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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."
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!
The more marketshare Firefox gets, the less likely lazy web designers are to design "IE only" websites.
Of course, it also becomes more and more likely that advertisers will spend more and more resources trying to figure out new and exciting ways to get past Firefox's popup blocker and the Adblock extension, so it's a bit of a double edged sword.
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?
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.
I think this is my problem with Opera.
Price.
Not that I mind paying for software. Hell, I've even bought boxed Linux distros. But, and it is a big but, most people pay for perceived value. For these people, which includes me, Opera does not provide $39 more value than Firefox.
Maybe I'm just cheap...
People couldn't type. We realized: Death would eventually take care of this.
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
It would be a shame to see Opera die, I don't want to use it myself, merely to have its nice features available as extensions to firefox....
Not to people who think slashdot is a major site. I think that's the point here. It's not geeks using firefox, it's everyday people who most people here never thought would want to switch.
no complaints abou killing opera either. ;)
they used to have a great product..
but why have ad-ware, (even in linux & bsd),
when you can simplay have a far superior browser
So, umm... What, exactly, did that post have to do with the post it was supposed to be in response to?
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
It was probably never more than a sham product anyway. During the anti-trust trials microsoft did a lot of things solely so the lawyers could make ludicrous claims yet have something to back them up.
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
Also, the websites they use probably skew the results as well...
If they want accuracy they should try throwing a few porn sites in, or maybe popular search engines.
Granted, their method isn't perfect...that probably isn't possible. But it's a lot better than your idea. These guys want a picture of normal, actual internet users that they can count. Neither search engines nor porn will provide that.
In the porno case, you just hand everything to IE, as all those hits from the popup windows roll in. Also, the control in those situations is passed mostly from the user to the site, which isn't ideal for these tests either. And search engines are visited by scripts a lot, most of which misidentify themselves as one browser or another. So, either way you're adding a lot to your inaccuracies.
Choosing high-traffic sites from major providers does sound like favoritism (or at least just corporate whoring), but it's really probably about as accurate a picture as we can get of how people browse.
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
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'm all for more quality browsers, but a great engine doesn't gain marketshare without a great application around it.
--Asa
You are wrong... if you dont know the diference between a kernel and running in kernel space then please, don't come to online forums to spread your ignorance.
Part of what you said makes no sense at all, so I will just ignore it.
I love the fact that Firefox can be altered easily due to the way it uses such an open method of configuration and theme files, but this very thing also makes it slower. Parsing these files takes time. Using XML and such for application settings may make a program much more configurable, but it's just not good for speed.
But whether IE fully supports the standards is irrelevant. People have turned my originally innocent comment into such an opportunity to flame the IE user. It's rediculous.
The fact remains that IE controls the market, and that's not changing anytime soon. I am not an IE "fanboy" just because it's what I choose to use. I often have dislike for various things about it, but I use it because it's what works best with a lot of the web.
Whether people want to accept that or not, that's up to them. They can start flamewars over such a silly topic till they're blue in the face for all I care. It just shows me how arrogant some of the alternative browser users can truly be.
In the meantime, I'll continue using Avant, and develop for the websites I'm hired to develop for, and not think twice about all the crying that people did here over me deciding to use an IE-based browser.
Given the razor-thin margins in a lot of retailing, giving up even 5% of potential customers seems pretty retarded, IMO. A lot of companies break even by such a slight margin that just the wind blowing differently could push them to a loss. Ignoring 10% would be insane.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
I rather suspect they mean that they had the site operators embed a small (possibly 1x1 pixel transparent) gif hosted on their own servers and checked the logfiles.
Like tinyurl, but one letter less! http://qurl.co.uk/
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.
Well, one thing to consider is there is more than FireFox in the alternative browser scene. If you find it slow, you might try Opera or K-Melon(I think the KHTML engine on windows). They might be faster, while equally secure.
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
Anyone reasonable person will conclude that a world dominated by Firefox could hardly be any better than a world dominated by IE.
I think I'd like to meet one of your reasonable persons.
The resonable people I know would surely prefer a Web dominated by a standards-conforming browser that was faster, safer, more secure, more usable, and ran on a dozen platforms than a Web dominated by a browser that pushes proprietary lock-in technologies like ActiveX, is filled with security holes that are deeply tied into the OS, and runs decently on only one or two platforms (depending on your definition of 'decently'.)
The reasonable people I know think that an open source, open and published standards-based, cross-platform, free solution would be a much preferable monopoly than an expensive, single vendor, single platform, proprietary system.
I consider myself fairly reasonable and I think that a Web server world dominated by tools like Apache, PHP, Perl, Linux, Python, and MySQL would be a fine thing compard to one dominated by Windows, IIS, MS SQL, and ASP.
Is a world dominated by BIND DNS "hardly any better" than a world dominated by a proprietary alternative like MS DNS? I don't think so.
I'm all for healthy competition between decent organizations who share the goals of a free and open Web, but I think you go a bit far when you suggest that a wildly successful Mozilla Foundation would be no better than a wildly successful Microsoft.
--Asa
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).
Scrollbar coloring is supported by many browsers, and the fact that the Mozilla line of browsers doesn't is a failing on its part.
Mozilla could support scrollbar coloring. It can draw either natively-colored or -themed scroll bars, or it can draw them in what the current browser theme specifies (the theme either says "draw them like this" or "go native"). It would certainly be possible.
Many things aren't part of the W3C standards, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't use them. If enough features are used on the internet which people enjoy, then it will force W3C to catch up. That's not to say that alternative methods shouldn't be employed for browsers which don't support these things. I'm all for making a site usable for everyone.
Remind me again what usefulness colored scrollbars have? Scrollbars belong to the browser or the operating system, but not to the Web page.
Forget semantics and standards, what's really important is c0lor3d scrollbars?
R.Mo
PayPal.
Three things:
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