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...
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.
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
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*
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.
I don't know about some of those other sites, but have you validated the HTML? Slashdot may not render properly due to, ahem, pretty lousy output from Slashcode (do a View Source and see for yourself).
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
Oddly enough Slashdot Japan renders correctly. http://slashdot.jp/
I don't think anything else needs to be said.
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.)
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
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.
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 $10 will go a LONG way.
How is he being stupid?
A website shouldn't require user intervention to display properly.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Only shooting for 10%? They should come up with a good slogan to help them hit their goals, like:
Mozilla FireFox -- The Libertarian Candidate of Browsers
Mozilla FireFox -- Shouldn't YOUR computer be on Fire?
Start Button > Set Program Access and Defaults > Choose a Default Web Browser
I've yet to try Firefox out on the same platform as Mozilla and Konqueror, but I can say that Konqueror is now may favorite browser. It looks good, it's quick on modest hardware like 333 MHz PII and up, and it's integrated spell check and file manipulation tools across local, ftp and sftp rock. I miss the specific blocking features, but the trade off is worth while.
For pure speed, Dillo is very cool. It won't do scripts but it runs like lightning under fluxbox on a 90MHz P1 with 24 MB of RAM.
Friends don't help friends install M$ 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!
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.
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.