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%.
Come on Hemos! Pull back the curtain, let the truth set you free! Slashdot readers want OS/browser stats.
My website's percentages (I would say a somewhat stereotype independent website):
.5% every month), so that kind of confuses me. Either way, IE is going way down, and Mozilla/FireFox are going up.
September 2003:
MS Internet Explorer 95.9 %
Netscape 1.8 %
Mozilla 1 %
Opera 0.4 %
Safari 0.4 %
September 2004:
MS Internet Explorer 92.5 %
Mozilla 4.1 %
Netscape1.4 %
Safari 0.8 %
Opera 0.5 %
October 2004:
MS Internet Explorer 90.9 %
Mozilla 2.7 %
FireFox 2.1 %
Netscape 1.4 %
My guess is that my host just updated awstats so that firefox and mozilla are seperated. It does list FireBird (less than
-LBArrettAnderson (I seem to be banned permenantly).
Is there a tool that can make FF the browser that comes up when *any* request for a brower is made by external programs?
Example: I build a Win2k box for my Dad who uses netzero. Netzero will still launch IE for the web based emai.
thoughts?
...yup...
Is it not expected that ZDNet readers would skew towards Mozilla? How about the percentage of users to the top ten visited websites? Save for google.com, why would we expect that Mozilla access rates to those site would be markedly higher?
Of course not. 90% of the market is still enough to prevent having to develop cross-platform. How many versions of AutoCAD do you see for Macintosh or Linux?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
When will Firefox render slashdot properly? I still have the page text overlapping the margins, and about 9 times out of 10 when I submit a comment or click to read into a thread, I get a page full of crap and have to reload a few times.
What's the deal? 1.0 preview release now, and it's been this way since 0.6. It's in Bugzilla, though I suspect it's slashdot's problem, like so many other amateur websites they probably only test with IE.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
How bad would it hose the box if "iexplore.exe" was a shortcut to Firefox's executable? Might be worth a try.
Today Dave Winer wrote, "I won't use any non-Internet Microsoft product until they start investing again in MSIE. I don't hold out much hope, but it's the least I can do for the Web."
Not using MS products IS probably is the least you can do. Whatever happened to Microsoft Free Fridays? With FireFox aiming for 10% of the Web, it seems like it might be time to do more than the "least" for the web.
Any interest in a javascript alert message campaign to promote Firefox on Fridays? People could add the script to their site and on Friday an alert message would display saying something allong the lines of "The browser you are using isn't startard compliant or secure. Please consider upgrading to Firefox."
Might be fun to rename IE to iexplore.bak and FF to iexplore.exe - add the FF folder to PATH and see what happens. No promises, 'cause I haven't tried it, but like I said, might be fun ;)
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
From a medium ecommerce site:
Internet Explorer 85.77%
Netscape Navigator 4.37%
Mozilla 1.71%
America Online 4.80%
Safari 1.08%
Opera 0.23%
Our site (web dev):
Internet Explorer 50.99%
Netscape Navigator 6.00%
America Online 0.54%
Mozilla 3.36%
unknown 34.34%
Safari 2.06%
Local downtown portal:
Internet Explorer 89.38%
Netscape Navigator 4.21%
Mozilla 1.87%
America Online 1.92%
Safari 1.11%
Opera 0.12%
... by convincing (begging, whining, pleading) to a friend of mine to use anything, ANYTHING, but I.E.
She finally succumbed.
Her reaction: "Wow, it lets me do much more than I could before. I love it!"
If everyone tells two friends (and they tell two friends), we can finally eliminate I.E. from the universe! BWAHAHAHAHA!
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV
``He attributes some of the success to faster browsing and a lack of software bloat''
Compared to what? Mozilla is a piece of bloatware, and although the Firefox team stripped a lot of bloat, it still isn't exactly a lean browser. Konqueror on my 333 MHz Celeron feels faster than Firefox on my 800 MHz G4, not to mention Firefox on the Celeron.
