Slashdot Mirror
Firefox Continues Gains against IE
kurtz_tan writes "News.com reports that the popularity of alternative Web browser Firefox continues to rise at the expense of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, according to a new study by WestSideStory.
The study measured market share by embedding sensors on major web sites such as those of Walt Disney, Best Buy, Sony and Liz Claiborne. WebSideStory retrieves data from 30 million internet users a day passing through its monitored sites. The company then takes a snapshot of two days and compares the growth.
Since beginning its measurements last summer, WebSideStory has been cautious to draw any broad conclusions about Firefox's popularity. This time around, the company said many people are not only downloading Firefox, they're sticking with it and using it."
according to a new study by WestSideStory.
It's WEBSideStory , not WestSideStory
I feel pretty, oh so pretty...
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
it's not so much a increase in Firefox on Windows as a growth spurt of Linux and firefox of course...
Why is the best browser available making strides against IE news anymore? It's better, everyone knows it, including our government intelligence (hah!), and only PHB's give me any reason to use IE anymore.
Cue Opera fans.
don't we already know this?
just my 2 bytes
What's all about Marketshare and so on ? We are not on a Marketing competition as if we win something. We only want to use a good great browser written by people who are skilled to offer something to the Open Source world. The ordinary people really don't care enough if Firefox had won another 0,2% Marketshare or not. They use Firefox because it's the best choice there is for Open Source.
granted you see this in every article...
A Microsoft spokesman did not immediately comment for this story
but i love that.
Runnin' On Empty
Nowadays everyone talks about firefox, even people tat I told about mozilla 2-3 years ago and were ignorant at that point of time. I guess everyone manages to spread the word pretty well and, of course, firefox is great. Good Stuff.
You no talent pricks that develop pages that require ActiveX plugins and Microsoft's perversion of JAVA should be flogged. Seriously you're a bunch of no talent hacks who are inadvertently building a MS dominated web infrastructure that is going to take years to overcome. Nice job assholes!
Not much, could probably be explained away by pure error.
Also, the websites they use probably skew the results as well; Disney, Best Buy, Sony, and Liz Claiborne?
If they want accuracy they should try throwing a few porn sites in, or maybe popular search engines.
I imagine if you had a more accurate sample that Firefox's share might be a little higher.
What?
I told them to switch. They complain about students complaining about popups, and how it slows down their "research". It's kind of ironic why they network guy and 3 out of the 4 computer science teachers use it, but the county considers it as a hazard to the network. (I installed it with out asking, (actually they looked away so they wouldn't get in trouble)). Hopefully this will change their minds.
WebSideStory has been cautious to draw any broad conclusions about Firefox's popularity
Slashdot will be more than happy to do so.
Figures I have seen on w3cshools show a falling usage rate for opera, from 2.3% to 1.9% - almost a 20% drop. If this is a trend is across the entire userbase, then might firefox end up killing opera rather than (as well as?) IE?
Do not know why MS discontinued IE for Unix. I can see thay can expand there.
http://www.microsoft.com/unix/ie/default.asp/
Without any info given on the margin of error, this 0.88% increase is hard to put in perspective. If the margin of error was 0.7%, then we're not talking about much here. Nonetheless, it's very interesting to see FireFox taking hold, even if very slowly. (I suppose that really shows just how entrenched MSIE is.) -- Paul
OpenSource.MathCancer.org: open source comp bio
Do not underestimate our great strength, yes. We are heavily armed. Our great armies have you surrounded. Prepare to be assimilated.
If people going on to Liz Claiborne or whatever are using FF, then you can assume that is someone's mom. Either that, or the IT guy trying to look at women's underwear pics through his work's web filtering. :)
Good analysis, though. Let's hope this continues...
Baby steps, right?
Can anyone actualy find the article at WebSideStory? There is a link on the main site about firefox gaining share if you click Read More it takes you to a page with nothing about firefox.
websidestory
...I reckon much of the increase is due to IE users spoofing their user-agent and pretending to be Firefox
but the company said its Windows-only numbers are more accurate because new configurations in Apple Computer's Safari browser inadvertently skewed results. I'm speechless. We (linux/mac users) don't use Windows, so our traffic doesn't count?
Robert Bindler
A Computer Science student's views on technology.
The study measured market share by embedding sensors on major web sites
.... wow!
Embedding sensors? You mean it checked the user agent. Probably logs (I don't run a webserver, so I dont know if all webservers log that). I knew media tended to sensationalize things but
FireFox is actually a good browser.
This would have happened a long time ago if such a good browser had come along sooner.
Firefox is fast, secure, easy to use, skinable, free, and compatible.
For once, IE isn't more popular based on it's merit. It's actually at a technical disadvantage again and it's decline in popularity is a result of that.
I was skeptical about converting most of my less tech savvy associates over to Firefox at first, but when a few actually actively asked me to help them and their feedback was all positive afterwards, I suggested it to a few more and then even more.
Now anyone I don't feel is capable of keeping their system clean while using IE I recommend convert and I've yet to hear one single complaint.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
I think Firefox will continue to be popular if Microsoft makes new additions to IE mainly because I don't see them removing any of the insecurities (ActiveX) or bloat or integration into the OS that made people switch to Firefox in the first place. Since when was the last time Microsoft removed a so called "useful" and "major" feature despite its obvious downsides?
i recently posted an image on fark.com hosted on my own box. 10,000 hits later i was surprised at the results. 45% firefox, 40% ie.
