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Firefox Continues to Bite into IE Usage
InformationSage writes "According to Information Week, Firefox usage is now over 6 percent, pulling Internet Explorer usage down below 90 percent. 'Firefox is currently the only browser that is increasing market share on a monthly basis, and it is growing at the direct expense of Microsoft's Internet Explorer'"
IE7 pull this back for them with:
Better security
Tab Browsing
Conformance to standards
For a site I run Firefox is nearing 30% usage for Feb-Mar 2005 (some 20 million hits) Internet Explorer 59.3 % Firefox 28.5 % Opera 6.9 % Mozilla 3% Netscape 1 % Safari 0.5 %
It's good that Firefox is gaining market shares... but what about Mozilla?
The whole mozilla projet (mozilla + firefox) is what *really* matters, not only Firefox!
Microsoft are hoping that by taking leaves from Mozilla's book, such as Tabbed Browsing and putting them into IE7, the will stop the users who are not very tech savvy from changing to firefox, therefore still keeping the larger user base
Mozilla has an advantage with the fact that they can release a new version practically anytime, with updates nightly or anything. IE updates have to go out to everyone using it, and in general the people will not know as much, therefore creating more trouble.
Business Voyeur
What I'm missing is a good XUL IDE. I hear that KDevelop is going to support XUL soon and there are others, but one thing that Microsoft does really well is to help the developers to get started. Now if there just were a good IDE with syntax highlighting, completion and testing I think XUL apps would really take off. Don't you?
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
Are we at the peak of Firefox adoption or is this the calm before the storm?
I would never want to see Firefox reach the level of dominance that Internet Explorer has reacher. Having a 90% market share leads inexorably to the stalling of innovation.
A much better position would be for there to be lots of browsers with around 15% market share. This would foster creativity and would hammer home the importance of standards compliance.
I want the days of the software monopoly to come to an end, and Firefox may be the a catalyst for the wide spread disintegration of such monopolies.
Simon.
No testing is necessary; they already tested IE 6, and the first release of 7 will only be IE6 with a new skin. It will be 2008 before SP1 comes out, which will include the new features and security fixes for 2005.
Any statistics of Firefox usage based on http log analysis will have to be adjusted upwards by some unknown factor based on how many people surf as MSIE using the User Agent Switcher Extension.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
I think it could, and I also think it will be easy for Microsoft to stop firefox growth. They only have to ameliorate IE enough for people not to care about installing and using another browser. The only reason firefox is growing is because IE is flawed and annoying in several ways, so if a part of Microsoft's army of programmers is directed to remove that factor, firefox's growth will decrease greatly, in my opinion.
Then again, there may be some major annoyances that they won't be able to remove for compatibility reasons, such as ActiveX (which as you know is responsible for much of the spyware problem). What people should do is get rid of features like that completely, so that IE can be a secure browser...
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Your site is a gaming site. It attracts techies and geek gamers who are more likely to use a browser other than IE.
Now if your stats can show that John Q. Public or Jane Q. Soccermom is visiting your site and using FF, then that's completely different.
But Most of the users that are currently switching are users that allready used browsers other than IE (That is, Opera, Mozilla Suite, Netscape, etc. users). I would like to see actual numbers, not numbers that cames from the logs of some website, but stats that let's us track individual browser use, and see who is switching from what to what.
Most Internet Explorer market is people with default windows installs, and that is at least 70% of the market. That people is not going to switch anytime soon. So the grow of firefox will sadly certainly encounter it's roof soon.
I Would also like to make something clear, this is not a victory for Free Software like many people understand. This is not a victory against propietary software. Most of the people that installs Firefox doens't undestand or care about the fact that firefox is Free Software. Most firefox installs are under windows.
We will be talking about the victory of Free Software when people understands why Free Software is important, and why proprietary software shouldn't be used, and NOT when some specific piece of Free Software gains marketshare.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
I am worried about the future. With IE7 on it's way, is this going to slow down the adoption of Firefox by the masses? Is Microsoft going to start advertising everywhere that IE7 is on the way so users will think "Nevermind Firefox, I can just use IE6 because IE7 will be out soon and it will work better with my sites"? (re: vapourware effect, not that I don't think Microsoft won't release it) Also, the bug that causes the user to lose the entire contents of their hard disk drive while uninstalling Firefox 1.0 is worrysome. But I've warned all my coworkers, relatives and friends (who run Firefox 1.0) to not upgrade by uninstalling and installing Firefox 1.01.
