the net ain't going anywhere fast. How many converts have you claimed?
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Now that the Spell Checker for Firefox is almost as good as IeSpell is for IE (http://www.iespell.com) I've finally switched over to Firefox. And it's become my replacement on my primary Windows PC.
http://thepoliticalgeek.com/blog/ Politics for Geeks.
As the article says, this is a survey of "as tech savvy an audience as you could have." While it's exciting to see tech savvy people getting more and more switched-on to Firefox, we could flip it around and say that more than half of even the most tech-savvy users are still using IE. And with the SP2 pop-up blocker and security improvements they have fewer reasons to change than ever.
Just thinking obvious thoughts out loud.
In my opinion, there's an urgent need for translations of the Mozilla applications suites. That would make the success even greater, as many people in non-english speaking countries feel discouraged to use software in a foreign language.
The Microsoft lackeys how this isn't a real website this can't be real, just like the last time. I know I tell people all the time when they call, I work tech support for an ISP, how the reason for their pop-up and spyware and other assorted problems is because of security problems with IE. I am just one person so I doubt that I would have much of an impact, but I bet there are a lot of tech support reps out there doing the same thing because they are getting tired of all the calls.
Convert an IE user today!
Its nice to see that IE gets some good competition. And when people stop using IE more and more it would force websites to think more about standards and such..
Next step: Convert them to Mac. This may be a bit more difficult ;)
Remove libnullplugin.so from your plugins directory to get rid of those popups.
I think it would also be good if the download manager could resume a download. ITs quite annoying when you have to start downloads again from the beginning if the file was too big to get in one session. Unless I'm missing something...
Most 0.9+ plugins should work with 1.0PR. Go to about:config, locate extensions.disabledObsolete and change its value to false . Worked for me, YMMV. Good luck.
-- CD
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
I'm finding myself quickly leaving sites that are built, either intentionally or out of ignorance, as IE-only.
With tabbed browsing, fantastic bookmark controls (add bookmark here and synchronized bookmarks), great content tools (bugmenot, adblock), the browser goes almost everywhere.
Folks who are reading this and who made the plunge, but still use Outlook, SWITCH TO THUNDERBIRD! While I wasn't very happy with the seemingly random way my old emails were imported (messages with multiple mime parts dont have the correct items displayed on the pane, and others meant to be displayed as shown as 'part1.1' attachments), I was incredibly happy with the abilities and extensions of the program.
Specifically, I found Thunderbird very happy to deal with my POP3 and IMAP accounts, interface very easily with GnuPG (via Enigmail)
Mozilla really sucked for quite awhile, but these days I'm surprised when I find people who still only use IE. How 2001.
I look forward to the work being done on calendaring.
My site has about 50,000 registered members and many more who are not registered. These are your average internet users. The type who come through AOL, Cable, etc. Most are not computer geeks and are lucky to know how to crop a photo in photoshop.
Of these people - which is the most significant portion of the internet overall - about 94% are still coming through using MSIE.
So the idea that MSIE use has reduced to only 57% is silly and just plain wrong.
Is it really important for internet community what of the browser is more powerfull? The time has run out... IE to bring in a fashion his ugly standard's and kill the original Netscape. ... paying with a hangover for the feasting of others ...
Alexey Mas
www.webnews.tv
----
My site gets about 16000 unique visitors a month (1.4 million hits), and so far in September the stats look like this:
:) These numbers are from awstats which uses total number of hits for this (660K), not visitors.
IE: 77.5%
Firefox: 8.9%
Opera: 3.5%
Safari: 2.6%
Mozilla: 2.2%
Netscape: 1.2%
The trend is there though, I think IE used to be in the 90's. It's just a really slow trend. I'm glad to see old Netscape almost non-existant.
I wonder why Mozilla and Acrobat co-operate just fine?
The owls are not what they seem
these stats are for one site that claims to be 'tech heavy'
Internet Explorer 6.x 53%
Firefox 18.16%
Safari 11.25%
Internet Explorer 5.x 4.07%
Mozilla 3.18%
Opera 2.50%
Netscape 7.x 1.42%
In addition opera and mozilla and firefox have user agent string plugins, but even ie can be regedited to send
Mozilla compatible, sod Microsoft (Windows 3.11)
Of course, stats don't matter, as long as you use what you want. Out of interest,I noticed Yoper is using evolution as the mail client, I personally love thunderbird - any ditros thinking of using thunderbird and sunbird as thier mail/calender?
should it be thunderfox and sunfox?
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
How about if Slashdot would open up their logfiles? Same crowd, but bigger sample...
Something that might prevent people ditching IE is problems with dependancies on M$ dll's. When I installed Firefox on my mothers computer, I couldn't run it until I had upgraded to IE 6 as it claimed that there was a dll missing. This was on Win 98.
I did it for security reasons. They both like it, and I've had no "site blah won't work now" problems.
;-/
I never get to meet them now, though.
I'm a safari user but those firefox users need our help to quash IE usage, I shall defrain from using Safari again, I shall help my unixy brothers in order to fudge those numbers some more.
Jonathanjk.com
What i miss is a feature named "render this page faulty just like IE", since the css-implementation of ie is incorrent, and many sites depend on this wrong implementation.
FireFox is a fantastic product, no doubts about that. But I would really doubt that logs from one site can be used as an argument for an overall trend. The Microsoft website probably has 95-98% of all the hits generated by IE. RedHat, SuSE and Slashdot would have a bigger share of Konqueror, FireFox and Netscape users.... even Lynx =)
There is no point to generalise the results of one log... plus keep in mind that more and more browsers nowadays can "lie" about their identity... just say that FireFox is worth a try, and don't push it any further!
http://www.automatiq.se
Watch great movie opening scenes!
Adblocking.
Simple as that.
I would be interested to know how many of those numbers are made up by Mozilla/Opera users whose browsers are set to identify as IE, which is the default on Opera.
I am not sure about Firefox as I don't use it.
Probably the numbers would not swing the percentages to any great degree, but it would still be interesting nevertheless.
... you cant deny that firefox is on a rise.
/. its maybe even at 40%. What is interesting is the change we see. Firefox is being more and more used by more and more people.
What we might see here is a the bigging of some change. Sure, firefox right now is maybe at 5% at some sites, at 10% on others and here on
For me its a big big deal. It means it is harder and harder to make sites that only work well in IE. Since I cant use IE this is a great thing for me since it makes it much nicer for me to surf the net.
World dominance is of no importance. What I want is to have a firefox that is so big that the people making homepages make sure they work in them. And to me it looks like we are getting there... Quicker than I expected.
People should use sites like google to generate this kind of statistics, since everybody uses google today.
Probably some of the features that make the IE insecure is what make it popular.
How anoying it is to install Firefox, browse to a flash website and realize that you have to go to the Macromedia site, download and install the plugin and only after that you can see flash files...
Wouldn't it be great if the most common plugins on the web would come with Firefox already ? I don't see any problem with that, maybe the browsology of 'light browser' is being taken too far...
Such as this, gathered by general purpose search engine, Google, in June. Specifically, this graph. That "Other" category is not exactly setting the world on fire, is it now?
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
The Engadget stats reflect an early-adopter consumer crowd and backing those up, this chart from w3schools shows the same trend
He never claimed that the stats were for the entire net or anything. -1 Redundant.
I work as a Tech at a rather large highschool, and starting this year we have preloaded Firefox on all new issued laptops. every year I have worked here the vast majority of problems we deal with are spyware or virus based. (duh) and i have to say, now that we have switched, the total number of spyware related problems we have to deal with has dropped to half a dozen people a week (as compared to 10-20 a day)
anyway, just my $0.02
Jack the sound barrier. Bring the noise.
It uses IE right now but hopefully gecko will be supported soon and i'll drop Firefox instantly. Maxthon has many of the features Firebird has and you don't need to install a bunch of extensions. Also i don't like the Firefox about:config thingie, there's some pretty general stuff in there that shouldn't be 'advanced' options.
In my opinion Firefox can still make stuff somewhat more user friendly. My mom's no computer person and she wouldn't know how to make links all open in new tabs instead of windows and such...
Sample this!
This article is an example of sensassionalist reporting. Sorry but this is not a true random sample. Their sample was apparently restricted to the visitors of some tech-savy web site which, by the way, I have never heard about before. So the article title is _very_ misleading. I am sure you can also obtain a staggering numbers showing that Firefox and Linux usage is on rise by examining access logs for something like sourceforge.net. I don't see any trend here at all.
The problem is, Firefox people will go read the site, there by pushing the points up more.
Most IE users (that I know) are pretty much ignorant when it comes to browsers.
Personal site, geek/gamer, all 2004 January ------- MS Internet Explorer No 9349 83.6 % Mozilla No 1027 9.1 % Firebird No 319 2.8 % Opera No 225 2 % Netscape No 112 1 % Unknown ? 31 0.2 % Sony/Ericsson Browser (PDA/Phone browser) No 19 0.1 % Microsoft Mobile Explorer (PDA/Phone browser) No 16 0.1 % W3C HTML Validator No 16 0.1 % W3C CSS Validator No 16 0.1 % Others April ----- MS Internet Explorer No 6479 83.1 % Mozilla No 950 12.1 % Unknown ? 139 1.7 % Opera No 80 1 % Safari No 46 0.5 % Netscape No 32 0.4 % Firebird No 26 0.3 % Konqueror No 23 0.2 % W3C HTML Validator No 8 0.1 % August ------ MS Internet Explorer No 7421 71.3 % Mozilla No 1566 15 % Unknown ? 1130 10.8 % Opera No 146 1.4 % Safari No 69 0.6 % Konqueror No 40 0.3 % ... I see a trend too ;D
The combined stats for the web sites I run for the year to date look like this (Mozilla includes anything built on Gecko):
89.17% IE
8.02% Mozilla
2.67% Opera
(the rest is Safari, Web TV etc.)