1. Some non-zero number of people aren't running windows.
2. More that 5% of these are runnning firefox.
Then these figures are an underestimate for the entire web population.
Of course accepting (1) but not (2) suggests an over-estimate, so in either case be wary of considering these figures as accurate.
>of course...
Did you just pull that 'fact' out of your ass you retard?
.. am unbeliveably happy! May the day come when we do not have to work our ass off just fuck up code that work on standard following browser to get stuff to work in IE! Oh Happy happy, joy joy!
Since when is Liz Claiborne a major site?
I think that's a buzzword for "we analyzed the logs" :P
Joseph?
...the best choice that Microsoft could make right now would be to completely take apart IE and redesign it from the ground up as a Firefox/Netscape variant with the Microsoft logo stuck on the cover. Better yet, Microsoft could package Firefox with new versions of Windows right out of the box, thereby eliminating all complaints of IE being too slow or too vulnerable. Of course, this new Microsoft browser would still probably include ActiveX support, Microsoft-only features and all that other proprietary jazz, but it would be a vast improvement on what Microsoft has going for them now.
September 2004 - 2% Mozilla
October 2004 - 2% Mozilla
November 2004 - 3% Mozilla
December 2004 - 3% Mozilla
January 2005 - 5% Mozilla???
Power to the Peaceful
The recent discovery of a potentially damaging software flaw suggested the potential for FireFox attacks. Did that get fixed? Cuz if not, that'll be a problem in the future for firefox. One of the reasons people like firefox so much is the thought that "OOOH, now I don't have to worry about nasty viruses and hackers and evil things." Once there's a virus written for firefox, that little golden halo is gonna come crashing down.
theres no place like 127.0.0.1
One feature alone, the ability to easily use RSS feeds off the box, gives a significant reason to go Firefox.
But call me when it hits 50 %
(reading between the lines gave the following results: this is all nice and all, but we really know this allready, so it isn't really news before it really hits a milestone. I mean really)
Admittedly, I am not a typical user. I visit numerous porn sites and am addicted to looking at gorgeous, naked women who would never spend time with me. Unfortunately, those sites are also boobytrapped with pop ups, viruses, and malware. If you do not believe me, then use IE on Windows and surf 1000 sites over the course of a month. At the end of the month, your computer will be unusable, and you will be forced to reinstall Windows.
With FireFox, I am relatively safe when I visit those sites. So far, none of the boobytraps have infected my computer. The only negative is that downloading the pictures takes a while with FireFox since it is not as tightly integrated into the OS as IE. Nonetheless, I am no longer reinstalling Windows on a monthly basis.
Now, where's that can of vaseline.... Just kidding.
IE kills Netscape.
Firefox kills IE.
0.88% may not sound like a large figure, but this gain is over one and a half months (early Dec to mid Jan), especially when IE declined by 0.7%. IE has lost 4% since June last year.
A little bit more of this, and a considerable amoutn of momentum is going to be generated. And consider the opposition: a browser that is built into the OS it came with. Crikey, the FF team should justifiably be proud of what their work is doing.
Help fight these horrible new statistics... Install IE today!
Karma: bad (mostly unaffected by funny mods)
Don't forget to use the www.spreadfirefox.com links every time you refrence someone to download Firefox to increase the counter. Also, never let anyone use IE User-Agent when they are using Firefox, because using counterfeited User-Agent unfairly skews the statistics to the side of Microsoft, and we all know that this is a two-handed sword.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
From TFA: "The study measured market share by embedding sensors on major Web sites such as those of the Walt Disney Internet Group, Best Buy, Sony and Liz Claiborne."
Poor choise of sites, IMHO. Personally, I doubt I visited any of them within a year or so.
I wouldn't have guessed that would be a site that would recieve a lot of hits from Firefox users...
"The world only exists in your eyes. You can make it as big or as small as you want." - F Scott Fitzgerald
I'm a fan of Firefox, but I would like to see the numbers if it wasn't free.
To make sure that Firefox percentage rises, not only you must use it, you must know how they are measuring it.
Make sure your firfox convert visit the follow sites to get "sampled". Your clicks count.
Walt Disney, Best Buy, Sony and Liz Claiborne.
Ace's Hardware recently ran a short article that Firefox passed 50% share at their website in December. They had a nice graph showing IE clearly in the majority, lessening over time, and, finally, passing into the minority.
We'll miss you, IE...not!
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
According to this, FF has still got a way to higher share than IE.
The amazing thing is that the more you have the better since you are unlikely to guess everyone on the high or low side. The more variables you have the more accurate.
Fermi himself used this to estimate the power of the first Atom bomb via dropping paper confetti from above his head (2 meters) and look where they landed after the blast arrived. He was within 20% if I recall. There is an intersting book called Fermi Solutions that you can find here I read it like 10 years ago but the publishing date is 2001 on Amazon so maybe it's a different book I read.
Help fight continental drift.
Due to all the flaws in IE that pop up so often, I'm always very tempted to use something else other than my IE as my main browser. But, until Firefox decides to start supporting things like scrollbar colors, give it somewhat more configurable toolbars, and perhaps optimize it a bit better for speed in Windows, I'm just not going to switch.
I also do website development, and considering such a large portion of my audience is and I'm sure will continue to be IE users, I sway towards using a browser in which I can see exactly what my viewers are seeing. Though I always test my work in Firefox and Opera, just to make sure.
Firefox 1.1 is going to be based on the trunk. So it's got a few rendering fixes.