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use of Firefox rose to 6.17% from 5.59% in January.
Firefox's gain comes at the expense of Internet Explorer, which dropped to 89.04% market share, from 90.31% in December.
So, IE has dropped by 1.27% and Firefox has risen by 0.58%. That means other browsers have risen by 0.67%, which is more than Firefox.
PimpMyMazda.com - Crazy mods to a 2002 Mazda Protege DX.
Funny? that wasn't supposed to be funny dammit. I'm trying to burn karma here. Mod parent down you moron!
* burnin karma all day
This is true for a lot of open source software. Developers often ignore the need for more advanced management of applications. A lot of companies will not touch software unless installation and configuration can be managed properly.
I believe that it is quite easy to add this type of support to a lot of open source software. A simple thing like creating an MSI-package for your application will often help deployment a lot.
Maybe all that is missing is a few decent tutorials on packaging and AD integration to get open source software into corporate IT-environments?
Standards Schmandards
Comment removed based on user account deletion
use of Firefox rose to 6.17% from 5.59% in January
I always like how they manage to get these results out to the second decimal place.
I converted, IE evil, FireFox good. I'm warming to ThunderTurd.
I was thinking about the following: Every time the is a security warning, such as "Do you want to install this programme?" or "Do you want this java applet complete access to your hard disk?", shouldn't there also be a button marked "I have no idea what this means" and make it the default button. This button has obviously the same function as cancel.
I hate M$ but I'm realistic. Once IE7 comes out - matter how badly it will support standards, people will go back to it.
http://www.frontmotion.com/Firefox/
MSI Package can be rolled out with Group Policy in an Active Directory domain.
I am having problems with this calculation - I may probably not thinking clearly this morning. If Firefox has 6 percent and IE is now below 90% (granted they don't give an exact figure) then that means that other browsers like Safari, Opera, Netscape, Mozilla and Conquer total for only 4% of usage? Since Apple has about a 5% market share, and Safari is the de-facto browser for Apple, doesn't that mean that mean that all of the other bowsers I mentioned basically are not used by anyone? My website statistics do not show that. I would guess that IE is WAY below 90%; maybe even approaching somewhere in the 70% area.
My
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a) it's support for (group) policies. which is simply defining control points in the registry and reading from the points and following instructions. this should not be difficult.
b) it's scripted/automatic install *and* repair. there may be some of this in there but i'm not sure.
c) other remote/automatic managenent support for not only ADS but also NDS (SuSE/Novell would be very interested in that).
eric
All they would have to do is completely support CSS 2.1. Maybe even do CSS3 support with all the extension for accessability for webpages. Bump up of the control of the printing device. Have CSS selectors that act for some of the less used options that are dead if they aren't there. Geek support will gradually come in. They won't like it, but they'll have to eventually admit standards are supported.
.NET control that gives complete control over the manipulation and creation of Office documents. Yes, this will put at least 3 companies out of business. But this will also ensure (ensnare?) businesses.
Then for the final business reason to keep IE. Make a
Then everybody will have what they want. Business types just want excel/office for browing the Internet and the tech types will be able to code standards compliant web pages for their intranets.
Oh...and as a side note. Work on security a bit too. Personally, I don't see how they are going to fix it with backward compatability a overriding requirement. If they can't get rid of ActiveX, then their security problem won't go away.
-I hate unripe sigs.
While Internet Explorer can be managed using group policies, which you have to use to lock down windows anyway, that doesn't mean firefox is entirely unmanageable in a network environment.
.ini-style settings or profiles stored in directories for ages. Using shared or synchronized files (with appropriate permissions) to propagate settings has been a common way to manage applications for ages as well.
Firefox accepts a startup flag (-profile d:\foo) that tells it what it's configuration directory is. You can install firefox on a shared directory, and have it retrieve settings from a (read-only) shared directory (or on a per user basis).