I've heard about many IE users who didn't want to switch, because IE is faster. Opera leaves both of them a mile behind.
Seriously, there are good reasons for using Firefox, but speed and lack of bloat are not among them.
Anybody still working on the KHTML to GTK port?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
MS can save corporate, institutional, and kiosk users by simply having a "lockdown mode" that's trivial to set.
Here's what I envision:
With a single configuration setting - something a non-techie library employee can set when logged in as an administrator, have it automatically block all potentially-hostile content from everyone that's not on a predefined whitelist.
The default whitelist is *.yourorganization.com + *.microsoft.com. Whitelisted sites would not necessarily be treated as the "local" zone, but rather they'd be treated the same as if the lockdown were not in effect.
Plus, add a button to the end-user screen that says "site doesn't work." If a user clicks on this, the administrators will be notified to check it out and, if they deem the site safe, grant it more privilages.
This is something MS, or possibly even a third-party vendor, could do in a matter of weeks. It requires few if any underlying code changes, mainly just a browser-helper-object and some "re-packaging" of existing configuration settings.
The long term solution of course is to redesign IE's security model.
If MS takes no action, they'll continue to lose market share to browsers that don't represent such an open door to hostile code.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Lack of support to dynamic fonts is a major draw back to the popularity of Mozilla in asian countries and for people who uses browser to read asian websites. Now a days most websites uses dynamic fonts to render their pages and it does not work in Mozilla or in Netscape 6 and above. We cannot ask the websites to change that practice and go with the option of downloading fonts or use unicode fonts. Some of those asian lanugages does not have unicode support
I use IE to browse slashdot because installing or using firefox at work will get me fired.
with the SCO stuff that's going on, my company WILL NOT allow anyone to install ANYTHING that we haven't protected ourselves from. This basically means that we pay hundreds of dollars per line of source code to use open source software for the sole purpose of saying that "We got it from a vendor, sue the vendor not us!"
in the event that some company comes around and claims that they themselves wrote firefox and decides to sue every user, i guess we'll be protected.
I call bullshit. it drives me MAD that i can't use PuTTY or Firefox at work. Its an easy choice i guess, to use IE or get fired, but I'm already looking for another job because of it. Yes I HATE IE that much.
10 percent for Firefox (well, let's say for Mozilla browsers in general) seemed like a hedged bet :)
Everyone whose computer I've put it on seems to have taken to Firefox quickly (or in some cases, Mozilla), and I've heard several of them recommending it to other people.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
They will know if 10% of the customers start complaining. :-)
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
What I'm still waiting for is to see what's next. I'm surprised someone hasn't come out with something superior to a browser.
Most of what people want to do with the a browser just doesn't work that well. For whoever solves that, they'll be the next big thing.
I just don't see a lot of progess in information management and presentation. I guess the web has become main stream and such changes just aren't practical. Much like we're still using ancient SMTP for mail.
Mozilla has an oppurtunity. If they can make their browser easy to develop plugins and developer software for they'll have a chance at really gaining on IE. Until that becomes easier, there's still going to be a lot of resistance in IT shops where they need more than just a browser. The FireFox as a platform idea from Blake is nothing new, but the problem is that Open Source developers don't seem to have the ability to create a solution thats easy to develop for. Often it takes an age to accomplish something fairly minor
Ofcourse all that effort could bet squashed by whoever comes out with the next gotta have technology. Microsoft also has an oppurtunity to really shake things up. Unfortunately they'll probably go the proprietary route and get slammed for that. I should put a signature here
A number of people these days speculate that Google will be entering the browser war, especially when they bring up the fact that Google hired the main IE guy from Microsoft. Google _won't_ be building a browser, and it won't even be leasing it. Google may be investing their time, money, and people in pushing the existing Firefox browser, and enhancing its already powerful platform-like features (e.g. extensions and plugins).
For an example, you can try Firefox/Mozilla search plugin that lets you _full-text_ search your bookmarks from Firefox via Simpy[1]. I am sure you will see a lot more of that stuff soon.