1.1 also contains some decent enhancements.
IMHO adoption will pick up when 1.1 is released and some of these fixes take place.
1.1 will also have a MSI, which will make it easier for corporations to deploy Firefox to computers within their organization. That will allow for more Firefox gains.
Because it cuts YOU and the people you point it at.
Sheesh.
I guess today is a passable day to die.
...Netcraft confirms it. IE is dying.
"The plural of anecdote is not data" -- Bruce Schneier
But since Firefox is good and actually has some great features (you can thank the real browser innovator for many of these... Opera) people will stick with it.
I do believe that many, many more websites are designing to correct web standards instead of exclusively for IE.
As long as IE continues to be a security problem then alternate browsers will flourish. As to what % is significant I am undecided, my gut says 20% of the market and there will no longer be any IE only websites, at least any that plan on staying around!
Now get off your sister and clean up your room, er, my basement!
I swear I'm kicking you out of the house now that you're 36.
The study measured market share by embedding sensors on major web sites such as those of Walt Disney, Best Buy, Sony and Liz Claiborne.
I've been trying to embed sensors in my website for years but I can't ever bridge the physical to virtual barrier. Maybe someday when they invent that smart dust stuff?
I'm a technician for my college's distance learning program. We get many complaints from people who are having problems with cookies on Internet Explorer. I try to help them troubleshoot their problems with IE, but inevitably the only thing I can do is recommend that they download FireFox. I've recommended it to about a dozen people so far, and have never had another call back from anybody about the cookies problem who has been using FireFox.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
The company is called WEBSideStory. Were you born this moronic or did you have to work at it?
Why do I never see usage stats for Mozilla on Slashdot? Is it seldom-used compared to Firefox?
How is Firefox supposed to garner market share if many universities (example http://www.iss.soton.ac.uk) insist on making the default web browser IE on their computers? At Southampton/UK the only choice we have is to either use IE which of course boots up quickly or use an outdated version of netscape and have a wrapper install it. A process which can take almost a minute depending on the computer.
I've always been kind of curious as to why MS wouldn't want Firefox to become ubiquitous. How does Firefox hurt them? Right now they've got Avalon rolling along pretty well, they've got their XAML GUI tools, they've got Windows Lognhorn eclipsing the market soon and I'm sure there'll be something bigger and better with it that neatly supplants the need for ActiveX.
As near as I can tell the only thing that could be keeping them embedded in the browser market would have to be Google. If Google successfully comes out with some sort of internet based office suite that doesn't depend on IE (or Windows for that matter) then that might be it for Office (but also for OpenOffice, an odd possibility). If MS can get into that market first though then I'm not sure why they wouldn't want the system to be available to all browsers. Then, without having to pay attention to OS, they can create their software in one single way that can be paid for and used by people on any OS around.
Is MS trying to avoid cross-platform internet technologies or something? Is it their history of using the OS to cripple competitors products that keeps everyone so concerned about their use of IE, the browser that manages to cripple competitors products over the internet?
Direct away from face when opening.
This bank says, through IE only, their customers can get NetSafe!!
This is one of the reasons for slow adoption.
So, switch banks
What happens when all the ATMs in town are owned by one bank? For the four years when I lived in Terre Haute, First was the only bank in town, and for much of that time, its web site required IE.
His family tree doesn't fork.
It is official; Netcraft confirms: IE is losing market share One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered IE community when IDC confirmed that IE market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that IE has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. IE is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test. You don't need to be a Kreskin [amdest.com] to predict IE's future. The hand writing is on the wall: IE faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for IE because IE is losing market share. Things are looking very bad for IE. As many of us are already aware, IE continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers. All major surveys show that IE has steadily declined in market share. IE is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If IE is to survive at all it will be among DVR dilettante dabblers. IE continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, IE is dead. Fact: IE is losing market share
Intead of diagnosing and resolving the problem, you abandon your responsibilities and get the user to DL a different browser!
A tech support monkey at his best!
BTW what damn problem with cookies?
Please rate the parent up so that people will stop posting the stupid comments on how they did their browser comparison.
You choose a commidity institution (there are thousands of banks)
How many of those thousands of banks have ATMs in town? There are still a lot of one-bank towns in the United States, and even though some online banks refund reasonable ATM withdrawal fees, many banks' ATMs no longer allow deposits or personal check cashing using any other bank's ATM card.
"kurtz_tan writes "News.com reports that the popularity of alternative Web browser Firefox continues to rise at the expense of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, according to a new study by WestSideStory."
My sig is simply in reponse to Fermi's quote - "where are they?" - about ETs being MIA in the face of the numbers. It's just my opinion that every intelligent civilization evolves exponentially to the point of self-destruction, or singularity (at which point pre-singularity civilizations are as interesting as slime mold, and ignored, but still respected in a prime-directive kind of way).
Power to the Peaceful
The thing Firefox has to do now is focus on security, security, and security!!!
The main reason people have for switching is that they're fed up with constant spywares/adwares being installed on their computers. If I run a company I would force my employees to use Firefox just because so many incompetent users are out there.
However, now that Firefox is gaining shares, hackers and scumbags will surely start targetting Firefox for exploits and scams to get their malware installed.
If Firefox is able up their good work, then it's smooth sailing from here, because IE has already been branded as insecure. Please don't f**k it up. You know the M$ FUD machine is just around the corner.
Really, do you expect firefox can do something if it doesn't start growing faster?