While it's not as finegrained as internet explorer's policies (where you might prevent some-one from changing only the homepage, and nothing else, or vice-versa), it's by no means unconfigurable.
This sort of thing should hardly come as a surprise. Applications have been using
Now, it's a shame firefox doesn't come with a handy-dandy MSI file, but then, neither does Internet Explorer. Then again, "deploying" firefox is a question of copying/sharing a directory and adding a shortcut with a -profile flag. Much easier and less prone to failure than a (remote/MSI) IE install.
Also, check out sysinternals. They have some real handy tools like PsExec (in the Pstools package); basically rexec for windows, which can really ease your pain when managing a zillion workstations where some change needs to be applied NOW.
And for more security options, check out windows-2003 server and XPs "software restriction policies"; and the great tdifw firewall (no GUI, just a service configured by copying a text-based file to your workstations and restarting the service, mucht better than any Norton offering) (wipfw might also be nice).
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Why would Microsoft care how many people use IE? They give it away for free. Is it just that Firefox is a "gateway drug" and leads to use of other non-Microsoft solutions?
It's pretty neat how far FireFox is beginning to spread. CNN carried this story on TV just a half-hour ago. They mentioned that FireFox was becoming the most popular alternative to IE. My coworkers (who's job includes watching CNN) came by and asked me why this FireFox thing is better. I told them about tabbed browsing, popup blocking, lack of security issues, and other niceties.
:-)
One of the coworkers downloaded FireFox right away. I actually expected him to take a little while to wean off of IE. After I showed him FireFox's features, however, he set FireFox to his default browser and deleted his IE shortcuts! I think we're definitely making headway.
MS can come back from this and be resurgent again in the browser space. All it takes is will, it's certainly not a matter of resources for an entity the size of Microsoft.
When my father-in-law says, "I'm running Linux now," I about piss myself. Then I realize he just installed Firefox on his Windows box and confused all FOSS by lumping it in with Linux. Then, while trying to explain to him that FOSS is good but it's not just all Linux, I get questions reguarding the slowdown of his computer mysteriously timed with the install of Kazaa.
/me bashes head with phone.
I feel safer using firefox, and compatibility is getting better with every new release, so, I don't see myself going bak to IE anytime soon. I just don't "trust" IE anymore, nor Mircosoft to be able to deliver a secure browser or OS.
Plus, as long as you keep nursing at the MS teat, you are assured a job in the tech support industry, as you are sure to have many, many fires to fight each day, to justify your presence. Sometimes it is wise to build a fire break, unless you just get a rush from watching things burn. In that case, keep the status quo, and pass the marshmallows!
Hey, you know that by making your stats available on the web you are doing the following:
You are helping (referer) spammers!
So, for the love of [insert deity here], would you please password protect such pages
http://virtuelvis.com/
It's 6 freaking perecent. It's not much. It's nothing to get excited about, nor is it news.
For developers who produce public websites it is very important. It used to be the policy of some organisations to only develop for IE viewing. That policy no longer makes sense. It would mean that more than 1 in 20 of your customers would have difficulties with your website. For a business with thousands of users (or more), like a bank, that is a real problem.
Firefox has a master configuration directory. Pretty much every single aspect of the browser is configurable through that directory. In fact, you can do a lot of things with it there that you can't with IE.
If you want to set a particular action for your people, edit the configuration stuff. There's a lot of documentation on how to do it.
Mozilla is making their browser configuration work pretty much the same as everything else in OSS: through config files, which considering the complexity is probably a good idea.
With a GUI you'd have to play "find the menu item" to get anywhere. Ironically, though, if you want to do that, then you can log in as superuser (admin), and edit this file through the browsers config inteface for most versions of it (and for most parts of the configuration).
But to switch subjects, your "corporations are a much bigger market than home users" comment is almost certianly wrong when you're not talking about an app that you sell to users.
Consider this:
1) Almost everyone who works in a corporate environment has computers to work on at work, and ones for home. Thus, almost every corporate user is also a home user.
2) Not everyone who has a computer is in a corporation. Thus, there are a lot of home users who are not corporate users.
The bottom line is that there must always be more home users than corporate users. Sure, they may not actually want to buy Mozilla, but that doesn't mean there aren't more of them.