This time last year the figures were:
94.66% IE
1.58% Mozilla
3.68% Opera
So Mozilla is certainly on the up, but the trend is not that dramatic. I suspect the reason for this is that almost every company is running IE (in other words I suspect a lot of home users have made the switch at home).
Seriously. So what?
I'm a long time Mozilla user, but this is a silly non-issue.
If everyone in the world abandons IE for a different browser, the loss in revenue for Microsoft is exactly ZERO. Which explains why IE hasn't been updated/improved for years, because, if everyone in the world abandoned Mozilla, Opera, etc and switched to IE, the increase in revenue for Microsoft would be exactly ZERO.
'Firefox is a good browser, but does anyone know how to turn off those little pop-over messages, such as the "you don't have this plugin installed, click here to download it". I do not need flash or java, and I don't want the message.'
Just delete the npnul{whatever}.[so|dll] plugin from the plugins directory.
Of course there is a trend. Compared to IE, Firefox is undoubtebly a superior product. And thanks to OSS supporters even regular out-of-the-box windows users are converting to Firefox ...
But I don't think that unless we see a clear browser usage statistic created from a wide spectrum of high profile websites from diffrent fields (with various interest target groups) there's no way we can compare these numbers to the mentioned (and hopefully irrelevant) 95% market share of IE...
Never underestimate the power of idiots in large groups
I'm getting more and more convinced that Slashdots recent problems are caused by the rise in firefox.
because of the pages not being rendered correctly, people are refereshing their screens "twice or three times" and considering how slash is certainly not static, it can cause massive problems.
I know lots of people now use the font sizing thing, but its still a definate problem.
Does 1.0 fix this?
liqbase
>Microsoft state no more development on IE
Actually IE on an XP box running SP2 is pretty different. This may not be a formal version change but MS did catch up pretty well. Sure, I don't touch IE unless I have to, but the popup blocker, activex manager, extra nag screens, etc go a long way to fighting spyware and help make the web usable. Most people will never switch browsers and SP2 is for them.
I was playing with 1.0PR last night and found the firebird developers have already mimicked IE. The "info bar" which displays when something is blocked is blatantly "stolen" from IE. Not that I care or even think its wrong, but its interesting to see the browser war heat up again.
MS is catching up to FF while FF is picking what it likes from IE. I do like FF's policy of "looking a lot like IE" because it helps with mass-adoptation and frankly IE's interface and MS's usability are actually pretty good. Its a shame the code beneath isn't so hot.
Although Firefox is gaining popularity the fact is: IE 6 is the #1 browser. Until we (a combination of the open source community, and regular users) can pursuade a lot of ignorant web developers (dont get me wrong, not all web developers are stupid and ignorant, just a small minority that only design for IE) - then the web can still be a hostile environment for non-microsoft users.
<rant> Personally I've been an Opera user for a few years (but reguarly use Mozilla/Firefox, Netscape 4 & IE to check the compatibility of my sites), and I was shocked when I went to a site that said 'You have to download the latest version of IE to view this site'... Sure.. I can run IE in wine, but some people really don't think when developing sites. </rant>
As others have been pointing out, it's the trend that is interesting, not the raw numbers. And when you see the same trend happening on a number of different sites - with very different starting proportions, and thus likely pretty different readership - then it seems fairly likely that the trend is real.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
The whole point is that this is not an "early-adopter consumer crowd".
This is a crowd of developers/nerds/etc. who will probably patch and be smart enough to avoid most trouble on the 'net even with IE.
I know it gets brought up a lot, but what about the grandmothers, teenyboppers, etc.? They are the ones that need the extra safety net of Firefox.
It's not the overall level of FF users that matters -- that's going to be high on a site like Engadget, low elsewhere. It's the fact that it has increased that matters.
Subjectively, I'm seeing a lot more FF windows around the office than I used to -- which is a pity as I still don't have a clue how to make my Japanese translation plugin work in Mozilla.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
thoughts?!
Engadget brower stats
Yeah!
How about a spell checker!
Wikalong is a Firefox Extension that embeds a wiki in the SideBar of your browser, indexed off the url of your current page. It is probably most simply described as a wiki-margin for the internet. (Ctrl-Shift-A to activate). I think this is the kind of extension that will really set Firefox apart from IE. Very inventive, shows why having a plugin architecture is cool. Of course, being based on wiki software, this feature needs to obtain a critical mass of users to become truly usefull. However, having a user-maintainted commentary box for every website seems like a great idea. Homepage.
I believe that it does actually. I believe that a lot depends on the web site you are downloading from. Not all servers suppor "resume downloads". But on a few occasions I found out that the download resumed. I believe that Firefox adds an extension (I don't remember what exactly, ".incomple" or something else) to the end of the file so that it knows that it wasn't over. But of course, it all depends on the protocol for the download (http or FTP etc.). If you can check the filename in the download folder of a long download you probably can find out what this extension is, and change it for a file that had started downloading (and been interrupted) from a file where the protocol made Firefox unable to know if the download had been completed when the connection was broken (and the extension is removed from the file). Most of this is an impression that I got from past observations. I didn't do a systematic test on the topic... just noticed that sometimes it DID resume downloads.
I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)
well, there are extensions that let you choose an external download manager like kget to use for downloading a file. works fine and the moz team doesnt have to replicate a component which is already there, therefore reducing bloat.
sick of sigs... *sigh*
someone's a little touchy feely
- I got my free iPod and a free Nintendo DS....why not
You state the stats but fail to mention the website.
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
Aargh! Sysadmin, where is that office CD you promised blind you had a copy of five minutes ago? Did it get lost in the move between offices?
What would be really interesting is to have google browser stats. Anybody knows if they're available somewhere ?
What could be more accurate than google to evaluate a browser penetration ? It probably has the most large panel of users of the web...
I just set up a statsserver myself. Now if all of you Slashdottees click on the following link, I migh& $^..... [NO_CARRIER]
"Honey, I feel a certain distance between us..." "Really? A 31ms ping ain't that bad..."
Interesting too:r _surve y.html
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_serve
But you'd be surprised of the actual distribution of browsers on the getfirefox website! It is, for some reason, contradictory of these results!
--
"pain is weakness leaving the body."it's a known bug - http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=224846
/. filter)
(not linked because bugzilla has a
Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
Hence the submission refers to them as the early-adopter crowd.
What timothy could have done is provided the statistics for
Where's the Kaboom?
There's supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom.
I'm sure you'll find a huge overlap between the "early-adopter" and the "developers/nerds/etc." crowds. Perhaps not so much admins, but certinly nerds and geeks etc.
This basically means that visitors of w3schools.com, who are generally techies, are seeing the benefits of the open source browser, while general users are slower on the uptake. But that's OK, I'm sure once the techies are fully convinced, it will spill over into the minds of the general public, who tend to look to us as their techincal gurus.
security improvements? ah ok i see
but on the other hand wasnt the aol integrated browser switched to mozilla some time ago?
and for features: ie still hasnt tabs, which are vital for anybody who switched (atleast the people i know of)
-- Karma: beyond good and evil - mostly affected by posting political
1.first of all, a single site cant be a sample of the internet,more so if its a a not so famous site ,amazon,ebay etc.
2.a early adopter site like that would hav a majority geek/tech crowd, who will be on the latest,newest,best.That wont be the same with the general public.
3.A good sample would be few thousand major sites like Google, yahoo
Just to make the point , what do u think the browser stats of slashdot will look like?
internet explorer 90%?Ofcourse not.Firefox,opera et al cud contribute 90+.
IE is highly infamous here - wont be surprised if the stats are less than 10% for IE.
Of course only cow boy neal can give real proof.
I've just been through the logs for one of mine. It's a moderately busy site at around half a million pages a month, and doesn't have any bias towards the readers of CERT warnings (it's a human rights organisation). The numbers really have shifted a bit: six months ago we were seeing 92 or 93% Explorer and less than 2% Mozilla: this month it's 85% and 7%.
I just realized, that I have read at least 4 very similar /. articles in the past couple of months ... I mean - what is this? Is /. turning into a tabloid?
... my younger sister uses FireFox which in this new /. uncool trend language means that most single white women that use the Internet at least twice every week use FireFox ...
... this is /.
Wow
come on guys
Never underestimate the power of idiots in large groups
The latest releases of Firefox have serious focus problems.
For example, I just completed a download. The download manager automatically closed. The Firefox window beneath it did not have the focus (focus follows mouse for me under Enlightenment/Linux).. So I clicked on that Firefox window. Still no focus. Clicked a few more times. The window would not take the damn focus.
The focus handling in Firefox is really shoddy and there are numerous bugs. These are not new problems.
I love Firefox. However, that these focus problems are being ignored (maybe just under Linux???) doesn't bode well for the project in the future. How much effort is being put into the Linux vs. Windows code?
A chart from people who make heavy use of online tutorials -- maybe we're targetting the developer crowd in these stats? And a web site with tech toys says Firefox usage is up 18% -- a site which most likely caters to the same faction of people.
Enough. Ranting aside, I would like to see a broad sampling of stats from a variety of types of users, in different countries, etc. Not this one-off "hey this web site says Mozilla usage is up" kind of shit. This is ./ for crying out loud, give us some real information.
http://bigevilmegacorp.com
;)
FireFox 96.4 %
MS Internet Explorer 1.7 %
Unknown 1.7 %
Our conquest to take over the world, nah galaxy starts here, with IE.
Okay, so it's just a start of a site and 2 out of the 3 of us use Firefox only. My fiance is into statistics not me, so I will consider this valid data.