First, "% of browsers used" != "% of boxes". Firefox is having a hit because its users are people who spend a lot of time in internet. There're a *lot* of people who don't use internet a lot, and they don't get eflected in the stadistics just because they don't browse a lot.
Second, If firefox continues growing at this rate, microsoft will have enought time to rewrite their browser. Remember, 100% of windows boxes have IE installed, and as soon as microsoft gives them a update which is "good enought" they could stop using firefox. Don't understimate the power of microsoft, they control the most used software distribution channel for windows boxes - windows update
And let's remember that around 50% of the OS used to browser internet is XP. XP SP2 has a popup killer by default which is one of the biggest reasons to use firefox. And SP2 enables automatic updates, so IE is "safer". It doesn't really matters if IE is secure or not, if microsoft patches it fast enought users won't have problems.
so, what we need is to get *better*, and get better *faster*. Currently, firefox is just "a better IE". Yes, it's more than that, we know, but users only see that "a better explorer". We need to offer something different, innovative. We need to give them more things that are not just "better than the IE equivalent", but cool things that have not equivalent so users will stick with firefox. (don't talk me about extensions, IE has plugins and they could start those to add funcionality!)
And of course we need to have "automatic updates" for firefox. I think those are already there, right? If you don't updae users' browser, they won't do it themselves, automatic update (or at least a window warning about a "fastest, more secure version) is needed if you want that your users continue appreciating all the work you do.
I'd like to see what sort of work a guru-level 15 does.
What expense? Directly using IE doesn't earn Microsoft any cash.
Is the article even really news? For the VAST and GREAT majority, those who do business on the internet don't care about what browser you are using, only the fact you are visiting or buying something...
I do use both of the mentioned browsers.
Does it matter that some copies of firefox/opera are set to be detected as IE, as this was the only way to get certain websites to work without using IE? Would a copy of firefox that is spoofing IE be counted as IE or firefox?
unzip ; strip ; touch ; grep ; find ; finger ; mount ; fsck ; more ; yes ; fsck ; umount ; sleep
And now that Firefox has proven it's superiority to IE, why doesn't some one finish porting KHTML to windows so we have a second good reason against IE ?
Look what we've done with one single engine (20%).
Now imagine what could be done with another free and open engine like KHTML.
Let's hope : another 20% for KHTML, and IE sinking to a mere 45% against two such great competitors.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Though Mac OS X has a kernel derived from that of FreeBSD, Mac OS X is not a UNIX® system. Rephrasing what rpozz really meant:
Probably because no Linux distribution or vendor of a UNIX brand system whose primary GUI is based on X11 would consider bundling IE.
The Opera [the browser] is turning into a bloated mass of buggy features. Opera [the company] has lost its rudder.
Once they started to add in an email client instead of fixing the bugs in the browser feature-set, I knew that they were going to be an also-ran once a real alternative to IE appeared.
From TFA: the company said its Windows-only numbers are more accurate because new configurations in Apple Computer's Safari browser inadvertently skewed results
Can anyone say what this is describing? A change in Safari's UA string? I didn't realize that Safari had made such a change.
--
$tar -xvf
Over Christmas break my father told me that he was concerned about all of the spyware in his computer. He said that his weekly scans with Ad-Aware came up with at least a dozen threats every time. The very first thing I did was ask him what browser he was using.
The predictable answer: IE.
So, I installed Firefox for him, and ever since he has seen spyware cut down by *at least* one-half. He also seems pleased with the faster load times and *gasp* tabbed browsing.
So, there is hope for the IE crowd. We just need to show them the light.
Many Bothans died to bring you this sig.
That's .88% of 30 million users, or over a quarter million people.
If the analysts are remotely competent they'll use standard statistical methods for eliminating noise. E.g., take seven daily snapshots instead of a week of data. Either find the median value or compute the mean of the daily values. The latter approach also gives you a tighter confidence bound than the same value computed as a single weeklong block.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Why not change your sig to Fermis's Conjecture? Anyway Best regards
Help fight continental drift.
I work for a Washington State agency. The majority of the vistors to our main site are K-12 related (teachers, parents, students, etc). Microsoft products are quite popular around this area due to the steep discounts that Microsoft hands out to K-12 schools and their related state agencies. However, the 2004 stats for my employer's main site are quite interesting.
As a mac user who's had compatibility complaints about some sites, the retort that I encountered was that the problematic site in question was designed for "95%" of the browsers going there, and if I wasn't in that 95% it just sucks to be me.
Now that it appears that FireFox is coming really close to squeezing on the 5% margin, my question is: will web designers really consider making their sites compatible with 92% of IE and 5% of FireFox? That could be a lot of work, depending on the site. Or are site designers just more likely to say "as long as we have 90% compatibility, that's good enough"? Turning away 10% of your customers seems like a lot, though, too.
Web designers in the biz care to comment? Are you guys seeing new compatibility standards? If so, that's good news for mac users. The faster ActiveX is obsoleted, the fewer problems Mac users are to face--even if the impetus for the compatibility change came from FireFox.
--
$tar -xvf
Some of the financial sites I use won't accept FF and some software I use needs IE as well. I may switch to FF if this changes, but right now it's just inconvenient to switch back and forth all the time.
How can you draw a conclusion that someone who goes to Ace Hardware's website knows anything about computers. They sell hardware. I might accept that someone going to Ace knows about hammers, but software is a bit of a stretch. I am not even sure most of the people going to Ace know anything about hardware. The company I work for sells through Ace (not computer related) and we get calls from Ace stores that would indicate that some portion of their customers should not be attempting anything related to home repair.
