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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?"
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?
But you have to give the developers time to update their extensions/themes for the new release. Yesterday, the only one of mine that worked was AdBlock (the best one) and then today there was already an update for FoxyTunes - so the work is getting done, you just have to be patient. :)
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.
----
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.
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.
Ah, but be fair, it's not at 1.0 quite yet.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
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 also run one site, but mine isn't geared towards techheads. (Blood conservation for hospital staff.) Here's this months stats so far:
MSIE 6.0: 86%
MSIE 5.5: 3%
MSIE 5.23: 1.2%
MSIE 5.01: 0.9%
MSIE 5.0: 1.8%
Netscape 7.2: 0.7%
Netscape 7.1: 0.7%
Mozilla: 2.5%
Opera: 2%
Unknown: 0.3%
Konqueror: 0.1%
(Missing: 0.8%)
I'm waiting for Mozilla to grow. Then again, my site still uses frames, so why am I complaining?
Sum of IE Dropped ~2% since previous months where it hovered around 94.7%+-0.3. Mozilla numbers remain unchanged from previous months; Opera took the space it seems. Oh well.
This has been discussed on many /. threads regarding firefox ... The main reason for extension incompatibility between point releases is that Firefox hasn't yet reached the 1.0 release mark ...
... your criticism would have been relevant for Firefox 1.+ ... but not now
Meaning
Never underestimate the power of idiots in large groups
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.
No, by this logic two slashdot polls showed the number of Linux users double you could claim Linux was gaining on Windows.
RTFS!
Sindri Traustason.
What helps for me so far (100% score until now): 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. You can be sure they contact their developer/ site-maintainer about it.
If you contact the "developer" directly, you can end in a yes/no battle about W3C, so get to the guys with the money instead
"Honey, I feel a certain distance between us..." "Really? A 31ms ping ain't that bad..."
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?
If I had mod points, i would have modded you down.
Sure, its been a while since the mozilla browser has been in development, but note that a good part of that time was spent perfecting the Gecko rendering engine, and making the Mozilla Suite (browser, mail client, html editor etc).
Firefox (initially Pheonix, then Firebird) has been in development only since last year (around May or June?). They basically started with the browser component of the Mozilla suite, and rewrote significant bits of the UI, and added plenty of new UI features (customizable toolbars, better bookmarks, better extension and theme management, etc.).
So Firefox-the-browser (minus Gecko) is still a bit of a baby, and has only just reached 1.0PR. You cannot seriosly expect extensions to work across pre-release versions when they are still adding features (new RSS/Atom feature in bookmarks, new find toolbar etc, all in this release) and refining the browser!
The browser is still in development and gaining new features, and I don't mind waiting a few days for extension authors to make (mostly minor, if any) changes to their extensions before upgrading.
A trend is not about absolute numbers.
Another site may have 90% Explorer and 4% firefox.
If last year the figures were 92% vs 2%, then the trend is the same as w3schools (where firefox usage jumped from 8% -> 18 %)
Washington bullets will simply be known as the "Bulle
if that be the truth, then the mozilla folks should market firefox as a developers release, instead of pushing it to all users. I mean, Firefox is the first thing you notice when you arrive at mozilla.org. You shouldn't treat Firefox as a polished app, and then pull out the old "it's pre version 1" speak when critcism abounds. It only frustrates users.
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?
How about Wikipedia: 80% IE, 20% Mozilla & company.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
As I hinted at in another post, the problem would be seen by a CNN/Gallup poll after the respondents say:
"Which web browser do you use?"
The Internet 50%
The Web 15%
Explorer 10%
Internet Explorer 10%
Mozilla/FireFox: 12%
Other 3% (Including 1.2% who stated 'www')
Hey, IE was at 4.0 before it was barely useful. ;-)
I wonder whether MSIE 6.0 is at 1.0 yet. :)
if that be the truth, then the mozilla folks should market firefox as a developers release, instead of pushing it to all users.
:-P
It's the truth, and it's pushed as a "Preview Release" and a "Technology Preview". So they should expect about as much as a public beta version of IE from it.
You shouldn't treat Firefox as a polished app, and then pull out the old "it's pre version 1" speak when critcism abounds. It only frustrates users.
Yeah, and it frustrates people with insight of the Firefox status if people whine about pre-1.0 software that's released for preview purposes (says so right on the Mozilla.org front page).
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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
Just goes to show you - all you need to do to defeat Microsoft is to release something better. And release it for free.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
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!
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
maybe you should actually go to the site and learn how to make hyperlinks
I've just signed legislation that'll outlaw Russia forever. We'll begin bombing in five minutes.
"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
W3schools stats lump Mozilla/firefox/etc together in one group under "Mozilla".
And why would web developers use Mozilla instead of Firefox? I want something as bloat free as possible. Compared to Mozilla, IE is bloat free. Look at the feature list:
advanced e-mail and newsgroup client, IRC chat client, and HTML editing
That's why Firefox is nice. It's just a browser, thankfully.
I've just signed legislation that'll outlaw Russia forever. We'll begin bombing in five minutes.
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
Wouldn't web developers be most likely to use IE. After all, if it is the most used browser (perhaps still >90%) then it is in a company's best interest to make sure their website works properly in IE and not spend time making things working Mozilla if it works find in IE. There was much discussion on this regarding the lack of IE PNG alpha blending support.
I'm not saying this is a good thing, I'm just saying it seems to be the business attitude. There isn't much financial benefit in spending time to make their website compliant with a browser that has 5% market share if the site is fine in the browser with 95% market share. I do find this shortsighted though, since Mozilla/Firefox could be the dominant browser in, say, 6 months for example. Then all these companies would need to re-do their websites at extra cost so it would have been cheaper to make it compliant in the first place.
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 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.