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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."
...It does seem that everyone I know, personally, is already either using Firefox or just the kind of person that'll probably always use internet explorer forever. Let's hope this isn't the case...
...on the other hand, it is not uncommon, according to some business theories, for products to reach a temporary plateau after having reached all "early adopters" and that the majority of users will follow after a delay. Maybe that's where FireFox is now...who knows...
When nothing's driving growth rates, growth rates slow. Firefox had a big publicity push around the 1.0 release. Now that publicity push is dying down. The normal thing that happens when publicity dies down is happening.
Wait and see what happens when 1.1 is released.
Well, by God, it's Microsoft Anti-Spyware's fault!
Disclaimer: The previous statement was not intended to spread FUD. Results may vary, click link at your own risk, yadda yadda yadda.
To me, the Mozilla nightlies are starting to feel faster than the Firefox nightlies, and certainly faster than Firefox 1.0 and 1.0.1.
Has anyone else noticed this, or is it just a side effect of my old hardware? It seems like Mozilla 1.8 will be noticeably faster than at least Firefox 1.0 and last night's Firefox Feb 26 build for sure.
Does it make sense to make statements like "yup, that's as many customers as they'll ever have" based on a slowing growth rate, after exactly one major release that the public was aware of?
Circumstances change over time
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
According to these statistics Firefox is already over 20% marketshare. Why is there such a discrepancy between the two?
lasindi
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof of this theorem that this sig is too small to contain.
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.
One of my larger customers, with some 3000+ desktops, has asked about switching to firefox. Now, there are always some web sites and web based apps that require IE, which makes this a pain. But given the amount of time we spend cleaning spyware from machines, I think I can live with it, I don't know if the users can.
In any case, a coporate wide switch won't happen overnight. I'd expect to see the next 6 months or so start to see more corporations install linux enterprise wide. Those same corporations will complain about sites that don't work in Firefox, which helps fuel the uptake.
Also note to FF people - one of the reasons cited for not installing FF enterprise wide was the lack of central patching and policy control. This means patching security holes and forcing down settings to the clients; from my desk, without spending hours writing scripts.
You're assuming that Firefox has the same amount of bugs and vulnerabilities that IE does and it's not the case.
A lot of why IE has been so problematic is that during their war for the browser they "extended" the crap out of it, adding a lot of out-of-standard enhancements and extensions. IE has countless API's that keep web sites and applications stuck on IE and making it harder to switch to something else (really, no different then anything else Microsoft has ever made.)
Firefox is open source, it adheres to standards more strictly, and it's a lot more light-weight. There's less opportunity for malware to get in with Firefox, and if there's a security flaw it's fixed a lot faster. On the other hand, because of IE's extensions and extra functionality, it makes it much more difficult for Microsoft to back off on all the extra (and not soundly designed) features because everyone is stuck on them.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
The article is also assuming that exponential growth, not linear growth.
This is here so you don't ignore the last two lines of my posts.
Earlier you mention 'phony' statistics that were 'anecdotal'. Do you have research to substantiate what you've claimed above?
The Mothership
Most users don't know they want tabbed browsing, but everyone I've seen who has used it for a bit, gets pissed off when they have to use Internet Explorer. This is especially bad at school because, for some reason, they think it's a security concern to be able to use File->New Window (it says it's been disabled by security settings). This can be circumvented by just starting IE again from the start menu, but it's still an annoying piece of shit.
I know quite a few people at my office that just won't try Firefox. Even though they know IE doesn't render correctly, even though they know that it allows all kinds of spyware, and even though they constantly have to close popups. They just won't do it! It's like they are not trying it for spite or something. Really weird. It's not like these people like Microsoft, but they are not just ignorant users that think the blue E is the IntarWeb.
What can be done about these kinds of users? Is this the vast middle-ground of IE users that just won't switch?
--- witty signature
Do a search through Slashdot's past stories. They are what I am referring to. Slashdot posted with headlines similar to "Firefox Usage Increases On The Web," then you'd read the article and find out what really happened was that Firefox usage increased in some web dev site's logs. It's hardly representative of Firefox's global usage. It is those making claims that Firefox is taking over the web who need to be presenting the research to back up those claims.