How are they rude ?
Are you the FCC ?
He's right !
This may not be worth much more than the pixels it's printed on, but a Business Week poll that asks what browser you'll be using in six months currently has Firefox at 48% against "Explorer" at 32%. "Mozilla" is listed separately at 10% so if you take Mozilla and Firefox together that's a nice lead. Opera is sitting at 3.5%.
Remember when there was a "browser market"?
Make sure to cast your vote!
Haaa ha ha!
w ww .forgottennewbies.com%2F
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2F
Love those '<td Width="8" ' and '<td background="mytinydick.gif" ' attributes! Coool!
We have a real fucking XHTML/CSS expert here!
Bow down everyone!
Idiot!
We need to finish SVG support. We need to add an xml language to invoke java inside browsers to balance the XAML features IE will provide. We need more innovation in the xml language the browser renders. It needs to render more complex things. The form elements need to be updated to match (or surpass) Macromedia Flex's UI library (menus, toolbars, tab pages, datagrid, tree control, editable combo box, etc). I think there should be an option to enable the swing widgets set to replace the browser built-in one. This way you can upgrade the widgets separately. Browsers should support a fast animation engine similar to Flash. I think we should add a game engine to the browser that allows everyone to build sims or doom like sites much more easily.
Standards are great. I'm not saying get rid of the html 4.0 standard. I'm saying we need to create a 5.0, 6.0, etc that are much better. Standing still will cost you a lot.
If you want more high tech jobs, then create more powerful html standards. Companies will have to hire more developers to update and rewrite their applications. If they don't and their competitors do then the lagging companies will fail; I don't think companies have a choice. All you need to do is give them a compelling reason. The first web browser led to a huge employment boost. The evolution of HTML was a key factor. If you want more money then add power to the browser. We need to make the create a new html standard the makes the current standard look out of date and boring. This is what Microsoft did with MFC over the years. It drives a lot of upgrade revenue for everyone. This could work for you!
We should not use w3c for this; they are much too slow. Debate the features and schema on Slashdot. Build it in FireFox and w3c can standardize it years from now.
My hope is that Firefox is close to reaching a sort of critical mass. As more people use it, more sites find it necessary to support it. As more sites support it, a major reason that people give for not switching evaporates, and more people use Firefox. Therefore more sites support it, etc.
It may be too much to hope for, but this could even go a step further. Sites could start relying on newer web technologies like alpha-transparent PNG and CSS 2. Rather than just leveling out, the compatibility issue could tip in favor of Firefox.
Dude!
No fucking way does that guy ever socialize!
Web designers don't want to design for IE only, we hate it at least as much as you do, but our pointy haired bosses and clients tell us to that there is no budget to make things work for such a small percentage of users. Just for the record, for the last year and 1/2 I've been building my pages to work with Gecko engines first, then hacking backwards to get some reasonably consistant result in the crap Microsoft products known as 5.1, 5.5 and 6.0. (Still the majority browser even on Slashdot) I just want my layouts to look similar across platforms, monitors and browser brands and degrade gracefully without spending 3 days per page massaging for every last glitch. Nobody blames the browser bugs or willful lack of standards support, it's always the site designer.
When MAC announced their "Mini", it caught my eye. Wanting to buy/build a small computer for my already cramped breakfast bar, I started pricing out similar hardware. The results startled me. Most of the configurations I found were more than the humble US$499 of the "Mini", often much more. To match price I had to configure with a much bigger shuttle-style case.
My question is this. What PCs are currently on the market to compete with this? When my wife asks for the "cute little MAC", what real computer can I buy instead?
Not sure what's going on with January's "3." useragent, but FWIW here's a few months of their browser stats for just Mozilla:
It's pretty safe to assume that the "3" is their new Firefox entry, just missing its name. Summarizing the data by renderer makes the numbers far more useful to web developers as well:
MSHTML-Modern (Internet Explorer 5/6) : 88.69%
Gecko (Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape 6/7) : 6.67%
Other (Safari, Konqueror, Unknown) : 2.25%
MSHTML-Legacy (Internet Explorer 1-4) : 1.46%
Opera (Kinda obvious which browser it is) : 0.78%
Netscape (Netscape 1-4) : 0.16%
I wish they'd seperate out Konqueror and Opera. It would be nice to have a KHTML line in there...
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
I've always wondered how much browser dominance really matters to Microsoft. IE comes bundled w/ their OS, so even if everyone runs Mozilla, they still have IE in their system, and all the other MS apps (and many others) still leverage IE's plugability into other client software. So in terms of lock-in to the platform, there's still all the web enabled client apps out there (like most MS products).
PayPal.
Three things:
Looking at my site's browser usage breakdown (and I average between 1-3 million unique visitors a day), I noticed that on average, visitors that used IE decrease at about 1/100th of a percent since November, while Firefox users have increased by about 2/100ths of a percent since then. That's adjusted on a percentage basis against total unique visitors, which tends to adjust out odd seasonal / cycle data or other factors.
My point is: you could read this as "Firefox is growing at twice the rate as IE is shrinking", or if you're MS, you could read it as "Firefox is only growing on average 2/100ths of a percent, and by the way the growth rate levels off around mid January". Depends which story you want to believe.