Last week I complained about Thunderbird not being able to import mail from Mozilla on the Mac. Today I checked out TB for Linux, and that CAN import all mail and settings from Mozilla. It didn't work perfectly but it worked, and since I use my Linux computer the most I spend the last 2 hours switching all my machines to Mozilla Firefox & T-bird. It works fine. I think I won't switch back to the Mozilla suite again.
-- Cheers!
these stats are bad. It shows us that Firefox is still only the browser of choice for nerds. I'd like to see more mainstream sites with high Firefox percentage.
Wow, you have managed to completely miss the whole point of IE; control. MS has always used their applications (even their free ones) to gain control of their market and force them into their proprietary product line. The rise in popularity of Mozilla is now eroding MS control and forcing web developers to create more standarized, w3c compliant content. This makes is so much easier for non-MS OSes to compete (Linux /w konq, moz - OS X /w safari, moz).
Why would anybody care if MS gets or doesn't get a few more dollars? They have something so much more valuable; a monopoly.
> And when you see the same trend happening on a number of different sites - with
> very different starting proportions, and thus likely pretty different
> readership - then it seems fairly likely that the trend is real.
"Likely" this, "likely" that - that's not how you detect trends! I think you need a representative sample, and hard data.
As the poster said the endgadget crowd are probably early adopters. Early adopters are...'Early Adopters' and are a good gauge of how things could develop. Please these people and they tend to tell all their not so tech savy friends about it. I think this is the point the poster was trying to make. Things are starting to change and given half a chance we will start to see a move towards Firefox by the general public.
[Please type your sig here.]
but we all know that 27.6% of statistics are made up on the spot.
The browser stats from this site(IMAP and gmail)
Note- The site is mostly frequented by technical users and is about one issue only (most gmail users don't know about IMAP.)
Here's the recent stats
It easy. I installed firefox for my mother because it is just as easy and better and safer.
When grandmothers start using a open source product, than it will soon dominate.
your point? early adapters means that they start using it first. someone has to be first
It would be interesting to see the browser stats of Google. A single site isn't relevant to determine the current browser trend, but Google is visited daily by most internet users I would say.
On a few of my joe blow sites ~300,000 uniques/month 25% use some form of mozilla, firefox is like 90% of that.
:)
Hell I use firefox
The real numbers from general sites have Firefox climbing, sure,
That's a trend you know. In fact, it's the same one the article was claiming: Firefox usage is rising.
Now what was your point again?
Slashdot's nerds, techies, etc. probably have a higher number for IE because many people - including me - use it at work. But anyways: what are the numbers for Slashdot.org?
...and within five minutes Firefox is responsible for >50% of the visits of the last month :P
I love Firefox, and I've convinced practically everyone in two residence halls to switch over to it. However, there's one little capability I miss from IE. Dockable toolbars. I like that fact that I can put the File_Edit_View_etc... menu on the same line as the address bar in IE. It uses some otherwise completely wasted space.
I mean, come on, take a gander at Firefox when it's in full screen. You precious $1500 MacCinema TFT gets a 1cm swath taken out of it by nothing but grey pixels.
Still, Firefox is awesome, and it'll be a long time before I consider anything else.
P.S. How long before Firefox becomes the monoculture? I mean, it's great that everyone's switching to a product which is decent, doesn't invite spyware in with cookies and milk, and is open source, but still... Monocultures are bad, even when they're good, right?
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
I run a large european auto maker's website. Here are the stats for the last 30 days... Visitor Browser 8/14/04 - 9/14/04 Visitor Browser 4,795,922 Internet Explorer 4,336,610 90.42% Mozilla 219,831 4.58% AOL 127,381 2.66% Uncategorized 66,469 1.39% Opera 25,215 0.53% This covers all markets, including north america. I tend to think this is more demographically diverse than a tech gadget company.
Not having a date on Friday & Saturday nights (or any other night), a dedicated army of uber-geeks sit at home patiently clicking reload on their preferred uber-browser.
I'd be happy for an auto-update notification system that actually works.
I had to use the advice from the Firefox f.a.q. that basically instructs you to disable the auto-update notification, else it constantly tells you to upgrade to the version that you are already running.
Yes, I'm still on 0.93 but like a few others have mentioned, I don't schedule my entire life around updating my web browser. I like a controlled upgrade path to keep me on the leading edge, not the bleeding edge.
slashdot: A failed experiment.
Dvorak also thinks Firefox is showing a good increase in usage. His numbers show that Microsoft only has a 50 percent of the market from visits to his sites. He then goes on to explain how it's almost certainly much lower. Check it out.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Firefox is a great browser, but the project leaders' sunny friendly face doesn't work so well when they refuse to fix this horrible UI bug that makes picking helper applications nearly hopeless in the Mac, in both Firefox and Thunderbird. This, even though there's been a patch posted since June in the discussion thread on that bugzilla page. You'd think backers of a minority browser platform would be a little less dismissive of a minority OS platform.
Of course if they're not all that tech savvy, it's not like they'll be able to restore IE anyway (evil grin)
Obligatory plug - please visit my online novel
I've been seeing Firefox all over the last couple months. Maybe I just deal with more different people/computers than the average Slashdotter, but there's no mistaking that a lot of people are trying out Firefox and pretty much ditching IE.
Naturally the trend indicated by logfiles will be more exagerated on a site that caters to tech-savvy users/early adopters--this isn't exactly a secret if you RTFA. Please read the article and links before rushing in with an inane first post. I wish the moderators would read too before modding up drivel like the parents.
Simple as that. Adblock doesn't block shite and it leaves huge ugly blank boxes on the screen where ads used to be. I was sick of having to right click on every ad that Adblock missed to block all images from a given server only to have it let the ads through again on a refresh.
Install Admuncher for IE and you can configure it right down to whether or not the cow in the system tray is wearing shades or not. It blocks Google text ads, popups, banners, background music, and everything else with ease. And it replaces them not with large white squares but with nothing. You can't even guess where the ads used to be.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
We will fight fire with fire! If you are an IE apologist, then its time you met your maker. Once you tasted the power of Firefox 1.0PR you too will become a firezealot and help promote firefox!
I have been using Firefox for about eight months and have loved it (I run XP Pro BTW). One thing missing for Firefox for me is pushing down updates rather then going to find them. It's not a deal killer, but I would like not to have to go to the website and download a new version when a vunerablitity is found. BTW, if anyone knows an extension that does this I am all ears.
Yesterday, the only one of mine that worked was AdBlock (the best one) and then today there was already an update for FoxyTunes
Well it would be nice if Firefox were a polite citizen in window manager land too. It totally ignores the window manager settings on what to do if a window is clicked.
Some WMs are more versatile than others, and for example Icewm allows you to configure focus-on-click-but-dont-raise mode. That's brilliant for me, because I like to type text into partially obscured windows without them raising.
Unfortunately, Firefox says "I know what's best for you" and ignores the WM hints. All other X11 apps that I use under Gentoo obey the WM. Only Firefox is fascist about the click model. Bleh.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
...a few days ago.
It's in german though.
Does anybody really believe that the 95%+ market share of IE is going to drop to 57% in a few months? We can advocate and yell and scream and whatever we want, but people ain't switching in big numbers.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
People forget internet explorer 1, 2 and three were dire with 1 & 2 almost unusable even back then. All vastly inferior to netscape which had frames and such from version 2. But they still increased in market share rapidly just because they were microsoft and in windows. Firefox can't win just becase its better.
Sending screencaptures to support, sales, and marketing is very clever.
I've got a friend of mine that's working as a claims adjuster in Punta Gorda right now. He just called me yesterday to see if I could mail him a copy of Office so he can update Office on his notebook computer. Since he's working out of a hotel, downloading it off a server isn't an option. Driving 4+ hours to get his original disc isn't either.
The bullshit that requires you to have your office disc to perform certain updates is the biggest thing about Office that pisses me off. Carrying all your discs with you just isn't feasible when you're on the road a lot.
This post is true, but the other huge problem with the comparative statistic is that the 95% number comes from "All IE users over all IE versions" while the 57% number comes from just IE6 users.
i hate people who use statistics improperly to bend it to say what they want. compare apples to apples for christ sakes. for instance, according to w3schools, IE has a total share of 77%. the submitter could have been honest and used the real statistic, but instead chose the more improper one to highlight a point. i find that to be dishonest and points out the zealotry pretty well.
Title says it all.
Help spread some Firefox love by visiting the official "Spread Firefox" portal.
They aim to achieve 1 million downloads during the next 10 days. The countdown doesn't reflect that actually it has already been in progress for a couple of days now, but still, quite cool.
I'm helping their promotion by telling my friends and family, and my website visitors about it. I recommend the same.
Go slashdotters!
user@host$ diff
These stats on tecky web sites (such as W3Schools) are not representative at all, and we already commented earlier. Most people on the Internet don't have to create web pages, and thus don't have to bother about a web browser. They use what comes first. Period. These are the stats on my web site:
Listing the top 20 browsers by the number of requests for pages, sorted by the number of requests for pages.
2191: MSIE
1665: MSIE/6
526: MSIE/5
252: Netscape (compatible)
142: Opera
142: Opera/7
88: msnbot
88: msnbot/0
47: ia_archiver
44: webcollage
44: webcollage/1
42: SurveyBot
42: SurveyBot/2
34: Googlebot
34: Googlebot/2
26: Mozilla
23: Mozilla/1
20: LinkWalker
19: psbot
19: psbot/0
17: Uptimebot
8: Scooter
8: Scooter/3
7: Netscape
7: Netscape/4
5: webcollage.perl
5: webcollage.perl/1
4: Java
4: Java/1
3: Konqueror
3: Konqueror/3
2: TurnitinBot
2: TurnitinBot/2
2: favicon finder at http:
2: favicon finder at http://iconsurf
2: Openbot
2: Openbot/3
7: [not listed: 8 browsers]
Firefox doesn't even appear once. Come on.
