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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?"
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?
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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
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...
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.
Watch great movie opening scenes!
While I agree with what you're saying, neither you nor I, nor the extension developers can help the changes that are made by the Firefox developers. So they just have to adapt. As someone else here mentioned, you can disable the "don't use obsolete extensions" thing which will just force all of your extensions to work anyways. But I'd just assume wait until they're actually updated and are KNOWN to work.
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.
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...
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.
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.
What I find funny are those sites that throw you off if you don't have IE - often when the site works fine using a faked user agent. They must have a lot of money to burn if they can turn away 10% of their revenue just for the sake of fixing a few (or no) broken pages.
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
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.
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?
Funnilly enough I was looking at the stats for a relatively large website in Australia (receives roughly 30,000 homepage hits a week) earlier today, and noticed that the trend for Firefox did have a huge jump halfway through August (came from not even a blip in our stats package, to 1% in the space of a week). It has plateaued over the last two weeks to about 1.5% of all browsers. As far as non MS browsers go it's the highest, consistently, since the huge jump one month ago, but by no means is it continuing to grow as much as people would hope.
I would consider the stats for this website to be pretty indicative of "normal" browsers in the real world, being a supermarket chain.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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
For a reasonably well trafficed (say 30k unique visitors per month) and high profile (within its industry that is) B2B site I manage the figures for September are:
1 Internet Explorer 6.x 68.81%
2 Internet Explorer 5.x 8.48%
3 Firefox 8.00%
4 Safari 3.76%
5 Mozilla 1.69%
6 Opera 1.58%
7 Netscape 7.x 1.38%
8 Others 0.83%
Two months ago, the July figures were:
1 Internet Explorer 6.x 65.82%
2 Internet Explorer 5.x 10.60%
3 FireFox 5.07%
4 Safari 4.65%
5 Opera 2.13%
6 Mozilla 1.87%
7 Others 1.53%
8 Netscape 7.x 1.36%
A couple of things to note:
a) I might skew the figures a bit as I'm _always_ on the site and my usual browser of choice is Firefox.
b) A lot of money was spent and the site launch was delayed so that Safari could be "supported" at the request of some very vocal senior team members. However, Firefox is not officially supported and in fact some key site functionality does not work as intended in this browser (iframes & embedded media problem). Yet Firefox has more activity than Safari on our site.
Brought to you by the author of such childrens' classics as "Some Kittens can Fly!" and "All Dogs go to Hell."
Well, considering that there are 2 billion Linux systems (counting all the embedded stuff) and only 600 million Windows systems, Linux is a serious threat. ;-)
Oh well, what the hell...
Another example that is visited by few geeks (and fewer people with live brain cells) is www.wtfpeople.com - they've noticed the trend in Firefox growth enough that they changed their header graphic from "FUCK ALL BROWSERS EXCEPT INTERNET EXPLORER" to "FUCK ALL BROWSERS EXCEPT THOSE THAT WORK" - and they've never changed the code at all, just heard enough from visitors that they checked it out for themselves.
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society - M. Twain
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 . .
For those interested, here is a link to FoxyTunes;
http://www.iosart.com/foxytunes/firefox/ - an in-firefox mediaplayer control.
Find more (and some very cool ones like Bugmenot) here: Firefox extensions
What would be interesting to me would be to see the trend of IE browsers on Mozilla's site over the past six months or so. If it shows an increasing or even steady trend, then it is excellent news for the Mozilla folks.
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
-truth
I had a steady B+ in my AI class until I failed the Turing test...
You mean an 'entrance' in the weblog as IE, followed by an 'exit' a few minutes later as Firefox ;o)
...or someone who has had to re-install...again...after killing their PC...again...
ok...ok - I know it wouldn't work like that, but it's a nice thought.
They could go through their logs looking for IE hits on the firefox download page, followed by a firefox hit on the default after install (I forget which URL the fox sends you to straight after install) page. The same IP, within 5mins or so of each other = 1 new user
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.
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
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
I don't know any "average" web sites that show browser statistics. The best I can think of is TheCounter, which lists stats for a bunch of fairly average sites. They show IE usage down from 95% in May to 91% in September.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's probably not about fixing a few broken pages -- it's about testing, and about certifying.
I'm not in the industry, but maybe this scenario isn't too far off the mark in some cases. Suppose you run a web design company, and you're an MS shop. You've knocked up loads of web sites that run on IE, and you've got it down to a fine art. Suppose someone asks you for quotes for IE and for multi-browser. What do you say? You say that multi-browser is likely to cost a lot more. Not necessarily because there's much more coding to do, but because your testing goes from one browser on one platform to umpteen of each, in all the umpty-ump combinations (which may well involve buying and setting up those different platforms and browsers), and you then have to work out how to fix any problems (which may mean gaining or buying in expertise). So of course, for an apparent 10% of visitors, most companies won't stump up a lot more dosh. And so all the web sites, and the web design companies, do things cheaply and only certify their sites on IE/Windows -- whether or not they actually work on other sites.
It's not conspiracy, just self-interest.
If that's so, then what it'll take is one major web design company acquiring the expertise and equipment needed to be able to offer and certify multi-browser sites at the same price (either off their own bat, or from a commission from an enlightened client); then maybe clients and other design companies will follow. But until then...
BTW, for me the great thing about this story isn't the large figure for FireFox. Not that I've anything against it; it's a great browser, and I'm pleased it's doing well. But more important than that is the low figure for IE. The less of a monoculture the web is, the more everyone benefits: FireFox and their users, Camino and the other Gecko-based browsers and their users, Safari and its, Opera, OmniWeb, even Lynx. And, indirectly, IE and its users! The only people who gain from an IE monoculture are MS themselves, and I'm quite happy at the prospect of them having to compete on merit for a change.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
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."
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