Slashdot Mirror
Firefox Shooting For 10 Percent
Random BedHead Ed writes "An
article on ZDNet Monday features an interview with Bart Decrem, the Mozilla organization spokesman, who says that by the end of next year they expect to have 10% of the browser share. "We have the momentum," he says. He attributes some of the success to faster browsing and a lack of software bloat, and suggests that other open source projects might see similar success if they trim features. The article also quotes some very interesting figures from ZDNet's own web servers. About 9% of ZDnet visitors were using a Mozilla browser in February; now in it's at 19%." The average for OSTG overall is about 30%.
I can't comment for other sites, but for our city's website, http://www.laytoncity.org/, here's our breakdown as of 9:14am today:
RomSteady - I came, I saw, I tested. GamerTag: RomSteady / http://www.romsteady.net
Just go to the site WITHOUT an affiliate link, Spread Firefox.
Some applications have hardwired to launch iexplore.exe - so changing your default browser won't help if NetZero is one of those applications.
Thats when you complain to NetZero so they know its not appreciated.
- sarcasm is just one more service we offer -
... if by any chance you have MS LAN with AD, you can deploy Firefox to all your clients nearly instantly using Firefox MSI. It works like a charm and increase their chances to keep the promise.
There may not be all that many IE-only sites, but I use opera, and there are a hell of a lot of "not-Opera" sites out there in the corporate world (start with FedEx, the USPS, and UPS, for three fine examples)
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Business 2.0 has an interesting article titled "Microsoft's Worst Nightmare" with some additional background on the rise of Firefox.
Reading the text you can almost imagine Redmond concocting a cunning plan to distract 19-year-old Blake from his Firefox duties, involving free tickets to a tropical island with Natalie Portman. And daily hot grits via room service.
I've just dealt with something similar. The first step is to go through (manually and painfully) Win32 file associations and make sure nothing points to Internet Explorer. That, and having FF set as the default browser, should significantly reduce the need for IE.
The next step, and one that I have yet to try, is to find a test system and symlink the IE binary to FF. It's a disaster waiting to happen, I know, but I think the experiment itself is worth the effort, let alone any possible success. In case you're wondering how to link in Win32, take a gander here.
*blinking cursor*
This isn't a troll (I'm posting from FireFox), but I wish the Mozilla group would stop rushing to get 1.0 out the door and fix the rendering problems associated with sites like CodeProject.com, Slashdot, MSDN, pinvoke.net, Neowin, and the host of others I've visited that often are problematic.
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
There actually are still many sites that require IE to work properly there is a list of some here: http://toastytech.com/good/badsitelist.html
The worst offenders are usually locked away behind user accounts (like bank systems) or hidden deep within a web site that otherwise works.
I work for the National Older Worker Career Center - a spinoff of AARP - and can verify that this is the case for our web site. I keep hoping, but I haven't seen the browser stats budge away from IE at all in the last year.
Whenever slashdot supports web standards, obviously. This site is terrible when it comes to using standards compliant code. In other news, IE is generally better at rendering sites with malformed code than FireFox. (IE is still behind FF in standards compliance of course.)
``if IE use drops to 0% across the board, how does this affect M$'s bottom line?''
The magic word here is `control'. As long as virtually everybody is using IE, Microsoft has great control over what websites can do and how they do it. For example, websites do use ActiveX controls, but they don't use XUL.
When Microsoft integrates XAML support into IE, web developers will be doing the things they can now do with XUL, but using XAML instead. F/OSS browsers will be locked out, because they don't support the new features the Microsoft way, even though XUL was there first.
Users will be bound to IE, and consequently Windows - the only platform IE runs on (the Mac port was discontinued, IIRC). This is why IE market share affects MS's bottom line. Without near-universal deployment of IE, they wouldn't be able to control the market like this.
It saddens me that the F/OSS communities don't work harder on enhancing interactivity on the web. I think this will be the killer feature of XAML - and I don't see why we need to sit and wait until Microsoft introduces it. We can beat them to it!
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Well, first of all Microsoft doesn't make a browser. They make an OS named "Windows" one of its features is an icon called "Internet Explorer." That feature isn't free, you have to fork over cold, hard cash for a Windows license.
Secondly, Microsoft didn't throw all that money into winning the browser wars for bragging rights. They had two main goals:
1. Kill the browser as platform. This was a scary topic that Netscape was talking about in the 90's, and Microsoft had to kill it, as a threat to their OS monopoly.
2. Control the platform. For anyone who remembers MSN "Blackbird", Microsoft has always wanted to own the web. Originally they actually thought MSN could compete with -- and win out over -- the WWW. No, really! Then when they realized they couldn't own it, they decided to try to control all the interfaces, APIs, and methods to access it. Even this hasn't been well executed, since Windows has 95% of the browser market share, but Microsoft's proprietary technologies haven't really caught on that widely -- except as a vehicle for adware and spyware.
I agree that the browser wars mean very little in the sense that Firefox or Safari must "win". The real importance is in that the battle is being fought. As long as there is a battle, the web is safe from being controlled by any one entity, be it M$ or even the Mozilla foundation. It's when there's no one there to serve as a check or balance that our standard-based web is at risk.
Good gravy, that reads like a democratic manifesto. :-)
I agree it's annoying, but there is a slightly less annoying workaround available. Instructions here.
From what I've seen, it seems the developers of both Slashcode and Firefox agree it is a bug in Firefox.
/. has more than a million readers yet http://www.spreadfirefox.com/ has less than 7,300 names as of today. So less than 1% of readers who are PRO Open Source are willing to put their money where their mouth is.
People, this is once in a lifetime shot at getting the web back from commercial interested.
$30 or even a $10 will go a LONG way.
Start Button > Set Program Access and Defaults > Choose a Default Web Browser
Type in "fish://myuser@any_remote_Linux_box/" in and fall in love.
It works over ssh, which means it will work with just any Linux distro out of the box. (Because AFAIK ssh is installed and active on almost all Linux distros)
You will never use FTP again. FTP is insecure, a hassle to set up and generally outdated.
BTW, the "fish:" links work everywhere in KDE, not just in Konqueror.
These stats may be interesting, maybe not. They are for a small farm equipment manufacturer in the midwest, so they are fairly representitive of a non-techie crowd.
IE 6.0: 73.2%
IE 5.5: 6.6%
IE 5.0: 6.1%
NN 6.+: 1.6%
NN 4.7: 1.0%
Mozilla: 3.7%
Safari: 1.6%
And 12 hits from Konqueror! Props to the unix-geek farmers!
You are a genius.
r agent.html
for those who want to change it.
http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2004/04/24/changinguse
I made strict XHTML/1.0+CSS compliance a critical priority
Which puts you in a different category from 95% of webmasters in the world. Your views of this subject are far from the norm.
"(mozilla is netscape is aol right?)" No. Mozilla is Mozilla Foundation. As for OSS business models, do you really think IBM rely on donations?
Evolution is just a scientific theory. Creationism is not.
or, maybe they realized that you hitting the refresh button brings in more ad revenue and therefore they will not fix it. in other words, broken html is a feature, not a bug. (kind of like the mysql "bug" that allows you to waste your mod points on a comment that can not benefit from your points)
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Translation: We don't guarantee we own it (CONDITION OF TITLE), don't guarantee you won't get legally harrassed because of using it (QUIET ENJOYMENT), and don't guarantee it doesn't infringe on anyone else's copyright (NON-INFRINGEMENT). Your employer has no more guarantee using commercial software unless specifically stated otherwise in a contract.
Show your boss the licenses to the commercial software you're using and watch the sparks fly.