My real question, and the thing that Microsoft is probably wondering: does Firefox create a significant and unique value proposition for users? The answer may be "yes" currently, but there are no barriers to keep Microsoft from adopting these same features to re-errode Firefox usage. From what I have seen of Microsoft's next version of IE, they've incorporated tabbed windows, transparency, and they've already beefed up their popup blockers.
As a side note, I'm an avide users of Firefox and Mozilla (one word....Venkmann), and I'd like to see it overtake IE altogether. But I'm not sure there's enough lock-in potential to prevent Firefox users from re-adopting Firefox-like versions of IE. Browsers are too much like any other commodity: people will use the lowest cost / highest value, regardless of the branding.
This is rediculous. The parent poster posted a dissenting view and he was modded down. Granted, the majority of /.ers obviously feel that Firefox is better (I'm a Safari user myself), but that's no reason to mod this post TROLL!
I hope this mod pops up in meta-moderation, and somebody wakes up. Firefox could start supporting scrollbar colors, because maybe that means something to somebody.
Sheesh, usually the Slashdot moderation system works, but sometimes it's just a big let down.
"There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
- Bob Dylan
Now it appears you're going into offtopic nitpicking for its own sake. It's not polite to nitpick unless you're making a non-nitpick point in the same comment. It appears that you still have not responded to the rephrased comment, which I reproduce here:
Microsoft discontinued Internet Explorer for UNIX probably because no Linux distribution or vendor of a UNIX® system whose primary GUI is based on X11 would consider bundling IE.
dave, try this
( the IE View Firefox extension )
Hmmm, look at this way...
The finacial sites that you are using are not just ignoring 5% (maybe closer to 10% right now, the votes are still out as far as I am concerned), they are giving up 5% of the market! Is that really a financial company you want to deal with? 5% of the US market (let alone the WORLD market) is enough to drive a lot of businesses!
TYS (figure it out) has a new GIS frontend that shows when a plane is scheduled to land and where it is on the map. Fascinatingly, it ain't IE in kiosk mode (does it have that). It's Firefox. The admin restarted the GIS app while I was sitting there staring at the girlfriend's flight from LaGuardia. Lo and behold....
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
This isn't a Firefox issue, it's an application-specific issue - the applications are hard-coded to launch IE for whatever it is they're using the web for. If the apps really *needed* IE they'd stick an IE window within the app itself. This is one of the biggest problems for FF acceptance, in my opinion - as well as MSN Messenger, does anyone else know of some widely used or essential apps that refuse to accept anything but IE as the default browser?
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
This notion:
I'd wager that a lot of browser users (those who don't switch because they don't know the differences between browsers...very novice users) aren't using FireFox because they wouldn't understand how to switch.
Since windows ships with the browser you get that catch-22. Internet Savvy users are more likely to know how to keep safe when using online e-commerce sites, ergo they might spend the bulk of the money online for day-to-day purchases. These internet savvy users are the ones who switch browser like some users' change shirts. Ergo they are the current leading-edge FireFox switchers.
When calculating the percentages of web site visitors versus web site visitors who make purchases, are the numbers becoming skewed towards FireFox for the latter condition?
Anyone care to take a stab at this?
I only ask because I keep seeing the "IE is still "x"% of the market" argument for keeping certain sites IE-only or IE-biased. It makes less sense when considering that those browser users might be less likely to make a purchase, since we've opened the cusomer-base can-of-worms.
JB
If you look at platform changes, you're not as directly measuring the effect of browser competition, as you now have another significant variable. If you do Windows-only results, then it's more likely that any observed changes are actually due to people liking Firefox more than IE.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The parent post will be read by Slashdotters. How many of them would do as it said? Next time, post that comment somewhere where it could make a difference. Otherwise, you're just preaching to the choir...
The real answer is to phone/email/write to the banks in question to ask them to fix the bug though. (NB: they are probably also violating your local disability and/or advertising laws.)
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
I worked for years in the public school system before I went to the ESD, and one thing I will say is that school teachers and district IT staff are usually not the brightest when it comes to technology. All they see it as a box to babysit their students and to do their grades on. The majority of the teaches I know are too afraid to experiment with their systems unless they hear from somewhere that "such and such app is cool and they have to try it out". The same applies to many building and district level techs that I know.
As an interesting side note, those stats started to climb after WSIPC gave the go ahead that Mozilla/Firefox was supported to run Skyward (Skyward is an online student managment app that the state is migrating towards).
If you are curious as to exactly what kind of discounts Microsoft gives to WSIPC members, you can go to http://www.wsipc.org/ and choose services > purchasing services for the Microsoft contract and price list.
and 5 new people on the planet are using firefox? hahahhahahah.
The UA switcher is worthless on sites that rely on ActiveX controls (http://launch.yahoo.com strangely being one of them).
Scott
©20014 angrykeyboarder & Elmer Fudd. All Wights Wesewved
It's strange that people try to humiliate firefox and exagrate their all-time browsers. Actually what normal brain should do in such a IE-oriented web to support firefox's trend.
If firefox gains valuable market share, sites can not resist to obey standards. They would know that there are other browsers around. And unlike Netscape vs. IE years now they are easy to implement and test. If all sites obey web standards, every other rival browser of IE can easily adapt those standards without trying to mimic IE behaviour. That would make them even more enjoyable to use. However current situation is, despite opera is quick, or safari is ui sleek they have to face with 'best viewed with IE' pages.
Firefox seems to be only solution for that 'best viewed for IE' plauge. So if you want to use your favourite browser without caring if this page will look good, support firefox, and stick to your browser.
