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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.
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.
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.
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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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
Are you serious? In fact the potetial loss rather the control over the dominant client platform. Just think a bit about what you get with proper completely cross platform GUI rendering engine with nice development bindings and wide install base. Just take a look on this .
Is it right? Not?
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.
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?
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
True, the loss to MS is zero in ONLY the browser space. In other spaces, the loss may be FAR greater.
Microsoft didnt make IE out of the goodness of their hearts, they paid staff, millions of hours of development time, a court case with the DOJ, to get this "free" browser out. And we know MS doesnt give things away unless they are either goign to earn profit somewhere else, or to prevent loss occuring somewhere else.
going back to 1996/1997, Microsoft realised that Netscape, the dominant browser at the time, were slowly morphing from "Just a Browser" into something that together with Java resembles an OS. It was a platform that allowed applications to be delivered over the net, making the core OS irrelevent. Have a look at archived docs about Netscape's Aurora, and you will understand why MS was scared.
Secondly the Java & HTML can be developed by MOST students for free. You only needed a Text Editor, a paint package and a freely obtainable JDK. There is no relatively "simple" ways to create windows applications for free. This was the reason why Microsoft gave away Visual Basic Active X edition for free, to get people less intrested in Java, and create More MS centric solutions.
Therefore dont assume that there is no value to MS from Internet Explorer. It is core to them. They only got a bit of a breathing space because fo the Dot Com bust, didnt create as much intrest for Web Applications as originally thought.
Obligatory Mastercard Parody:
- development time: 10000 Man hours
- Cost of development: $1million
- Sending SP2 free to anyone who asks: $1 per CD
Mahing the Windows/Office/Visual Studio triopoly maintained, and seeing Netspace and many other compeitors ground to dust - PRICELESS.
Have a nice day!
"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
-truth
I had a steady B+ in my AI class until I failed the Turing test...
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.
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.
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.