Yesterday I was trying version 1.0PR and I still find it very buggy. Some details I could find:
-Changes notification has gone. It was a useful option. Where's it now?
-Printing preview is a disaster. Pages look all messed up.
-Problems with bookmarks icons were supposed to be solved, but they aren't. When I bookmark a page, favicons are never used (Linux & Windows).
-The installer crashed if I tried to change the installation directory
-The new fast find option doesn't highlight the current element if you issue several finds without closing the bar
Using my highly scientific survey accurate to within 3 standard deviations, I monitored TWO sites:
www.iLoveMac.com, and
www.iAmAMacFanboyAndProudOfIt.com, and found:
99% Safari
1% other
I think that's all the proof anyone needs!
Now, THAT would be a good indication
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
I installed an earlier version of Admuncher, and the cow shades weren't optional, so I uninstalled it.
Now I can remove them, I just might have another look. That's one handy little feature.
Oh, wait...
Cogito, ergo sig.
Of course, the logs were rotated Sunday, and they are only up to a few thousand thus far...
I've put a few more faculty (and fellow geeks) on to Firefox or Mozilla (for those that use NS mail) here at the University. Most of the Faculty have been Mac users though who don't have an IE or good IE option available. I recommend Mozilla/Firefox before Safari even. Just downloaded FF 1.0 and already like some of the new features .... no apparent lag either.
Que Deus te de em dobro o que me desejas
[May God give you double that which you wish for me]
These stats are correct, but really only for sites that early adopters and technical users flock to. For instance, Simpy (see URL in sig) is obviously something that power Web users will find useful, and its stats reflect that:
38% -- Mozilla family
35% -- IE
4% -- Safari
3% -- Opera
On the OS front:
62% -- Windows
12% -- Linux
6% -- Macintosh
These stats also tells us that a lot of Mozilla/Firefox users are Windows users.
Simpy
No one is going to believe that IE is losing market share that fast. Quoting one site and saying this represents the internet is just stupid. But then again that is slashdot.
This has been the highest traffic month for my website ever due to this article. According to my analog I have this break down: 30937 Mozilla 6010 Konqueror 3935 MSIE 2028 Opera 325 Safari 211 Netscape (8 Netscape/1, had to note that) 42 Lynx
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck
I guess this proves Microsoft's point that bundling the product did not damage the competitors because the competitors sucked. As soon as a competitor started to build a good product and market it Internet Explorer's market share starts to drop.
Yeah, my whole high school switched to FF this year, they figured that it was more secure I guess....
For all the "early adopters," I would be willing to bet there are 100 "never adopters," people who accept technology the way it is packaged and if it doesn't work well, too bad, that's just how computers are. As IE is packaged with (and an integral part of) Windows, and Windows machines make up somewhere around 90% of consumer machines, I don't see IE's market share dipping much below 90% for the general public, regardless of better (free) options. Most people simply won't take the time to download IE alternatives when they've already got a web browser.
my Firefox identifies itself as vi on a ZXSpectrum and I never have problems with sites refusing me entry.
Oh well, what the hell...
500MB of Java? woah!
Well it was the SDK and not the JRE.
If you're installing 500 MB SDK from Sun then you're not only installing the JDK but the entire NetBeans IDE as well. Try using the link just below that one and only download the SDK which is around 50 MB for Windows (and still too large at that if you ask me).
Who said Freedom was Fair?
(That's Lazy Coward, by the way).
Firefox did not correctly interpret the TOPMARGIN attribute of a BODY tag; IE and Opera did!
I believe more in Opera's hybrid model; with Firefox, it might be a deja vu of Netscape -having to migrate out when nobody GOOD carries the banner at some point.
I posted this before, but funny, it never made it onto the board. I just wanted to see for myself now how "Open" this forum really is.
I don't think the observation of this bug is "Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive" (from Slashdot's notice...) By not releasing this observation, you're only hurting Firefox - a bug will persist...
Even though I'm not the only one in my family that knows a lot about computers, I seem to be the only one willing to help with other family member's problems. Usually the only problem is that the computer is sluggish from being really full of spyware, adware, and viruses. So I just point them at Mozilla and tell them why they should use it. After a few days and pretty much the thing that keeps them hooked is the pop-up blocking. So far I've probably converted around 8 people, and I myself have been using Mozilla for only 6 months so far. Of course, after you install Mozilla, its best to delete the IE icon. For some reason my Uncle would end up with half of his file extensions being associated with IE everytime I came over, and this was the solution ;)
What we're seeing is a market shift, and something like that is driven by a lot of different factors across each "market." So it progresses in jumps and spurts, rather than as a steady upward curve.
.
.). That means that there is a growing shift within the web design and development community. And while they are still probably designing cross-product, they're going to favor designs and standards that work with their favored browser. That, more than anything, could add momentum to Moz's growth. That's the community that has had and spread the IE love for years at this point. If they start to spread the Moz love, we will see further mass shifts to Mozilla products.
I help run a bunch of fannish websites. Fannish websites tend to attract females with at least a slight bit of geekiness (even if they're non-technical), so the members of fannish communities tend to end up on the "front end" of mass market shifts. Based on message board conversation (unfortunately, I don't run those message boards so don't have access to those stats), a major shift over to Mozilla/Firefox occurred about four months ago. They were geeky enough to recognize that the security holes in IE announced over the past few months COULD affect them (and did, in many cases) and driven by the fact that MS wasn't putting out the updates to keep them safe. There was real fear, and there where the technically geeky of the community offering a solution that they could understand. Although my sites aren't directly connected to these message boards (and we haven't run browser stats in years) I think that if I looked at the logs for the past couple of months, they would reflect that community shift to Mozilla products. (I'm going to ask the server admin to run some historical vs. current stats for me and I'll post them if I get them in a reasonable amount of time.)
At the same time, the "computer guy" (computer idiot) in my local paper started recommending Firefox. This is a guy whose columns usually make me want to slap him upside the head, because he spreads SO MUCH inaccurate information about computers and operating systems, and reinforces a lot of the misunderstandings that are in the non-technical population. He's gone the distance with Firefox love (too far, really), now recommending it as the solution for any IE-based problem. He's completely lost the MSIE love . .
What I find interesting is that w3schools is one of the sites reflecting the trend. Who uses that site? Web designers and developers. It's a great quick-check resource (no, it doesn't go into depth on most topics, but when you've forgotten the syntax for something . .
Somebody doesn't know what wildcards are do they?
I must say it's very courageous of you to admit that on a site like Slashdot. Personally I'd be a little embarassed.
Not sure what you mean about the large white squares either. I was under the impression that the ads were replaced by whatever colour made up the background behind them. Maybe the developers made a special version just to piss you off?
PS. I hear that with Admuncher you can also configure the cow to laugh in your dumb face whenever you get infected with spyware or hit with another IE only exploit. Is that true?
You must have done something wrong if your comment didn't get posted. Everything is posted, even flame comments.
Opera is argueable a robust and stable browser. However, in the face of IE and Mozilla providing a free browser WITHOUT annoying advertising embedded in it, I don't see much of a future for Opera. The new Mozilla browser also has a great leg up on the Opera browser too by not interfering with the operation of an existing installation of IE. That was a big netscape problem and is a major complaint of people who try the Opera browser. Ditch the forced ads and the interference problems with competeing platforms and they might survive.
This AC explains what the policy is for extension compatibility across point releases.
Can't expect say, a bookmarks-related extension to work in a new version that has several new bookmark features, can you?
"Less than 2 years ago, IE had a 95% lock on the market. Anyone else see a trend here?"
Okay, I realize it's considered Geek Chic to rip the methodology (or, more usually, the lack thereof) used by the "reporters" of these stories. But c'mon! My daughter, who's in 9th grade and not a particular fan of math, could see the holes in this one.
The link used in the sentence quoted above, showing 95% market share for IE, goes to onestat.com. If the reporter had taken the time to check their latest report, IE still has a 93.9% share of the market. It's right there in their press releases! How hard would it have been to look?
I love Firefox, and would love to see IE go away. But I'm getting real tired of having to apply my own personal lameness filter when it comes to determining what Slashdot stories actually have "stuff that matters".
#DeleteChrome
I'm browsing with Spacetuna.
All those popups, activex, javascript etc which take advantage of the lack of security don't work on mozilla unless you turn all the security features off. Most shops don't even test against Netscape anymore just IE.
All that I see on my servers is 1-2% Gecko-based clients.
-truth
I had a steady B+ in my AI class until I failed the Turing test...
Though IE in Microsoft Windows XP SP2 addresses many of the security issues, not every home user can afford to upgrade from Windows 98 or Windows ME to Windows XP.
The first is an interface-compatible Gecko baesd replacement for MSHTML. This is good, because we can use it in the Wine project as a placeholder until a real MSHTML clone is developed.
There exists such a control, but it often won't work as advertised. Because applications that use MSHTML don't expect to be patched to use the Gecko control instead, applications that use MSHTML tend to couple themselves to VBScript, nested ActiveX controls (the second issue you mention), and other proprietary IE technologies more closely than web sites.
Shocking Results: (remember, this is a POLL, not a logfile analysis).
Internet Explorer 17.77 percentNetscape 4.11 percent
Mozilla 18.71 percent
Opera 13.08 percent
Firefox 37.05 percent
Safari 6.40 percent
Konqueror 1.84 percent
other 1.05 percent
total votes: 24065
Here are the most current results:
Link
Calling the inventor of the lameness filter, please step forward for painful execution, thank you...