It's worth checking out recent browser-speed benchmarks. The new beta of Operate placed very well in terms of performance:
Browser Speed Analysis
#include tinfoil_hat.h
... I Think that FireFox is good for Micro$oft. The Browsers war has been for years a black point in the reputation of m$, and have caused them legal troubles. The fact that there is another browser out there, and that there seems to be an anti-IE-pro-Firefox campaign that has reached the Media, let's microsoft say that there is just fair competition, and make the cort forget all microsoft's monopolistic practices.
... that may be just accurate
Whenever some product has tried to compete directly with Microsoft, Micro$oft has just killed it. M$ is an unfair competitor, and it know just how to get ride of the rest of the market. Just look at the FUD campaign aginst GNU/Linux they are doing
just a paranoid idea
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
I have this buddy with Windows XP. You know, the kind of person who doesn't understnad just how dangerous .exe files are. As expected, this system was full of all kinds of spyware by the time I got to it. It wasn't even possible to open regedit; a spyware program was killing it. I couldn't even download Firefox from IE; I had to use the old ftp client to ftp over to ftp.mozilla.org to get the program.
So, I get and download Firefox for him. I explained to him "OK, I'm going to reinstall this system and not give you the admin password when I get time. In the meantime, use this to browse the web". I got rid of the IE icon from his desktop and replaced it with Firefox using the IE icon.
A couple of days later, my friend says he wants to keep Firefox. He told me the tabbed browsing was "tight".
I think Firefox is currently the best open source application for non-technical people out there. It is 100% open source and better than the competition (better CSS than IE; more security than IE; more feautures than IE).
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.
My favourite browser is still galeon.
There are 3 things that have been in galeon for years and are not in Firefox yet:
1. Tab detach feature
2. password manager not based on autofilling (which is dissallowed by some banks thus my on-lin bank site has password unmanageble by firefox [operations requires one-time passwords and tokens so no, there is no extra security in that ]).
3. sessions - saved in given point of time (windwos with tabs) or when browser crashes
Also there is one feature needed:
4. disabling flash player - same way as hjava.
Its because some people dont like to think their stupid and dont know what theyre doing, and the more you point out to them that you know vastly more - the more theyll stick their heads in the sand. Let them be sypwared and laugh from your open source throne.
Microsoft windows usage up to 110%.
Google announches they now handle 112% of the nets searches.
This just in: Slashdot announches a new strategy to deliver 120% correct stories, no more dupes, fact-errors or posting lame stories about fake screenshots.
As you know, Firefox is based off the Mozilla 1.7 branch. The Mozilla devs did a lot of work 'deCOMtaminating' Mozilla for 1.8. Essentially they're removing XPCOM interfaces from various performance-critical parts of the app, allowing tighter binding + faster execution. It makes a huge difference, especially on slower hardware. Firefox 1.1 will be based off Mozilla 1.8, so it will take advantage of the streamlining.
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.
Since when US users reflect the all users around the world? Considering amount of spam coming from US, users from different places of the world are more careful in selecting secure software than US computer users.
Grab "FX-ppc7450-2005.02.27.dmg" for your PowerBook, it'll probably change your mind about Firefox versus Safari! :)
http://homepage.mac.com/krmathis/
Wrong.
Mozilla 1.8 is basically just there to test Gecko which will be in Firefox 1.1. New Mozilla's are just testing bitches for Firefox.
Rumor has it that IE 7 will sport all the little whiz-bangs like tabbed browsing and so on that Firefox has. What this means is that the "average" non-techie user will see no difference, and there for no reason to migrate from IE 7, should they already have it. As well, I see a problem with a feature that most techies like, but the average user sees as a big hassle: Surfing the web, only to find that the base install requires a lot of plug-ins to be installed to open Flash, Real files, and all the other popular crap. My worthless two cents...
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
IE Theme.
What I do is make the top menu icons small, remove the "bookmark" toolbar, adjust the remaining two bars to be useful.