Firefox is powerful, and when 1.0 hits download servers, all major newspapers will be blabbering about it, just like they were blabbering about GOOG's IPO. Then even non-tech people will dump IE in favour of Firefox.
[1] Simpy
Simpy
I have several thousand bookmarks / favorites with directories within dirs, within dirs, etc.
FF only displays them in treed mode and scrolling up, down, side to side is a pain.
I'd like something that opens a window in explorer list mode.
Much easier to navigate.
I've yet to try Firefox out on the same platform as Mozilla and Konqueror, but I can say that Konqueror is now may favorite browser. It looks good, it's quick on modest hardware like 333 MHz PII and up, and it's integrated spell check and file manipulation tools across local, ftp and sftp rock. I miss the specific blocking features, but the trade off is worth while.
For pure speed, Dillo is very cool. It won't do scripts but it runs like lightning under fluxbox on a 90MHz P1 with 24 MB of RAM.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
My useragent is set to GoogleBot. That way, I can see articles which are set to be open to google indexing. IGN does this a lot.
Might be fun to rename IE to iexplore.bak and FF to iexplore.exe
I gave it a whack on my test machine, and it sort of works. What I did was installed firefox to C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer so as to not worry about path issues. Made a copy of IEXPLORE.EXE and made my IE shortcut point to the copy, made a copy of firefox.exe and renamed that copy to IEXPLORE.. This way, when firefox is called for normally, nothing is different for it. MSN launches firefox now when checking my hotmail, except it doesn't actually load hotmail, that doesn't work seem to work, with the way IE is being called by MSN. Then, when I launch IE manually later, it loads two instances of the browser: 1 with my start page and 1 with hotmail in it. If I hadn't run MSN just prior, and tried to check hotmail in firefox then it just does the start page. IE also now gives a warning about running in compatibility mode, and that some features may be disabled (probably a good thing, heh), but my online banking works so it works well enough. I'd figured there wouldn't be major issues with filename conflicts, though something obviously did bork somewhere.
Then how about $10 or $5? Techies tend to have a reputation for being cheap and giving very little to Charaties. This is a way to change that perception.
/. reader gave $1, well you do the math, that's 1M.
If ever
At the risk of this thread becoming a list of statistics:
41.0% Internet explorer 6
17.7% \"Window (W.T.F.?!?)
14.4% e-SocietyRobot
8.92% Mozilla 5
4.05% Internet explorer 5
2.33% Googlebot
2.13% Ocelli
2.11% Mozilla 3.01
1.13% Slurp
1.07% Jetbot
0.65% msnbot
0.49% HenryTheMiragoRobot
0.35% Wget
0.26% NaverBot
0.24% Googlebot-Image
What's worse is that most of those "MSIE" hits are probably robots too -- just look at the number of copies of internet explorer downloading pages only linked-to from invisible hyperlinks...
(that's from a site serving about 7000 pages per day)
I often get family and friends asking me to come over thier house to fix thier spyware laden and virus infected computers. I would often do this only to have to come back six months later to clean up all over again.
I now tell them in order for me to support thier computers five things have to happen:
1) Virus software is manditory. If you dont have it I will pick it up but hand you the bill.
2) Adaware.
3) Zone Alarm. Only because it's not microsoft. This is not meant to slam them. I figure minority software has a smaller chance of being attacked/exploited.
4) Thunderbird instead of outlook. The history of outlook exoploits mandates this one.
5) Firefox instead of mozilla. I just like it better and again I figure minority software has a smaller chance of being attacked/exploited.
If thier favorite IE only sites dont work in firefox I just tell them the sites are broken. If they insist on IE I in turn insist that they will be on thier own and I will no longer support thier computers.
I use zone alarm to block IE and outlook in addition to using the XP application chooser or whatever its called.
If I am going to be responsible for fixing someones computer for free; I am doing it on my terms.