--- Eat my sig.
September 2003:
:)
MS Internet Explorer 97 %
Mozilla 1.4 %
Opera 0.8 %
Unknown 0.4 %
Netscape 0.1 %
September 2004:
MS Internet Explorer 78.4 %
Opera 9.7 %
Mozilla 8.1 %
Unknown 3.2 %
Netscape 0.2 %
the trend on my site seems fairly clear
They are so cudley! I bet they would rip my head off as soon as frisk me for loose change...
So skip the "rip my head off" part and go straight to the loose change so you can buy a buy a plush toy.
You forgot AOL. To that bunch of fools AOL == Internet.
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
I would be interested to know how many of those numbers are made up by Mozilla/Opera users whose browsers are set to identify as IE, which is the default on Opera.
But isn't Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 set up to identify as "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)"?
The company I work for makes women's shoes, hats and handbags. According to WebTrends since Sept 1 we have had:
I know this is not a CNN/Gallup poll, but as they say the plural of anecdote is data
Hooptie
"Heavens, it appears that my weewee has been stricken with rigor mortis!" -- Stewie Griffin
If you read the updated data
That is a Trend
I never cared for Mozilla that much, even though it blocks popups, because it ran terribly slow on my machine compared to IE6. Even the early versions of firefox were not as fast as IE
I just loaded the latest version of Firefox 1.0PR and was pleasantly surprised. Firefox now loads faster than IR6 (with all the security patches), web pages load noticeably faster than IE, and those mini web site icons that sometimes appear in IE and then dissappear are all present in Firefox.
I especially like the tool bar that allows me to place bookmarks for frequently visited sites. I've made Firefox my default browser.
Windows update still requires IE to be present. Hopefully, the Firefox Team will find a workaround for this.
IE Sucks, but I use it out of habit. Swiss cheese has less holes. My traffic stats show that IE is used by around 40-50% of all visitors.
My site got SlashDotted this week (I am the guy with the Hobbit Hole idea) and here are my stats for this week.
Week before Slashdotting...
MSIE 6 741 56%
Gecko 249 19%
??? 140 11%
MSIE 5.0x 57 4%
Googlebot 32 2%
NS 4.0x 30 2%
MSIE 5.5 30 2%
NS 7 26 2%
Week of SlashDotting...
Browser sort Hits %
Gecko 18733 65%
MSIE 6 8025 28%
??? 734 3%.
NS 7 471 2%
MSIE 5.5 166 1%
NS 4.0x 152 1%
Even though most use MSIE6 to visit my site (when you people aren't part of the mix) it is still a significant shift.
Stormy
we could flip it around and say that more than half of even the most tech-savvy users are still using IE
/. would likely say I use IE about 80% of the time...guess I have better stuff to do than read /. when at home *ducks for cover*
Largely due to them being on company Win2k boxes surfing the web while they should be doing work...
If one were to draw statistics from my own personal surfing behaviour,
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
besides, if you want extra gadgetry in your browser, Firefox has a lot of nice extensions and they are extremely easy to install(1).
--------
1) Except for the fact that the the response times from the extension download is horribly slow. Do something about it!
There used to be an American proverb: Lies, Damn Lies, Statistics. It came to my mind when reading this.
How about trying a site that really matters to the average user. I have seen zip Mozilla usage inside my company, and a lot of developers there too. what are the stats to microsoft.com? lol. please. I'd really like to see the stats to marthastewart.com. Then we can talk.
I think the key is, people are losing patience.Everyone wants a faster browser which hangs less and eats less memory.IE fails in both.With every new version its getting slower, takes more memory , has more security flaws.
Whereas FireFox gets more efficient, has all the features that IE has(infact more) and uses much less memory.The browsing experience is smooth and fast.
A lot of people are hesitant to move to FireFox cos they don't know what it has to offer and Windows ships with IE so it naturally captures most of the market.With just the right kind of exposure FireFox will bloom even more.
Lord of the Binges.
So what do you want, no change at all? Sure it's a small dent in IE's market share, but on the other hand it is a large boost to the number of users using Mozilla/Firefox. The whole wolrd isn't going to switch at once. Like everything else, it will be a gradual process. Don't act like just because not everybody switches today means it's a failure.
I run a small (~1800 unique visitors/month) subcultural (occult) site that I presume is mostly viewed from home PCs.
This months stats so far:
1 - 58.21% MSIE 6
2 - 19.42% Mozilla/5
3 - 10.85% MSIE 5
June's stats were:
1 - 62.87% MSIE 6
2 - 13.28% MSIE 5
3 - 10.75% Mozilla/5
The site does not favor any browser. So, to answer the original question: yes, I definitely do see a trend here.
Until FireFox offers a centralized way to update. That is to say, in an organization that would roll out FireFox en masse, if a security update arises, there needs to be a secure method of pushing out that update to the end-user of the browser. Believe me when I say it, the VP of Information Systems (my boss) at my job was a proponent of an 'alternative' browser being used instead of IE. He had looked at Opera and I showed him Firefox (less impactful change for end-users) but at the time, Mozilla released a single fix for Firefox's security, and he asked how it would happen if everybody needed an update. If Mozilla can solve that problem with security in mind with PUSHING the updates -- we are going to be in seriously good shape in a year or so. Companies can adopt and push the mainstream users to use it. After all, people use IE because "it's what I use at work" or at least, it's a good enough excuse for a lot of people.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
I am a SysAdmin for a company that provides listings for real estate web sites. Sadly we aren't fully w3c compliant, but we make sure all of our code renders properly in both Mozilla/FireFox and Internet Explorer.
Last week We had 12,156,966 hits to our sites, which is only the search related pages, not photos etc.. 11,689,635 (96.15%) were from Internet Explorer.
I'd wager to say we would see a much more diverse range of users than a site specifically designed for web designers. I hate to say it, but IE is still as much of a force in the market as it ever was.
chown -R us.
IE has 97% share on my site http://www.vinvesting.com/ which is a site for stock ideas. - jason
instead of printing to postscript (device or file) like every other browser since motherfucking mosaic, firefox wants a special daemon running. woohoo, great fucking design assholes!
Yes, the extension is called Download With. I'm not sure if it works with 1.0PR, but I use it with 0.98 with Prozilla as my download manager. Downloading source tarballs over dialup requires frequent resumes, so i find this extension very useful.
Watashi wa chikyubutsurigakusha desu.
I track hits on a home page I keep at my ISP. The page has some notes and pictures for various projects I've worked on from modifications to mufflers on motorcycles, welding up custom racks for a seti cluster, to some coding in java, C, and C++.
My Ausgust data shows:
91% Windows machines
6.5% linux machines
1.96% macs
and
80.5% IE
16.22% Mozilla
2.7% Opera
0.5% Konqueror
So I suspect the numbers this site is pulling has something to do with their demographics.
What I see that is interesting is a significant downward trend in the number of hits from Windows boxes. Its as if for the past 3 to 4 months Windows users have curtailed their surfing habits.
This is just my 2 cents.
burnin
While I too want to flamebait these articles. Even I have to admit I was blown away by Firefox beta demos. I am almost certain to use it as Firefox 1.0 becomes available late October 2004.
The first one changes how the page is formatted, which can be good or bad. It works fine if the ad was a banner ad at the top, it can screw things up if it was a sidebar. The other was will never screw up formatting, but will leave empty areas where the ads go. Yes, these areas are transparent, not 'white', but that doesn't mean they won't show up as white if the page designed put the ads in a white table cell.
The grandparent post apparently discovered that IE defaults to the first behavior, and doesn't know enough to go into the AdBlock extention on Firebird and change it to do that. It's another one of those 'I like the way Microsoft does it better, and I'm too lazy to realize that what I'm talking about is an option on the competing OSS' complaints, just ignore it. It's like those goobers who complained about focus follows mouse.
I, personally, like 'make ads transparent', but what would be nicer is a way to change that on a per-ad basis, which no one can do, as far as I know. What would be really nice is some sort of automatic guessing with an option to override if it's wrong. (For example, if it's not in a table or moved with CSS, it can never screw the formatting to just delete it.)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Precisely! Then it's an easy sell to develop for Firefox "Because it has a quarter of the market" (rounding up + carefully selected sources + give it a few months)
Then you can code to firefox, it looks weird in IE, and put some WEIGHT behind that self-fulfilling prophecy!
SYS 64738 NO CARRIER
I know quite a few people who would rather use FireFox at work, but they can't. Their corporate standard is still IE and their desktops are sufficiently locked down enough that they can't figure out how to get it running.
I suspect that the numbers for FireFox and Opera would be a lot higher if the admins would allow them to use it.
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."
in my scenario, i would love moving the browser from ie to firefox (especially after the jpeg flaw and other critical flaws lately.) however, my problem is mass deployment of the browser throughout the microsoft active directory domain. first off, users do not have privileged rights so create a script after they have logged on will not be possible. also, users are only allowed to execute limited files, thus the installation will also fail. we do not have sms or other tools installed for mass installation (we are dependent on msi packages) because it is expensive to purchase these software for our current use (maybe in the future when we get more money.)
searching, i found some hacks but it is not very straight forward and i do anticipate to experience problems with deployment. once this happens, corporate users will be able to start migrating en masse to firefox.
