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).
.. that all those obnoxious web developers who make their sites IE only "because it's got 99% of the market" will have to stop telling us to "just use IE" and learn to develop standards compliant websites?
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?
The typical ZDNet visitor is much more technically savvy than the average internet user. This explains why their Mozilla use rate has increase. Go to www.aarp.org and you more than likely won't see the same results.
Why even bother with 10% when after Google releases the G-browser (Google branded Firefox) it will shoot for 90%?
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Solider: "Bumagi Pazhaluysta!"
Eastwood hands him a roll of toilet paper.
...or maybe not.
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.
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!!!!
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.
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.
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."
I got 100% Mozilla on my webserver logs! Of course my website is callled "localhost"...
The tipping point is coming. The point where enough late-adopters see news stories, tv segments, links on the web, and most importantly, other late-adopters using firefox. I actually think numbers like 25% or higher are achievable.
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
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.
... 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
MS Internet Explorer 27.6 %
Mozilla 7.2 %
Opera 7 %
Netscape 3.2 %
Safari 1.6 %
Unknown 0.7 %
Konqueror 0.3 %
WebCopier 0 %
But Jolt Finder does not see a lot of traffic, I was thrilled when Firefox overtook Explorer. But then again, I use Firefox, and obsessivly check the statistics waiting for a slashdotting.
There are two kinds of fool. One says, This is old, and therefore good. And one says, This is new, and therefore better.
The desire to want to match features is an artifact of the hidden source monolithic development model. If you have a product you're trying to sell, you want to maximize how attractive it looks to the purchaser.
FOSS developers, on the other hand, generally want to use the program they're writing (and don't want its performance to suffer). Also, they're open to the possibility that their niche has a boundary past which they shouldn't grow. There is generally less financial pressure to add new features than there is general pressure to keep the program working.
The thing that keeps Linux competitive is that Linus won't accept (*) a new kernel feature patch that decreases performance. As a result, Linux benefits from new hardware but continues to work on the older stuff (or at least, you can make it work).
I think as long as the Mozilla people keep these principles in mind, they'll keep doing great work.
----
(* except for emergency security fixes, or in a development kernel where the current state of a new patch is too slow, but the technology looks like it will eventually be faster.)
sigs, as if you care.
``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 don't think anything else needs to be said.
I think you hit it on the head. I'd guess that for most people, a browser and office suite is all they use. If people see they can use some other browser, and some other office suite, it's not far from there to using some other operating system.
Sort of like hoof and mouth disease for their cash cow.
sigs, as if you care.
``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.
Might be fun to rename IE to iexplore.bak and FF to iexplore.exe
:)
I'd prefer renaming iexplore.exe to iexplore.pos
Aug 2004
MS Internet Explorer No 63689 91.9 %
Mozilla No 1875 2.7 %
Netscape No 1363 1.9 %
Unknown ? 702 1 %
Safari No 563 0.8 %
FireFox No 554 0.7 %
Opera No 315 0.4 %
Firebird (Old FireFox) No 121 0.1 %
Sept 2004
MS Internet Explorer No 56837 91.5 %
Mozilla No 1685 2.7 %
Netscape No 1294 2 %
Safari No 945 1.5 %
FireFox No 931 1.4 %
Unknown ? 211 0.3 %
Opera No 118 0.1 %
Oct 2004
MS Internet Explorer No 40864 91.9 %
Mozilla No 895 2 %
Netscape No 880 1.9 %
FireFox No 757 1.7 %
Safari No 628 1.4 %
Unknown ? 235 0.5 %
Opera No 85 0.1 %
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
``Since the cost of making the site correctly in the first place is very low, likely the same price as doing it incorrectly''
That's not true. Any script kiddie with a WYSIWYG tool can generate a website that has hideous code but will be grokked by browsers. Making a standards-compliant website requires someone with actual knowledge and a certain passion, and likely needs to be hand-coded. This obviously costs a lot more.
At least, until the script kiddie FUBARs the site, of which I have seen the results a number of times. And cleaning such a mess is not pretty.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
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.
The ability to turn Flash crap on/off with the PreBar add-on is a great feature. I cannot understand why it isn't implemented in the brower. Does anyone have any insight into this why such a usefull feature is not included by default?
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
/. 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.
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
Only shooting for 10%? They should come up with a good slogan to help them hit their goals, like:
Mozilla FireFox -- The Libertarian Candidate of Browsers
Mozilla FireFox -- Shouldn't YOUR computer be on Fire?
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
Start Button > Set Program Access and Defaults > Choose a Default Web Browser
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
What is interesting is that the company will waste so much money and time "authorizing" software, but won't do simpler money-saving things like checking if their employees are wasting time reading web sites instead of working!
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.
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!
Am I the only one to notice that the devs involved are becoming more focused on FireFox and less focused on Mozilla?
FireFox has a better download manager.
If both code bases are open, why don't the improvements I've noticed in FireFox filter back to Mozilla itself?
I'll stop whining. Guess I should learn to program, then check in the appropos subroutines in CVS, and see if it ever gets built.
"(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.
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.
If Google ever releases a browser based on Firefox and promotes it in every frikkin page they have, I believe things could get pretty shaky for MS.
And once you are there, who knows what could happen. I can see a Google browser becoming a truly powerful and dominant consumer platform.
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.
I think one of the key pieces missing for XUL adoption is the lack of a robust, powerful IDE. If there was something with a notionally similar user interface to Boa Constructur, but spitting out XUL instead of wxPython code, it would be a HUGE advance.
Creating GUIs is fundamentally a different mindset to writing straight code. As a coder, I tend to use more "primitive" tools such as vim that let me get my hands dirty in the code (although Eclipse has just about turned me around); on those admittedly rare occasions when I have to build a GUI, I'm just lost without a powerful IDE. One of the big reasons for the success of VB in the past has been the absolutely killer drag-and-drop style IDE.
If/when MS releases XAML, you can be very sure it'll have a terrific IDE behind it. If there's no moderately comparable IDE for XUL at that point, I think it'll be very tough for XUL to keep up.
That's a very strange (but highly amusing) site. Check out their graphic of the IE logo dressed as Bin Laden.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
The idea of "standards" are foreign to most web designers, even those that really ought to know better (/.).
Instead, they will make two versions of the page, one for IE and one for Mozilla/Firefox, and tell everyone else to "upgrade". Just like they did when Netscape and IE both had significant marketshare.
PS: The Firefox version will of course be so outdated and broken, that you get better results by pretenting to be IE and let FireFox "bug compatibility" handle it.