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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'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.
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.
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..
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.
----
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...
It is snazzy amd sexy, and has a cute fox
... it's a red panda: linky. Still, a very cool animal.
Actually, it's not even really a "fox"
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!
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?)
It's from the Renaming FAQ. Scroll down a little bit on this page.
"What's a Firefox?"
A "Firefox" is another name for the red panda.
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.]
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
my Firefox identifies itself as vi on a ZXSpectrum and I never have problems with sites refusing me entry.
Oh well, what the hell...
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 . .
You can do this, and though it's not quite as simple as IE, it's really not bad.
Right click on the toolbar and choose customize. Drag all the elements from the navigation toolbar up next to the field menu. Click close from the customization box. Right click on the now-empty navigation bar and uncheck it from the list.
Voile! Buttons, address bar, and menus all in one toolbar.
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.
"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.
-truth
I had a steady B+ in my AI class until I failed the Turing test...
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 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
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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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!
Microsoft did it to themselves when they announced an end to development for Internet Explorer.
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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
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.
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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