Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
How about if Slashdot would open up their logfiles? Same crowd, but bigger sample...
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.
If it wasn't for IE, a quarter of all tech. support reps would be out of a job.
Ok, not really, but I do work in tech. support, and spend a significant portion of my day dealing with IE-related issues. If a normal rep spends an average of 1 hour each day on IE issues alone, and there are 250 reps at the center I work at, then we're spending 250 hours a day on IE problems. If no one dealt with IE issues, we could shift the workload and fire 30 people! that works out closer to an eighth, but saying "1/8" isn't impressive enough these days.
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?