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."

Comments

The best is yet to come

[digitalgimpus]

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.

Re:Meaningful Figure

[Seumas]

I have a popular auction site that is along the lines of what you're mentioning. It's very Liz Claiborne (people shopping for Lip Service, Hot Topic, custom jewelry, used CDs, crafts, custom fashions) and not at all "ThinkGeek or something".

I've been very critical of this "Firefox is making a difference" bandwagon for a long time. However, I've been observing my own site's statistics over the last few months and the numbers are, indeed, surprising.

Until recently, my site has been 95% MSIE, just like it has been for almost five years. Viewing just the most recent stats shows that out of 40,000 unique visitors:

77.2% are using MSIE
18.5% are using Firefox, Mozilla or Netscape
2.3% are using Safari
1.1% are using Opera

The reason I take these statistics seriously is that my site is not at all a technical site. It's an auction site with 95% females between the ages of 15 and 50. A lot of AOL users. While there are some very technically savvy people on the site, the majority of them are extremely novice to average. So if a lot of them are moving away from MSIE, it is a significant indication of where the general web population is also going.

Re:-1, Redundant for me, please...

[mAineAc]

There is an ActiveX plugin for Mozilla browsers.

Re:Internet Explorer technologies for UNIX

[sloanster]

Do not know why MS discontinued IE for Unix. I can see thay can expand there.

As one who has tried out msie for solaris, I can assure you that it gave new meaning to the terms buggy, bloated, and crash-prone. It was such a disaster that noboy would ever use it. OTOH, netscape ran fairly well, and stable, on all the major flavors of unix, so there was simply no contest. It's fairly certain that microsoft did the "port" as a political stunt, and an attempted propoganda coup, for 2 reasons:

#1, the blaring hype in ms ads saying "microsoft brings the internet to unix" (yeah right, the internet was pretty much a unix thing until microsoft woke up and came late to the party)

#2, the fact that they ported to an obscure platform like hpux, rather than linux, despite the fact that there were several hundred thousand linux desktop users for every hpux desktop user.

Then they backpedaled, saying "we didn't realize how difficult it was to program for unix". tee hee, a comparison to netscape and it's solid cross platform support puts the talents of microsofts programmers in a fairly bad light here.

Re:Marketing

[asa]

I have seen sites which already use various pop-up-divs with javascript to close them, and as long as the images are proxied by the web server (to the ad server) so that the user agent doesn't know the difference, then they can't block those images.

A sliding div withing the content area is not a pop-up. It's not a pop-under. It is an annoyance and we're working a solution for it but pop-ups have an entirely differnt set of usability problems that are much worse than in-content advertising. I'll consider it a huge success if we've convinced the market to move away from pop-ups even if the alternative are these modal sliding divs that don't break out of the content area.

Also, as far as image blocking goes, while the stock Firefox build blocks images from specific domains (so you wouldn't want to block the ad if it came from the same server or proxy as the good images) a simple ad-on like AdBlock gives users the power to easily block ads without losing the legitimate page content.

--Asa

Re:At the risk of revealing a proclivity ...

[asa]

f you find it slow, you might try Opera or K-Melon(I think the KHTML engine on windows).

Kmeleon is Gecko, not KHTML. I don't believe that KHTML has been ported to Windows.

--Asa

Re:No surprise.

[beeswax]

Firefox is fast? Compare it to Opera and you'll laugh!

Firefox is secure? Look at these vulnerabilities from last year.

2005-01-11: Mozilla/Netscape/Firefox Browser Modal Dialog Spoofing Vulnerability
2005-01-05: Mozilla Temporary File Insecure Permissions Information Disclosure Vulnerability
2005-01-05: Multiple Browser IMG Tag Multiple Vulnerabilities
2005-01-05: Mozilla Firefox Download Dialogue Box File Name Spoofing Vulnerability
2005-01-05: Mozilla Firefox Insecure Default Installation Vulnerability
2005-01-04: Mozilla/Firefox File Download Dialog Spoofing Vulnerability
2004-12-08: Mozilla Browser and Mozilla Firefox Remote Window Hijacking Vulnerability
2004-12-07: Mozilla/Netscape/Firefox Browsers JavaScript IFRAME Rendering Denial Of Service Vulnerability
2004-12-01: LibPNG Graphics Library Multiple Remote Vulnerabilities
2004-11-25: Mozilla Firefox Infinite Array Sort Denial Of Service Vulnerability
2004-11-01: Mozilla Browser Cross-Domain Dialog Box Spoofing Vulnerability
2004-10-27: Mozilla/Firefox Browsers Unauthorized Clipboard Contents Disclosure
2004-10-27: Mozilla Browser BMP Image Decoding Multiple Integer Overflow Vulnerabilities
2004-10-27: Mozilla/Firefox Browsers URI Drag And Drop Cross-Domain Scripting Vulnerability
2004-10-27: Mozilla Browser Non-FQDN SSL Certificate Spoofing Vulnerability
2004-10-27: Mozilla Firefox XML User Interface Language Browser Interface Spoofing Vulnerability
2004-10-27: Mozilla Browser Refresh Security Property Spoofing Vulnerability
2004-10-27: Multiple Vendor Internet Browser User Action Prediction/Interception Weakness
2004-10-27: Mozilla SSL Redirect Spoofing Vulnerability
2004-10-27: Mozilla Cross-Domain Frame Loading Vulnerability
2004-10-27: Mozilla Browser Cache File Multiple Vulnerabilities
2004-10-27: Mozilla Personal Security Manager Certificate Handling Denial Of Service Vulnerability
2004-10-22: Mozilla/Firefox Browsers PrivilegeManager EnablePrivilege Dialog Manipulation Vulnerability
2004-10-22: Mozilla Firefox XPInstall Default Installation File Permission Vulnerability
2004-10-20: Mozilla Browser Cross-Domain Tab Window Form Field Focus Vulnerability
2004-10-06: Mozilla Firefox DATA URI File Deletion Vulnerability
2004-10-05: Multiple Browser Cross-Domain Cookie Injection Vulnerability
2004-10-05: Mozilla Browser Non-ASCII Hostname Heap Overflow Vulnerability
2004-09-15: Mozilla/Firefox Browsers Tar.GZ Archive Weak Permissions Vulnerability
2004-08-27: Mozilla/Netscape/Firefox Browsers XPCOM Plug-In For Apple Mac OSX Content Spoofing Vulnerability
2004-08-23: Mozilla External Protocol Handler Weakness
2004-06-14: Mozilla Browser URI Obfuscation Weakness
2004-05-25: Multiple Vendor URI Protocol Handler Arbitrary File Creation/Modification Vulnerability

I really wish people would stop with the over-hyping of something that isn't all that.

A lot of people using IE can be somewhat safe if they disable activex and get regular updates.