Then I show them that you can see more of the screen in Firefox than you can in IE, "You can see more of the internet". This makes Firefox look better on every page they see. As dumb as that is, it works.
I then do as above, removing shortcuts to IE.
Right from the Maxthon homepage:
So really, you've given up a good browser AND the security of your computer since in reality, you are now using IE.
As for your Firefox problems, it seems like it could be an issue with your machine (possible malware), internet connection, or perhaps even your selected DNS servers. I've never experienced any of the issues you mention and use Firefox on two different platforms. Mabye you should submit a bug report instead of giving up on it
Most users don't want tabbed browsing? Are you on Crack? EVERYONE I've showed tabbed browsing to has loved it. Even when I didn't do it intentionally, e.g., googling for something with a friend I start middle clicking, he sees these tabs extending off to the right and goes "WHOA - what's that?" -- I show the sites opening up in the background -- he says "That's cool!" That's the usual response from tech savy to friends who think AOL is a nice service.
As for the "90% IE", three words "user agent spoofing".
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Firefox is a relatively small download but some people (think of older folks) just don't like to install software that way. Some entrepreneur should put together the Windows versions of Firefox, OpenOffice, and maybe Cygwin on a CD and sell it through CompUSA and Best Buy for $12. Maybe they could get work out a deal with LavaSoft to include Ad-Aware.
The "look" and "feel" will become out of sync if you do that. For example, IE's toolbars have little gripper visuals on the left-hand side. You can grab those with your mouse and rearrange the toolbars. You could reproduce the visual on Firefox, but that would be kinda lame considering they wouldn't be functional. That said, good luck and let me know if you find one... I could use it too.
Karma: -2147483648 (Mostly affected by integer overflow)
You can leave out mail and newsgroups, the address book, and the IRC client.
With modern demand paging systems, it doesn't matter anyway, as long as you don't load and use the other components. If you don't do e-mail with mozilla, the email code won't even be fetched from the disk. Same for IRC or other stuff that you don't use.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Here's something funny - I have firefox installed on my family's computer, I suggested that they use it, and they do, unless they need to go to an IE specifc website. Yesterday, I walked by the computer, and there's my sister sitting there with a good 10-15 firefox windows open.
I say "Hey, you know you could open all those sites in one window?"
She says "Oh in tabs? I'd rather use seperate windows"
That said, does anyone know of an extension that would allow me to organize tabs in multiple rows based on the site they were from? I'm willing to write one myself, but it's going to take me a little while to learn how to.
kaens.blogspot.com
- Februry is a short month
- New releases of Firefox updates have all but stopped. Its been about 4 months since the last update
- Lack of helper apps/extensions - Not much new (that is publized on places like
/.)
Firefox is solid. Early adopters have it and are happy. No new updates, so new reason to download it.No one really knows a whole lot about the new extensions because Firefox relies almost exclusively on the OSS forword of mouth. The current batch of extensions are not quite primetime so no one is pushing them.
Firefox is solid, but its reached a platue where Netscape was at 2.0. Now Firefox has to take to the next level with better advertising and new features, or fall between the cracks, just like its older brother.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
It's not easy enough to deploy Firefox (or Thunderbird) in a corporate environment. And/or it's not documented well enough.
r owser"
Next week, I would like to install both apps on 12 desktops running Win2K and XP.
12 is not 1000. I cannot spend 2 days finding how to do it, testing it, correcting, etc. I could install manually, but doing 12 times the same clicking around doesn't sound like fun (I'm not a mouse clicking fan either).
While I want settings to be in the user's profile, I need to make sure the web cache is elsewhere and isn't copied through the network at every logon/logoff.
I want to get rid of the moronic paths both apps use with "default" and "some-random-string".
I would like stuff in the Default Profile, so new users get it automatically.
This sort of thing doesn't look easy and straight-forward enough yet, and I'm sure that it is what is keeping many admins from deploying it on their desktops.
I will try it anyway, but I won't be able to bill the time I will have to spend researching how to do it right. Especially since the client didn't ask me to do that anyway. They are happy with MSIE. So I will spend time on my own cost, just to find how to install something that will hopefully generate less work for me in the future because I won't have to spend so much time cleaning infected machines because of MSIE.
