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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."
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.
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....
While the parent comment has some truth in it (the ActiveX legacy) I think it's unfair to a lot of good, professional developers who had no choice other than to use ActiveX because a particular component (a grid, graphing tool, whatever) was actully required in the project specification.
I'm thinking of sites/apps for internal, corporate intranets - not the Internet in general.
What were these guys supposed to do exactly? Resign on a point of principle?
Get real!
That's exactly what I'm talking about! Change your freaking bank! That's like when there were some banks that had all-night ATMs, and others didn't (guess how old I am), or later, when only some banks waived fees if you used their own ATMs and others didn't. Or, when some banks had free telephone-based auto-banking, and others didn't. You choose a commidity institution (there are thousands of banks) based on how well they provide you with that commidity. My stupid bank has a great web site for their brokerage area, but the regular banking part sucks. A lot. I've bitched at them, and actually ended up talking to the manager of their web dev team, who was shocked to hear about JVM version problems (what a loser!). They're working on it.
In the meantime, it's just not that big a deal to change banks, or just to fire up IE for minute. Oh... I'm guessing you run on Linux. Alas. Your bank will come around on their own, or they'll get tired of fielding the complaints. Market pressure works - banks are service companies, and believe me, they do listen to compaints - mostly in the cummulative, but they do listen.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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.
Often people like you don't realize that Microsoft does provides a huge, extensive, and powerful set of interconnected development tools. Ever pick up a single MSDN binder?
If you don't care about anything non-Microsoft, it makes sense to just use the tools in front of you. Despite your anti-Microsoft frothing, those tools usually work and get the job done, and their use is intended for use on Microsoft's platform.
I don't see anything wrong with that -- if the customer has different needs and the developer cannot provide them, the developer/provider has lost a customer.
The real thing you should be complaining about is when IE breaks or adds things to HTML standards that won't work on Firefox. That's just bad, because it's a web standard, not Microsoft's own platform.
If you say "here goes my karma" I will bite you!!!
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
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