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
And I reiterated this point a few posts down -- mass adoption of FireFox won't come until it has features that allows Windows networks (ie, corporate intranets) to use this with ease of updates and distribution.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a sp puts Firefox (and Mozilla) on the sharp upswing as well. All surveys being posted put Gecko overall usage at around 17-18%, so I'm certainly inclined to believe them. I trust W3C, and I use their information to plan what I might rquire for my fledgling site, videogamemaps.net. It's worked thus far =)
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
June usage: 3.38 GB, unique visitors: 4806
88.8% Internet Explorer
5.2% Mozilla
2.1% Netscape
2.1% Safari
0.7% Opera
July usage: 16.42 GB, unique visitors: 19088
88.5% Internet Explorer
5.9% Mozilla
2.8% Netscape
1.4% Safari
0.7% Opera
August usage: 12.38 GB, unique visitors: 15448
78.3% Internet Explorer
14.1% Mozilla
2.8% Netscape
1.9% Safari
1.6% Opera
September (14 days) usage: 1.82 GB, unique visitors: 2680
87.2% Internet Explorer
6.3% Mozilla
2.9% Netscape
1.9% Safari
0.8% Opera
Even the low September usage stats represent a statistically useful sample, and it appears non-IE usage is returning to pre-mozilla-fanfare patterns.
Amy
According to group psychology research, a minority needs to consist of 20% of the population in order to be totally accepted. This means that firefox will become visible by most "awakened" computer users when firefox user surpass this quantity. Considering the fact that firefox after all thechnically is better than IE, I think this could mean the end of IE monopoly.
Especially how many IE users visit mozilla.org and mozillazine.org. That's is very intersting.
If we see a lot of IE users at some time while the adoption rate of FireX is increasing. We can say people are attracted by the browser, the browser is really good, people who see it will love it.
And if we agree that most people are still using IE, then it will be a good sign to see a lot of IE users to visit mozilla.org or mozillazine.org.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
...by rendering the machine un-usable.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Isn't it funny how when Google's (now defunct) zeitgeist showed really high IE percentages and pretty low Mozilla/Firefox percentages that the Slashdot crowd made excuses that amounted to "well, Mozilla's share is so low because everyone is changing their user agent to IE!"
Yet when a site with a decidedly less mainstream audience than Google shows Mozilla or Firefox having a reasonably large percentage the same Slashdot crowd is ready to embrace these findings as evidence that Mozilla/Firefox is conquering the world. Funny.
if these statistics are to be believed, doesn't that somewhat undermine the argument that consumers are too stupid to make software choices and microsoft should be forbidden from even exposing their feeble minds to IE?
On my site, which isn't a geek-oriented site and therefore more representative of the general population of the net, IE still accounts for over 95% of the browser market with no change at all in the last few months.
Trends require more than one anomalous reading.
Which is more painful? Going to work or gouging your eye out with a spoon? Find out!
http://www.workorspoon.com
How long before OpenOffice or Abiword does the same thing to MS word ? This is the conversion that I am waiting for, this is what will kill the M$ monopoly.
What it does show is Slashdot posting--for the second time--web stats for a single tech-oriented website as "proof" that Firefox is magically on a global upward trend all over the Internet. "Firefox Browser On An Upward Trend" says the headline. Never mind that it's "Firefox Browser On An Upward Trend In Engadget Site Logs."
Microsoft, SCO, the RIAA, and other enemies wouldn't be able to pull this kind of shit with their statistics. Slashdot has done it twice with Firefox. My company's site logs don't reflect any change at all in IE's or Firefox's usage statistics, and I already see other people corraborating that with their site logs.
According to our logs for the past 6 months totalling some 400,000 unique visitors and ignoring all internal based browsing we're at 94.5% IE, firefox is 0.8% along with mozilla. We have two business sites hosting here. There might be a downward trend but were not seeing it in the business world, at least not yet. Come to think of it, the firefox browsing might just be me doing work from home.
Why do overlook and oversee mean opposite things?
Wikipedia stats are biased.
First, Wikipedia isn't yet a mainstream site (in the sense Google is). Which makes absolute numbers (20% of Mozilla usage) unreliable (biased towards Mozilla, Opera)..
Second, it's moving mainstream fast. Which makes trend analysis unreliable as well (biased __against__ Mozilla) (e.g. the page above says, that Mozilla gained only about 0.3% over the course of last 6 months, which is much lower than most other estimates)
...when it was up, IE was the dominant browser, in the 90-95 percentile range. Looking at the chart, IE6's market share was actually RISING.
And yet, Slashdot reported it as such. They even linked to the w3schools chart that Slashdot already posted about last time, which was also reported as a global stat when it was actually a local stat for w3schools. So this is the second time Slashdot has taken some tech website's local stats and reported it as a global stat.
"Tech news," indeed. What happened to reporting hard facts around here?
For the record, if Slashdot really wanted to energize the geek crowd, they'd make their site logs public too. Yet, they don't. Could it be because in the IRC interview, Taco revealed that IE made up the majority of Slashdot's browser statistics?
All the "different readerships" we've seen were all tech readerships. How can you infer anything from the private site logs of some tech websites? People are so quick to jump to there being a real trend that they'll latch onto anything. Looking at it objectively, it's silly.
Show me the stats for Yahoo, eBay, DrudgeReport, or Google and we'll talk.
yeah, Nice idea, but unplug yourself from the internet first.
Unlike every other browser in the world, IE seems to ignore your frame dimensions if you code format has interesting issues...
Say, you have a column that you want 200 px wide, and you stick a picture in it, with a name just immediately below it. If the picture is also 200 px wide, you'd think the text would go below it because the frame was locked? WRONG, fsking IE decides to bump it on the right of the picture, completely fuxing your frames, and ignoring HTML.
Blank returns are my friends now...
If I throw a stick, will you go away?
Something about the stats bothers me... He took the stats for both IE 5 & 6 and added them together, yet he didn't add Mozilla or Netscape 7's numbers into the mix.
Let's be fair, Mozilla/NS7/Firefox have more in common than IE5/IE6 have in common with each other.
So, the usage for gecko-based browsers is actually 22.81%. Not a huge number, but it's a big difference. Mozilla browsers don't quite have half the market-share of IE, but it's getting closer...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I wouldn't be too sure about that...
I've already had FF crash on me once and it makes a mess of several sites I visit. After the novelty wears off (and really there is no novelty, it is virtually identical to IE) I'll be back in IE so that things work properly once again...
I see a trend in which people submitting slashdot items use skewed data with no disclaimers.
Amen.
The real numbers from general sites have Firefox climbing, sure, but still well within the single digits. And IE (all versions) is still over 80%.
Yes. I second this. Story submitters -- it doesn't do you or anyone any good to submit yet another story with misleading statistics about how much Firefox is in use, and it makes it more difficult to get real numbers.
Firefox is nice. It's a better browser than IE from a technical standpoint. Have fun using it. The market share will come, given continued superiority and time.
That being said, I have a longstanding policy of marking as foe those who write egregiously bullshit and misleading Slashdot articles, so this story author has won a place on my foes list. If you feel the same way, here's a link to your relationship page for him.
May we never see th
...even if Mozilla is used 100% on the web, Microsoft wouldn't really be affected. They never made much from IE (it's free). This isn't 1997, when Microsoft thought they had much to lose if they didnt' kick Netscape's ass. Now everybody knows the money's in the server side, not the browser.
I use Firefox and never seem to run into any IE only sites.
Try registering to take the General GRE online.
May we never see th
FYI I'm the type of user who doesn't really get too involved in the politics of the browser wars or the linux vs MS wars - I just use whatever gets the job done for me and that up to a few months ago was IE. I got used to all the spyware it was installing on my system, I got used its slower speed and got used to the weekly security patches I needed to install not to mention the popups it allowed etc. I installed FIREFOX and now everthing works as it always should have with IE! Sure, once in a while for the odd non-standards-conforming-html site I still have to use IE but this is very rare (once a month or less). I do my banking with IE at many major banking institutions and everything works perfectly for example. Why do I like FIREFOX? Its much faster than IE, yes its much FASTER! It has tabbed browsing, and once you start to use them, you will love it. I HAVE NOT HAD ONE PIECE OF SPYWARE INSTALLED in more than 3 months (this was a major problem before.) I HAVE NO MORE POPUPS, and I didn't have to install anything extra. I wrote this blurb simply because I love Firefox so much that I want everyone else who has used IE in the past to give it a try. IE has given me so many problems over the years that I just accepted this as part of the WWW experience but if you try Firefox your eyes will be opened. Talk to anyone who uses it, and they will tell you the same thing. There is so much anti-Microsoft sentiment and many people make decisions based on some religeous-like counter culture to the Gates empire. I happen to use only MS Windows and love it - it works for me. If you use Windows and IE, choose FireFox simply because it is a much better piece of software than Internet explorer for most of your surfing needs. Keep your IE installed for the odd site but don't cheat yourself on FireFox, the speed increase alone will make you use it more than IE.
-truth
I had a steady B+ in my AI class until I failed the Turing test...
Wikipedia gets more traffic than Slashdot, that's significant. I suggest you go check alexa.com
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
IE has to be about the most frustrating thing to develop for - Web standards? WTF are they? IE for PC, you'd think it would work the same as IE for the Mac (Same company wrote it, right?) WRONG. The company I work for caters to the newspaper industry. Guess what! Newspapers are about 95% Mac users... Write a page that works on the PC, it looks wrong on the Mac, and vice versa... Mozilla on the Mac renders the same as Mozilla on the PC... Firefox on the Mac renders the same as on a PC. Why shouldn't become a standard development platform? Remember when IE first started becoming "standard" and you'd hit a web site, and get a message "Sorry, you must have IE 4.x installed to view this site" and people would install it, and view the page. I say people start making an error page, "You must have Mozilla installed to view this page - www.mozilla.org for this free software" The web-dev community could easily force this into being.
What, you're saying we should make our pages look sucky in IE so everybody gets Firefox?
Utter crap.
People should get Firefox becase it's a good browser with plenty of features and none of the same security holes as IE. Not because a site they like doesn't work in anything else. Not because 'omg teh IE is notez teh browser!!1!1!' (which the W3C have ).