I hope FFDeploy will help, but there doesn't seem to be such a thing for Thunderbird.
Last but not least: Firefox and Thunderbird are terrible memory hogs, with Firefox sometimes growing to insane memory usage levels (75 MB right now, but I've seen it go to 150!), and sometimes also crashing consuming 99% CPU. Fortunately, this last problem doesn't happen very often, but I will hate it when users on whom I forced Firefox call me on the phone because it crashed, so I can tell them to "press Ctrl-Alt-Del, select Firefox, click End Task, restart Firefox but-you-know-it's-a-much-better-and-more-secure-b
I do believe it's a much better browser, and it's my default browser since it was called Phoenix, but instead of contemplating statisics, I think there is still a lot work to do to make it even better, and to help administartors actually deploying it.
You nailed it. It's the "devil you know" syndrome.
People will not try a new browser or even more a new OS because it's just too scary. For non IT oriented folks who just need to use a computer it's wicked hard to keep from screwing it up to the point of non functionality. It's *easy* to screw up, impossible to fix, so if they get something running for them even half way stable and half way useful they think this is the epitome of "computing". I mean even half way is plenty good enough because the alternative they have seen more often than not is "not working at all".
It's like someone's favorite old shirt, frayed, maybe a button missing, etc. Sure you can get a new shirt, but it won't be as "comfortable".
Most of the world *isn't* slashdot, they have different interests and a computer is an appliance at work to run a few boring but necessary for that paycheck tasks, or it's an exalted videogame machine at home that people more think of as a television with a few more features but not as many normal channels. and it pisses them off that after two years even though nothing is broken they are supposed to upgrade the whole thing. they go "HUH?". And with modern software of the bleeding edge, every few months. Say what? People in general just don't want to do that, it's a PITA.
People don't upgrade their toasters TVs microwaves blenders vacuunm cleaners stereos etc every other day or week, they think it's weird and stoopid you have to do that with computers, and I don't blame them, it IS weird AND stoopid.
It's just wrong to expect people to become nascar mechanics or have that level of tech interest just to drive a car. They just aren't going to be out everyday giving it a tuneup and changing the oil and doing bodywork and swapping engines and stuff like that, so it's nuts to think they are going to be doing the equivalent with computers. And to force them to do that because the stuff that was just pushed on them last month is now "horribly broken and obsolete and you need new and improved whizzbang v1.9.5x" etc is cuckoo really. They think "that geek idjit *just told me a couple months ago* this was the best thing since burgers in a bag, now I need to do it again? why???"
Why indeed!
Firefox and linux etc will only get huge market share and get "mature" when that is what's installed on new computers from all the major vendors and it's on the store shelves at the retail level,AND it's not obsolete weekly and the updates are beyond automagical.. And that won't happen without demand, and there's *very little demand to the vendors coming from the open source community because they do all that stuff themselves* and are more the equivalent of nascar mechancis and racing enthusiasts than they are 'daily drivers'. Linux and open source (browsers or whatever) NEEDS a "daily driver" dose of reality to make that breakthrough..
Nerds build their own boxes, try out new stuff, etc. It just will never get much beyond that level of mindshare and marketshare beyond what it has now without credible persistant demand at the retail store cash level, and sad to say it just isn't happening. Daily drivers aren't asking for it, and the nerds aren't either, so????? Why should the vendors or the developers deliver? The vendors still sell all they want to regardless, they still making the coin hand over fist, and the developers are off in nerd land, far far away from daily driver land.
And that's why it's slowing down, too. I've already heard from some windows users how "firefox just doesn't work" after they tried it at my recommendations. So I actually quit doing that. I have stopped recommending it. Waste of time almost. The farthest I go now is recommend people try a "live" cd, because it's easier for them to backout of the deal and I won't get any tech support cries. If they can't be bothered to download and burn a distro to try or send away 2 bucks to get a complete operating system, they for SURE won't be able to run it or tweak it even to a m
Well, i have a friend who switched from IE6 to FF 0.9 all by his own. No i didn't even told him about FireFox (but i installed FF in that PC tho). Anyway, he didn't even know that FF has tabbed browsing until he saw me using it. "Wow! You can open many pages in the same window(TM)".