Guess FF is not the panacea so many thought it would be. Its success may be just that it's "different" and a few folks are attracted to something "different" (how else do you explain the success of the VW Beetle?). As TFA mentions, FF has had security issues and may/probably will become a virus/spyware target someday. I've always prided myself on being open-minded (not to be confused with empty-headed) and therefor may have to re-think a few things here.
Instructions on installing Active X in Firefox.
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
A writer at Neoseeker.com went on a little rant about IE after seeing this particular story: http://neoseeker.com/news/story/4246/
I am glad to see Firefox recieving this well deserved success and I hope Firefox continues to improve.
I think it would be nice to see Firefox include SVG and MNG support in the standard install. These two standards address many need I believe that web designers have in in being able to produce rich formatting and content, if these needs are not fulfilled by an open standards means developers tend to turn to propriatary solutions such as Flash to do these things. By fulfilling these needs, we can encourage the use of open standards. SVG includes good support for vector graphics while MNG supports image animation and several different encoding schemes which provide much needed capabilities for image creation.
then might firefox end up killing opera rather than (as well as?) IE?
Hopefully. I don't see any reason to use a closed source browser any more.
Let's just hope that some other open source alternatives can keep up with Firefox so that we don't end up in a 1 browser market again.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
This is still such a small minority. Less than five percent is less than the number of people that use 800x600 resolution. And nevertheless you will hear web designers saying, "can we stop designing websites for 800x600 already??"
However, a warning to web masters that aren't Firefox-friendly (and there are many), is that the digerati is like 50% or more Firefox. People who are frequent commenters on technology in blogs and in magazines are up-to-date on the trends, and use Firefox. So if you alienate the Firefox users, good luck getting that precious slashdotting or BlogDex coverage. Can you imagine BoingBoing or slashdot ever covering a site that was IE-only?
Philosophistry
Troll: An outrageous message posted to a newsgroup or mailing list or message board to bait people to answer.
What part of that definition is not clear?
That exploit was discovered in october 2004, and XP SP2 users are still vulnerable with all updates (even on 12-1-2005, after microsoft had theoretically closed this hole, but only partially suceeded
John Titor... is that you? Where've you been? When've you been?
I would have to say that explosives are the most abused technology in all of history.
it doesn't matter what bank you're with, you can always withdraw cash in your town.
True, for $4 per withdrawal ($2 to ATM owner and $2 to bank owner), I can withdraw from just about any ATM in the United States (or I can do it for free at Wal-Mart by asking for cash back with my debit card purchase), but each ATM only accepts deposits for accounts at its own bank.
I dont know why any one would want to stay with IE the tabs in fire fox are a grate invention. My only compliant is that i can not get MSN messenger to use fire fox over IE and usual M$ protecting them selfs.
Lately I've noticed /. isnt rendered correctly when using firefox. The sides seem to overlap the text in the middle. And I've also found that after navigating /. with IE that IE stops responding to all websites until I exit all IE windows and restart it. Is this just buggy /. that we've alll come to know and love?
Can I bum you a
Sweet Zombie Jesus!
The IE Patcher Tool will patch existing apps that call the MSHTML engine to call the Gecko engine instead. It doesn't always work, but in many cases it does, removing the dependence on IE and fixing rendering issues.
You are aware that the majority of users dont give a flying fuck about closed or open source, right?
They just want software that works out of the box, and doesn't take a wizard to operate.
Yes, I use Opera, yes I like the open-source philosophy, but encountering a few broken sites every now and then, still doesnt alter my preferences. To me Opera is superior to Firefox in every signle usability issue I can come up with.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
I switched to Firefox as Firebird just as it changed from Phoenix, on Linux I've found it faster than Opera (could be my implementation??).
... it's so cluttered in the default and it takes a while to switch all those extra sidebars and menus off.
....
Anyway, recently returning to Opera I found that the free version has graphical ads as before but now they are moving images (dynamic). This is very annoying. The one thing I hate on webpages is moving ads taking your eye away from what you're reading. And what about that interface
I tried to stick with it, but it still seems slower than Firefox (which on my system appears to leak memory like a sieve, 2 hours runtime at best before it's so sluggish I have to restart it).
KHTML is a whole mess of IE-like non-standards compatability so far as I see, so I rarely use that.
I really got tired of all the IE insecurities: activex, spyware, adware, page hijackers and any shit imaginable. Aprox. a year ago, switched to FireFox. Since then i am happy again, never had any kind of shit like the above. The only thing annoying is that after some minites of inactivity, it takes a long time to "come back" I only use IE for the crappy work intranet and some other annoying websites made with MS-proprietary shit
- This can't be... - Be what? Be real?
Sure, but it doesn't change the end result for me. I doubt my bank and the app makers are going to spend much time or money to make 5% of their customers browsers work.
Download your copy from here. It's significantly non-trivial to install. Despite the URL, that's with native graphics, not through CygWin's X server, an implementation which also exists.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I appreciate the suggestions, but it's just not worth the hassle at this time. I've alaways been diligent about what sites I go to, what I download and what I allow to run in my browser. Combine that with my AV and firewall and I've never really had any issues. If it comes to the point where it is an issue I'll switch, but I'm not anti-MS (not really pro-MS either) so I see no reason to adopt FF just for the sake of doing it.
Should have read "not like MS has a monopoly on banks yet".
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Why not ask google for info? With 200 million+ users /day, seems like they would get a huge percentage of the internet population.