Accessibility >= Design > Compliance
I DLed FF 1.0PR yesterday, first time having seen it and I found somethings about it surprising. Namely, anti-security defaults and behavior.
It really doesn't seem that security is a main feature of FF at all.
Examples:
1) After install, the option to "Save passwords" was on by default. WTF? So anyone that logs into the family, one login machine now automatically has access to the bank accounts and whatever else you need a password on? We all know that "normal" people do not lift a finger to secure their machines, so most will probably never even realize that FF is storing passwords or even when they do realise it, know how to disable it.
2) I tried adding a search engine plug-in from the FF site. The plugin managed to show an icon but no text in the search window drop list. Hmmm. I selected it anyway. CRASH! So it is clear that either FF is buggy or the plugin was buggy which would mean that the FF team is not vetting the plugins on their own web page. Given that most of these plugins are from third parties, I see a huge security nightmare just waiting to happen here.
3) I do not have flash installed on my machine. Several web pages use it. When running into a media type that has no handler, the FF user is prompetd to "Install missing plugin..." without even being told what the missing plugin is. This method of allowing the user a single click to DL and install plugins is another vehicle for security problems (as we already know, such plugins are frequently supplied by untrusted and unvetted sources)
Some minor things that I found a bit annoying...
Unnecessary links added to my favorites list that I had to delete. (JUST LIKE IN IE!) Things like "Fire Fox Crew Picks" are really pretty worthless and frankly, just as annoying as MS adding it's commercial partners to my links list. If FF really is to be better than IE then it cannot copy some of IEs more annoying points. Be fair, be generic, don't push ideologies in your use of supplying preconfigured links.
The install program has no digital signature and when installing on Windows from IE, it looks for all the world like you are installing a trojan with all the warnings. How many people at that point will be scared off from installing it? This isn't expensive or rocket science to take care of, but it does smack as a tiny bit of effort. Do what it takes to prevent those warnings. (I certainly do in the software that I write)
This may be a debatable point, but I was annoyed that by default FF ignores installed proxies and goes straight to the net. IE tries to find proxies first, then goes to the net directly if not found.
So as a browser I give it a 95% score. I found that sites generally work pretty well, but as for security potential, I give it 10%. I feel that FF is a huge accident waiting to happen with the obvious and overt lack of secuirty planning evident in the way the entire FF archetecture and default settings currently exist (as observed by it's external behavior)
I think the mentality of "It won't happen to us" or maybe "It CAN'T happen to us" might be affecting the development of this software a bit too much. It seems that there have been no security lessons from IE's problems learned here at all.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
Web browser stats cannot possibly be construed as matters of opinion, so bias does not apply here.
You're welcome to object to their method of data collection, of course, but not to bias.
Microsoft did it to themselves when they announced an end to development for Internet Explorer.
f d_top
0 /1740256.shtml?tid=109&tid=113&tid=126&tid=185&tid =187&tid=95
When otherwise loyal tech-heads heard that MSIE 6.01 would be the final standalone version of Internet Explorer they decided to look for something that wasn't 'doomed'.
http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-1011859.html?tag=
So why did Microsoft make such a claim? Arrogance. That had 90% of the browser market.
Microsoft has since recognized their mistake:
http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/04/06/2
See: http://secunia.com/advisories/12526/
Yet I see no mention of it on the Mozilla home page and the downloads look the same. Is there a patch is is there not a patch?
From Secunia:
Highly critical
Impact: Cross Site Scripting
Manipulation of data
Exposure of sensitive information
System access
Affects all versions.
Even the low September usage stats represent a statistically useful sample
Egads! N>30!
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
No, damn it, you CANNOT just "switch to Thunderbird" - a lot of people can't anyway because the CALENDAR SUCKS ASS.
Too many other cute features being added, but nobody seems to be paying attention to the fact that the calendar just blows ass compared to the Outlook one.
I've ranted about this before, yes - but guess what? Calendar still sucks. It can't use Outlook calendar invites. You can't just send a calendar item to another user and have them easily import it (it tries to open the calendar attachment in the browser.. seems that Sunbird has no friggin clue what its own calendar files are)
The calendar is what keeps a LOT of users (the ones I know) tied to Outlook - NOT the mail functions.
You mean apart from these critical flaws which let any website take over your machine by exploiting all the buffer overflows in it. The difference between IE and Firefox is that IE has a better automatic update system for patching security issues.
The sites I manage have about 12-14 million hits a month (only about 1 million are unique) and when viewing the stats on all of the different websites I am only seeing about a 5% usage for other browsers, IE is still 95%.
TruePunk | Games
Anyone else see a trend here?
The trend I don't see is the trend for people to stop saying that there's no hope against the Microsoft monopoly.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
As of the time of this writing, Firefox has 48% of the share on my site, and Konqueror's also way up there. Granted, I had to reset the stats last week, but the numbers are in roughly the same proportions for a sample lasting from April to a couple weeks ago when my domain got stolen...
Help us build a better map!
Versions Grabber Hits Percent
MSIE 2893 84.8 %
Msie 6.0 No 2600 76.2 %
Msie 5.5 No 101 2.9 %
Msie 5.23 No 21 0.6 %
Msie 5.01 No 14 0.4 %
Msie 5.0 No 97 2.8 %
Msie 4.01 No 14 0.4 %
Msie 3.02 No 46 1.3 %
NETSCAPE 98 2.8 %
Netscape 7.1 No 21 0.6 %
Netscape 7.02 No 46 1.3 %
Netscape 5.0 No 1 0 %
Netscape 4.04 No 30 0.8 %
OTHERS 418 12.2 %
Unknown ? 214 6.2 %
Mozilla No 204 5.9 %
--
I'm honestly surpised, that yes MSIE is loosing out. Before it was running around 95%. I can't say I'll loose any sleep over it, as MSIE always was a bad joke. I've always been an alternative browser user myself (Mozilla 1.7x now)
Good riddence!!
Kevin C. Redden (kcredden@kevinredden.name)
A site I manage which gets about 10k unique sessions per day.
1 year ago Sept 2003
IE 87%
Netscape 10%
Mozilla 2%
Month of July 2004
IE 92.92%
Mozilla 2.92%
Netscape 1.99%
Month of September 2004 thus far
IE 91.53%
Mozilla 4.19%
Netscape 1.92%
This is a site that sells tshirts. Very general target audience. My conclusion would be that IE usage increased over the last year as netscape fell. Current trend is IE declining, Netscape declining, and Mozilla increasing.
That said, I love Mozilla. I finally switched after getting completely irked over spyware. I now experience the web the way I remember it.
the official German Government institution for IT (BSI) security says they want to see "different browsers" and people should "not only use IE"
:), they _did_ plug the new firefox this week and told people to switch browsers. It nearly floored me when I heard that:
Heise reporting about the BSI comment
(Link to German site)
Apart from that, SWR3 (the biggest German radio station) have a small "Multimedia" feature (weekly?). While it is quite light and sometimes has apparent errors (for a geek like me
SWR3
(Link to German site)
Imagine hearing on the biggest radio station that users should switch to FireFox!
The only minor drawback was that the guy literally said Firefox is now at "version one" - oh well. Friendly User version numbers, they are not.
Best wishes,
Tels
While I have no doubt that the number of Mozilla/Firefox/whatever users are growing, the statistics can and will be skewed by a variety of factors. One in particular I don't see being discussed is that many Opera users mask themselves as IE users when browsing (such as moi) in order to avoid those annoying "sorry, you have to have IE to access this site" messages.
IE users don't mask themselves as anyone else; they don't have to. Since I don't use IE I'm not even sure they can. I also don't know if Mozilla users can mask themselves, but it's apparent from the slashdot posts here that many of the Mozilla folks are pretty fanatic about their support of the product and wouldn't be nearly as pragmatic in their approach to web browsing as Opera users would (Opera is all about pragmatism, not open source fanaticism or brand loyalty or defeating the Evil Empire).
My completely unsubstantiated guess based on a variety of statistics is that IE use is declining and that the use of ALL alternate browsers - open source or not - is rising. I very much doubt that Mozilla has many times the usage rate of Opera, as is often bandied about here on slashdot. Reliable statistics can be obtained to show that IE dominance is declining, but so long as we have various other factors at work (e.g., the Opera masking I talked about above) we can't show in any sort of empirical fashion that alternative browser X is the big leader.
Unless you happen to be one of those brand loyalty loons, this isn't a matter for concern. The more browsers in the market, the more competition among browser makers, the better it is for the rest of us. The last thing we want is for IE to be replaced by another dominant web browser, like Mozilla. This situation would only lend itself to abuse, as the Mozilla group would become the de facto web standards group in the process. We don't want ANY browser maker to be dominant in the market, open source or not; there's nothing 'holy' about open source that keeps the makers of a dominant product from using that product to enforce their own ideas and conventions as standards. A massively dominant market share lends itself to unethical exploitation, not to mention rampant egotism among those who see themselves as part of the 'winning' team.
If anything, we shouldn't be encouraging the use of Mozilla alone as an alternative to IE, but the use of ANY browser that does the job. And that means Konqueror, Galeon, Opera, and so forth. We want all of these products to pick up significant market share so that no one of them can take a dominant position ever again.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
...I'd hate to be the one that pisses in the punch, though, I already see a problem. Granted, one day, this argument may be used in some sort of congressional debate, I still want to voice my opinion.
;-)
Sure, the general public is slowly converting to the FireFox/Mozilla browser, but on the black-hat side, does this mean we should expect a frontal-assault on our browsers much like the now-dwindling MSIE did?