Ahh, and don't forget that when the time IE7 is released (hopefully in our lifetime), Firefow will have many new features.
Use cygwin and Mozilla/Firefox to provides seamless access to X Windows and X applications from within Web browsers and big corporations will love Linux even more.
m l
I have been using this in the 20th century:
http://www.powerlan-usa.com/webtermx.ht
P.S. I am also looking for ISP offering NFS access to Linux software (I have no time to install everything myself).
P.S.2 I hope that some day I will be able to run both Linux and Windows simultanoesly without vmware.
I checked out the docs for ECMAScript for XML and it looks like this is a really cool feature! Now instead of big long yucky DOM calls we get simple parent.child.grandchild access to XML data. This is going to be a boon for people doing Ajax, since it's basically all XML data.
Especially since they're still growing, and incredibly quickly. They picked up about a percentage point a month two months straight. Since it started that at about 4%, they were seeing 25% *monthly* growth. Good god, how long could that have possibly continued?
Oh, and they only grew 14% this month. So I agree, that kills the whole "as many customers as they'll ever have" crap.
I mean, really. This is THE open-source success story of the year. How many companies see 14% monthly growth? Legally operating companies? Not between 1998-2000?
At this point, they'll easily see 7.5% by June. They'll need some continued press, and hopefully a few more killer IE bugs, but 10% by December is a very reachable goal.
I swear, sometimes I think the asshats around here won't be happy unless IE's at 0% by Thursday.
It would be nice if it had strong type safety. It would be nice if full type information was present on every interface. It would be nice if didn't have stupid funky memory management issues. It would be really nice if it didn't have the awful apartment models. It would be nice if it had a lot of things, actually. But what it does have is a pretty simple design, and it scales. It allows for neat extensions. It allows for a slick upgrade path. And even if I think DCOM is the spawn of Satan, the fact that it was possible to implement it after-the-fact with a legacy set of objects is still kind of neat.
The other thing that I like about it is it strictly enforces the "black box" usage of the interfaces (for the most part.) Even though our COM objects are written in C++ and mostly used by C++ applications, we use VB test programs. Why? Partly because some of the objects end up getting used in ASP web pages, but also because we know if we can fully test it with an IDispatch caller, the coders aren't playing "pointer shenanigans" through the interface.
Jeez, listen to me. I sound like a Billy the Gates fanboi, eh? Well, Don Box made me say it!
John
I've done my share, how's everyone else doing:
1 120850 55.17% Mozilla/5.0
2 76857 35.08% MSIE 6.0
3 5897 2.69% Opera 7.54
But - ah - different statistics. Same site, mind you, same logfiles, just a different tool doing the stats:
Firefox No 2287166 39.1 %
MS Internet Explorer No 2202449 37.6 %
Mozilla No 556825 9.5 %
Opera No 515143 8.8 %
Now that's a major difference, isn't it? Ah well, as long as Firefox is #1 there, I'm happy.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
seem to be adopting firefox just as much as their *nix and MacOS counterparts.The article states 5.47% of windows users use firefox vs 5.69% of all OS users. I actually thought windows users percentage will be far lower.
/. I'd think firefox would account for 90%
Would be interesting to see a "What browser do you use" poll on
That actually leads me to thinking that geeks are a far lower percentage of the population than I originally thought.
The following statement is true
The preceding statement is false
Replaced IE with Mozilla in the company I used to work for. Management wouldnt let me so I replaced the Mozilla icon with the blue E and installed Mozillas IE skin. Nobody realised that there was any difference, though management surfed on with IE.
And no, I wasnt fired for changing to Moz. I quit.
Meme of the day: I browse "Disable Sigs: Checked". So should you.
Fair enough. I just find it unnessesary to want to get statistics for usage in one particular geographical location. The web has evolved to cross most borders demographics should be treated as that.