Slashdot Mirror
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. -
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
It's worth checking out recent browser-speed benchmarks. The new beta of Operate placed very well in terms of performance:
Browser Speed Analysis
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
- 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?
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.