This almost makes me want to open a new thread titled, "FireFox/Mozilla Exploits". What concerns should we address, because the fight for security is the toughest its ever been. Are there any ActiveX-like components, unchecked buffers, or any other interesting unlocked protocols in FireFox we need to lock down? Frankly, I'd like to see FireFox set with a default configuration to turn all the pretty crap off. Automatic resizing of pictures is the worst thing in the world. I hated it in MSIE and I hate it in FireFox! Get rid of it - its one of the things that urged me to convert anyway!
I'll fully support FireFox and the Mozilla Initiative, but keep in mind, the more users we bring into the light, the more Script-Kiddies and malware we attract. With that said, I'll continue surfing safely...
-- Game Developers: Stop porting badly-textured games from crappy console systems!
If you find an IE-only website, make a screendump of what the website looks like in FireFox, and mail it to the sales--or marketing--dept of the company.
and conversely, if you hit a site with a banner that says "Works best in $MS_Browser" and it works just fine in Mozilla (or whatever), email the webmaster with the details of what you found and recommend that he change the banner.
gewg_
Firefox is the best non-IE browser I've seen yet. However, it's probably been mentioned multiple times that the kind of people who use IE are the kind of people who don't come to Slashdot. 99% true.
I use IE still because of Avant Browser (www.avantbrowser.com), a great browser that uses the IE engine but adds tons of features. I'm not interested in the IE engine, I'm just interested in the features. (And we're talking just about every conceivable thing you could want in a browser and more--it's easy to turn off the features you don't like.) Firefox already has a huge leg up on IE because of tabbed browsing, but I had to post to a Firefox forum to discover that simply reordering the tabs by click + drag is a seperate component (expansion) for Firefox that you have to download.
Something as simple as this should be part of the core Firefox install. Until you get that Exp, you can't reorder tabs, and it's such a rudimentary feature of tabbed browsing that I think Firefox, great thing it is, is not hooking as many people as it could because this intuitive feature is not present by default.
I'm rooting for Firefox, but until they A) put rudimentary features like click + drag reorder in, and B) Explain what the hell "expansions" are in an impossible-to-miss way, Firefox isn't living up to its full potential. (And I'm rooting for Firefox, I really am. But it's not done growing up yet!)
I will note that I was educated as to the link about Firefox Expansions. It's there, on the website. But it's not nearly prominent enough. Highlight it with background, put it at the top, take it out of the sidebar, but give it some important status. Even if Expansions are not part of the core Firefox code in order to keep the core install file small to download, THAT'S A GREAT FEATURE, and you shouldn't shove it off to the side simply because the authors of several expansions are not part of the core Firefox programming group. Firefox, I love you, and I wish you the best. Keep on track, and you'll have me for a user. In the meantime, I will spread the word as best I can about you.
Heh, then you must've forgotten about or never known Netscape 4. Consider yourself very fortunate, for thou dost not know real frustration.
Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
duh. one web site's statistics, used to speak for the web?
very amusing, people.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
I agree withh this. I've used Thunderbird for maybe 6 months now, having first migrated through Pegasus (for Windows) to KMail to Sylpheed.
I think that one of the best moves I made was finding an IMAP server and converting all my mail to live behind that. IMAP is well enough supported by mail clients that I can now use whatever client I prefer at any time without having to deal with (for instance):
And, of course, it also allows remote access to mail folders although I don't personally configure or use it that way.
I'm unsure what free IMAP servers are available for Windows -- I currently use Dovecot in linux. For those who are in a position to run an IMAP server rather than letting their mail client handle the mailboxes directly, I'd recommend investigating the possibility. It means a lot more freedom to easily move between different clients for different preferences and tasks.
You can't get much more "mainstreem" than Google. The Zeigiest project has been logging web trends for a long time.
Here is their latest posted data (June 04). If you squint and look really closely, you can see a similar trend but it includes netscape and mozilla together.
--KS--
Among CNET News.com readers, site visitors with open-source browsers jumped to 18 percent for the first two weeks of September, up from 8 percent in January.
That's quite a jump.
What I find interesting is that since most Firefox users also use AdBlock & other page display controls that essentially remove 99% of advertising content from web browsing (ahem... *doubleclick*), with the rise in use of Firefox more & more advertising will not be getting through to its intended audience. This can have the side effect of cutting off the revenue stream of many web sites and may lead us down the road of paid content.
I for one even block the ads on slashdot. Call me a freeloader.
I would agree with that, unfortunately I have worked places where it was a sin to install anything but IE on your computer to browse the web with.
Perhaps if you also had a link on the page to continue on anyway, then that could hammer home the point, without being too obtrusive.
--- I do not moderate.
seems like most people's comments' about target audience of the webpage directly related to the stats - but personally, most of the electrical/computer engineers and computer science majors (even masters students) flat out REFUSE to use - or even try out firefox. That kind of attitude's just sickening. What's the point of installing anti-spyware software if you continue to run IE and outlook? For whatever reason, some of them even claim that firefox is only for geeks, just like the way they would say about linux.
miserable.
my blog
No, I never said that, now did I.
Utter ignorance.
CODE TO FIREFOX. Code to STANDARDS. IE doesn't need help to make compliant, accessible, well-designed pages look weird.
SYS 64738 NO CARRIER
Thankfully, I found some dealers who don't work from the standard site, and are compliant, so I'll be buying from one of those instead.
The people who run the site will be getting an email in the morning about why I won't be buying from them.
If more people did this, and threatened to boycott, there's a chance that people would respect browser choice more.
I've been using it, but it's got several annoying or dangerous misfeatures, not the least of which is its uninstaller will remove files the installer didn't create (make sure you don't download or otherwise put anything remotely important anywhere in it's program tree OR accidentally install it in a directory that already has stuff in it (such as "Program Files") as it just blows it away if you find the need to uninstall/reinstall) (version 0.9, at least).
And I hate how the "File->New Window" selection creates a new window with the HOME page, when EITHER a BLANK page or the CURRENT page (as in IE) is more often useful. I'm fond of "forking" pages so I don't have to "back" to get to something, all I have to do is "close." I've also found several cases where "open in new window" doesn't appear in the right-click menu, but "copy link location" does and I end up having to paste a copied link in a new window as a workaround. And so I end up setting the home page to blank just so I don't have to waste so much time loading it when what I'm trying to get is a link opened or the current page opened in a new window.
But considering the number of misfeatures or bugs IE has, Firefox is worth using...
I think the bigger story here is where the other >= 95 - 57 - 18 = 20% went! (That's even more than Firefox's 18%.) Or do we count Mozilla and Firefox separately?
if m$ wants to "compete" and regain their amazing foothold on the market what they should seriously consider doing is making ie open source... the masses are slowly beginning to see that over time open source software is a better choice as problems are quickly reported and fixed...
All the torrents you could want.
Ugly Opera advertising? Where?
re sig: interest (cbr2702 to yahoo d0t com)
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
What shocks me is the total lack of common sense that allows people to claim that IE ever had 95%+ marketshare. Last time I checked, that was approximately 103% marketshare among Windows and Mac users, according to Google.
Now, you could argue that Google is too small and their audience too much of a niche market for their numbers to be accurate, but I somehow doubt it. IE with 95% share is about as plausible as CBS's forged memos.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That's a good one. I'll remember that one too.
"Honey, I feel a certain distance between us..." "Really? A 31ms ping ain't that bad..."
Most likely, he has a number of browsers installed to see what they are like. Know your competition, and all that.
Clever signature text goes here.
Here Apparently you haven't ever used the free version of their browser. The ads cannot be turned off. I am proponent of not paying for somehing I can get for free, (Not steal, just free). I guess that leaves me with the Mozilla or IE browsers. I don't have to pay and I am not force fed advertising.
If it doesn't look right to 60% of the browsing world - probably more, given that W3Schools is hardly the most accurate place for this information - it's not very accessible now, is it?
The point of standards is accessibility, so why use them when they hinder it? Sure it'd be nice if IE was compliant, but since it isn't, make pages that CAN be accessed in all browsers rather than ones that SHOULD be accessible in all browsers.
Accessibility doesn't always mean it looks right. You can have divs that overlap or just don't line up in various browsers. It works and reads fine, but it looks a little funny.
...and my point ORIGINALLY was... just tell your boss, "Actually, a quarter of our visitors will see an ugly, broken page. Is that what you really want?" Then you actually have the OK to spend the time on not only writing to Firefox, but maybe even sneaking in some nice features that will only show up in Firefox (and be invisible to IE).
So the hacks and tweaks are typically fairly minor right now. We err on the side of IE, and maybe the width is off by 3 or 4 pixels (border width, sometimes) in Firefox. Font sizes are never quite perfect.
On the other extreme, check out Eric Meyer's pages on css/edge to see what I mean...
You can see the menus and select them just fine, but they're weird in IE. Check the complexspiral page - it doesn't even look LOATHSOME in IE, but it's just not proper enough for professional developers to accept it for a production page. Look at the slantastic one too, as well as the explanations.
The most frustrating thing is, it works the other way around. If it looks OK in IE and horrible (or even INACCESSIBLE) in anything else, everybody just shrugs their shoulders and says "Oh well, as long as they can read the content. They can just fire up IE."
SYS 64738 NO CARRIER
I've never had those problems. Never.
And I forgot to mention how much I love Firefox for the extensions. Bad-freaking-ass. I remember the day I finally gave up on netscape for IE (sometime in 1998), but they've finally caught back up. It's great software, and I plan on installing xplite without explorer at all, and using firefox. I can't wait.
So do you expect Windows XP users on dial-up to order the Windows XP Service Pack 2 CD from a public library and otherwise just leave their computers turned off for 6 to 8 weeks until the CD arrives in the mail? What's the appropriate analogy to brake pads here?