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Mozilla 1.8b1 Released, Firefox Growth Slowing
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla 1.8 Beta 1 has been released, and in addition to numerous bug fixes now includes ECMAScript for XML (E4X). Mozilla 1.8 will serve as the code basis for Firefox 1.1. In other Mozilla related news, WebSideStory saw Firefox's usage growth slow down to just 15% (Jan-Feb) from 22% (Dec-Jan) making Firefox's 10% marketshare goal for 2005 potentially more challenging. Their stats also saw Internet Explorer usage drop below 90% for the first time in many years."
They are faster. Firefox 1.1 should have the same changes.
There is a lot of talk about Firefox, and everyone gets very excited about it, but Mozilla standard is still very good. Personally, under GNU/Linux, I prefer it to Firefox (Under Windows I prefer Firefox, however).
My sister uses GNU/Linux (Mandrake, with KDE) on her computer (No Windows) and prefers it to her old Windows ME OS. Mozilla was part of the reason - it is easy to use, helpful, securer and just makes sense. I'm not saying Firefox isn't any of these, but on Linux, I think it looks a little "Out of place", and Mozilla does not. My sister also preferred Mozilla to both Konqueror and Firefox.
Anyway, just wanted to point out that Mozilla itself exists for more than just feeding Firefox.
- Jax
It's no surprise that the percentage growth of Firefox in terms of marketshare is slowing down, this is the a natural part of the growth curve for any new poduct. 15% monthly growth is phenonemal, and it is literally an unsustainable growth rate. I'd be more interested to know the growth in raw numbers of new Firefox users; that number is likely almost exactly the same in January than December.
Here's my math. 0.15*(1.22)=.19, so 19% vs. 22% growth in market share from the December base, but the market is probably 1% larger. The way I see it, the number of new Firefox users is down probably 10% from January to February. Then remember that there were 3 fewer days in February than in January, which would account for the 10% difference. In other words, the number of new Firefox users per day stayed almost exactly the same from January to February. Maybe someone who RTFA can tell us what that number of new uses/day is and how it compares to earlier months.
The growth is remarkably fast, and may also be remarkably stable. How many more months would Firefox need to reach 10% market share?
The summary is not quite accurate regarding Firefox 1.1 being based on Mozilla 1.8; my understanding of the roadmap is that Gecko 1.8 - which is used in Mozilla - will form the base of the Firefox 1.1 program. Maybe just a technicality but it is different to say the base on which the programs will built is the same, rather than Firefox will be a stripped down version of Mozilla.
The statistics on the w3schools.com site are just statistics on the people who visited that particular site.
It isn't really surprising that the people who visit a web developers site tend to use Firefox more than the general population does.
I've now RTFA. There were only 35 days between the last 2 surveys, and 42 days between the previous 2 surveys. This works out to a growth in market share of 0.63% (February) or 0.64% (January) for every 30 days. Since Firefox is at 5.69% now and they need another 4.31% to reach 10%, it will take about 6.8 months to achieve that goal. That works out to the end of September. If Firefox simply maintains its (phenomenal) growth rate, it will easily reach 10% by the end of 2005. They can even slow down a little and still reach 10%. Awesome.
It has nothing to do with bloat or the number of people working on the project. Instead the speed difference has everything to do with Mozilla (specifically Gecko, the rendering engine) getting much faster between Mozilla 1.7 (off which Firefox is based) and Mozilla 1.8.
light weight? is this why it sucks up about 122MB of ram before you even load a web page with it? (and this is with memory cache off)
122MB? TaskManager reports Firefox is currently using around 40MB, with 9 tabs open and I've been surfing on and off for around 4 hours now.
Compare to IE's 21MB with one window open and about 20 minutes worth of use.
I wouldn't call Firefox particularly "light weight" either but it doesn't clock in at anywhere near 122MB...
My debian just updated from Mozilla 1.7.3 to 1.7.5, and there was a -huge- increase in responsiveness, before I start loading insane web pages. (And instead of allocating >150MB RAM after IPL, it now seems to use on the order of 3-4MB, at least until pages are loaded. This makes a -really- major difference in operations when you're on a computer with 128MB physical and 512MB in the swap.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
IE Theme.
"You're assuming that Firefox has the same amount of bugs and vulnerabilities that IE does and it's not the case."
It cannot be assumed that FireFox doesn't have the same amount of bugs and vulnerabilities, it hasn't had as much attention paid to it. Frankly, the 'as much' number isn't all that important anyway. It needs to have one vulnerability to be a problem. Suppose a FF extension becomes really popular, and somebody finds an exploit in it?
I'm not defending IE here, rather I'm pointing out that one should be careful in making broad assumptions about the future.
"Derp de derp."
It could be this: the popup blocker doesn't block popups launched from Flash (it's technically a hard thing to do, as Flash is essentially an embedded application running within Firefox and can do whatever it wants).
Sometime in the last couple of weeks, Fastclick, a major ad network, started exploiting this to get its popups around Firefox's popup blocker. The ad scripts load a small Flash movie which then lauches the popup.
You can block plugins from launching popups by using a hidden pref but this will block all plugin-launched popups, even ones launched in response to a mouse click. To do this, enter about:config in the Location bar, hit return and then right-click any where in the content area and choose New > Integer. Enter privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins as the name and 2 as the value.
Flashblock is a good extension to get rid of this problem; as long as you don't mind clicking on those flash driven plugins you actually want.
Flashblock has a whitelist...at least the version I have does. The only sites I whitelist are places that I go just to watch flash movies (like homestarrunner.com and joecartoon.com). Other than places like that, I could care less about flash, so flashblock is a godsend.