When I deal with complicated HTML page layouts, they all Just Work in Konqueror and Safari (wish I could say the same about Konq's JavaScript, which still sucks as at 3.3.1).
Gecko (FireFox and friends) will sometimes require a gentle hint or two about stuff like heights.
MSIE requires its damn hand held tightly for every single agonising step of the journey down the page.
I too would be deeply interested in seeing examples of MSIE adhering to W3C standards where Gecko does not.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Yeah. that's what I think.
But just right now Windows has none.
Mac OS X has Safari, but nothing great using KHTML on windows.
If someone could help developping a killer app based on KHTML, this will
- Help FireFox in the battle against closed browsers
- Create more alternate choice for the Windows market. (If one day some complexe worm manage to infect FireFox, you could switch easily to another open-source apps, if you want... or be just happy that firefox is open-source and you're going to get updates faster than with non-open browsers).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
...something along these lines. I have seen more and more sites advocating FF over IE, some of them quite large. I am on staff for http://www.Deviantart.com and they have over the past year been recommending users to switch (as well as having site developement geared for FF taking precedence)with a noticable number of them doing so (which on a site of its size is saying something).
So if the entire world moved to Linux and Mac OS, and only one person, Bill Gates himself, were still running Internet Explorer on Windows, that would be an ideal scenario for Internet Explorer, right? It would then have 100% of the market by your logic.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Putting Active-X into Mozilla is like going to a ballet like Swan Lake and - halfway through the performance - the prima donna ballerina drops trow, squats, and grunts out a massive steamer right in the middle of the stage.
I'm familliar with the plugin, but have no desire to infect Firefox w/ActiveX, thank you....
Launch is a site I truet, so I don't have qualms about ActiveX there (other than wondering why they don't dump it). I seem to recall Yahoo! is a BSD shop...
Scott
©20014 angrykeyboarder & Elmer Fudd. All Wights Wesewved
Exactly, what's the point of monitoring the whole world when you know that people who take informed decisions aren't going to believe your marketing and hype anyway.
/. for their news).
I think they should have picked sites visited by people with sub 100 IQs, maybe TV guides or FOX (since all the geeks supernova their TV anyway and
So in this case we have the worst case scenario, the corporations pander to Joe Sixpack, ignore the moderates and are the rich.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Asa really is da man when it comes to mozilla. it's all about the super review.
BTW, have you considered the possibility that interstellar travel is so difficult that no one does it to any significant degree? There could be a billion year old (stable, mortal) civilization 1000 light years away, with no reasonable way to travel here in person.
Meanwhile, they use tight maser communication with a codec so advanced we couldn't distinguish it from random noise, even if stray signals accidentally pointed at us, which they don't.
They're out there, AND we're effectively all alone. That's my theory.
I think much of the people wanting to try Firefox is due to the fact that Firefox has a number of features that Internet Explorer lacks, especially tabbed browsing, RSS support, and pop-up ad blocking.
However, I have this suspicion that Microsoft maybe preparing a counterattack of sorts. If you've played with Maxthon, it's a pretty powerful shell program for Internet Explorer that essentially gives the browser a large fraction of the functionality of Firefox, plus Maxthon has number of interesting features of its own, such as its very nice ad blocking features. I would not be surprised that Microsoft might just buy the rights to Maxthon and incorporate it into IE itself some time later this year.
If Internet Explorer gets the functionality of Maxthon, the incentive to switch to Firefox will go down quite a bit, to say the least.
You know it is possible that a lot of 'IE only users' are being drowned out more and more by all the spyware infections that they can't even surf anymore... tipping the percentages more towards firefox. heh but I ain't complaining.
But depending on how you feel about IE (and as a web developer, I hate it with every fiber of my being) that could be a good thing. Let these "official" numbers trickle into MS. Let them assume they are stronger in the browser market than they really are. Complacency on the part of MS is good for the rest of us.
They'll still charge for it!
I don't use an ATM any more, and haven't for several years. It's no sweat off my back to stop off at the bank and cash a check- a tiny bit less convenient, yes, but certainly not undoable. The main issue is that I got tired of seeing these ATM transaction fees on my statement each month - they add up. Of course, now the banks have come up with other ways to extort money from their "customers". I've noticed that lately, my monthly service charge is based on a percentage of the overall transaction total. It looks like some banks are positioning themselves to become financial brokers of sorts, charging a commission on each transaction (which really, truly sucks).
Overall, I'd say these kinds of things are happening for two reasons: a) customers allow them to happen, and b) market saturation...they need to invent new ways of extracting money from their "customers" in order to maintain positive growth - or at least the appearance thereof.
has anyone considered the fact that the rather sharp increase in ff over the last couple months might be related to other businesses and companies using/porting ff to their own uses? (eg universities etc.). Don't get me wrong -- i totally agree with using ff over ie for ohhhh so many endless reasons -- but i cannot see *ALL* of the increase as due to just the average joe suddenly getting struck by lightning and saying "oh, i'm gonna go back me a fire sponge browser today." i, for one, believe that a large -- if not the larger -- majority of ff adoption is not due to the average home user, but rather due to businesses / organizations using ff and including ff in their packages and plans (whether its indirectly ['the it guy said do this'] or directly [an entire policy is made for it] is irrelevent).
Having said that you still need MSW and still need to run the same proprietary Active X code that MSIE uses.
I seem to recall that everything Yahoo! never works and looks like it has been created by a bunch of yahoos anyway.
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
If firefox is so good then why doesnt it make its own os?
Master