It makes sense that Mozilla would concentrate on its primary marketshare. Especially when it does what you want. They probably assume that if you're paid to do global configs, you can figure out how. I suppose that was a wrong assumption in your case.
Are they asking to much of Windows admins?
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
I agree, the flaws and annoyances that I talked about were things such as popups (although I've heard that IE on XP SP2 already blocks popups - well? I don't know because I use win2k) and spyware.
:)
But I'm not quite sure that Firefox will continue to grow much after the next version of windows... We'll see
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Pretty slick. Modded up on the same freakin comment 3 times. I'll have to try that one...
heh I'm wondering if they are counting popups and malware-spawned browser windows toward the IE percentages. Several people are saying 70 to 80% is more likely, but if you count the extra 'hits' from popups and such, that could easily push those numbers higher. ;-)
I help to run "one of those" sites, the nature and scope of which I will leave entirely to the reader's imagination, save to say it's unlikely people hit it from work.
Over the course of the past three months, I'm seeing closer to 30% of my traffic as being Mozilla based, with Firefox accounting for almost all of that. 60% is IE, and the rest is split between Opera, Safari, Konqueror and various spider bots. Oddly enough, Opera is better represented than Safari... I attribute this to its popularity on cell phones.
Speaking with other admins, these numbers aren't unique.
IE's lost its monopoly in the home browser market... its overall dominance comes from locked-down corporate desktops, where change comes but slow.
SoupIsGood Food
Here's what you have to do:
Make your base image with firefox installed and configured the way you want it.
If the users login with a generic login, like "computerlab" then all you have to do is make note of the location of their profile directory. Set the files in there writable only by system and administrators after you configure firefox the way you want. If you need to make any changes after that, use a GPO and have windows run a bat file on startup(when it will run as system) that replaces any changed files in the profile. Deny users the ability to create new files in c:\documents and settings\%username%\application data\mozilla\firefox\profiles. This is the easy scenario.
If your people are logging in with their own idea, then you have to work around Firefox/Mozilla's assinine profile directory naming convention, arguably the stupidest thing they've done. Everything as before, except your script that runs on computer start up has to loop through all of folders in c:\documents and settings and then find out what Firefox decided to name the default profile. *Then* you can copy your files.
IMO, the profile naming convention and the refusal to use registry settings under windows are the two biggest mistakes made by the Firefox team. Because I can't write a custom adm file to make a GPO to control firefox in a lab, I can't role it out. It takes too much of my time to configure and then work around the problems with the software. With IE, I just set a GPO and suddenly no one can run activeX components. No one can override the popup blocker, no one can set the home page or change the backgrounds.
Firefox may be more secure out of the box, but the inability to easily manage it in lab settings makes it less secure there.
It would be pretty hard for MS to walk away from ActiveX. After all, all plug-ins for IE are ActiveX components. So every single one would have to be rewritten (unless Microsoft adopted the Mozilla standard, fat chance). And if Microsoft removed ActiveX, many, many websites would be instantly broken, because they use the non-standard clsid object tags.
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Publishing Webalizer stats doesn't help spammers if you hack it to use rel="nofollow" .
I run a smallish (300-400 unique visitors per day) football (soccer) site , who must rate pretty low on the techie side of things and Mozilla (presumably 99% Firefox) usage is at 36% and the vast majority of the rest using IE (just a couple of percent for Opera). All the main sites dealing with the club have been doing a bit of promotion for Firefox, though positive stuff and no nagging or little tricks to try and make people change. Generally the feedback has been very positive with people enquiring about and suggesting extensions to look at. Did give OOo a little push too with the b3ta 2.0 release, but as (seemingly) the only linux user around there, I am allowed :)
Other people have made very good points about how browser lockin can lead to webapp lockin. Back in the bad old days this was a major issue: people were afreaid that IE would lead to mass adoption of WMV, IIS, and would allow MS to create proprietary web standards by majority. Certainly these fears haven't completely been abated, but I do think MS's ability to do this is worsening.
I also know first-hand from MS employees that some of the justification is much shorter-term. A majority of IE users don't change their home pages or search engines. These can generate significant revenue, as long as they get a lot of users. This is one reason why MS recently improved MSN search--they were embarrassed to discover that their old search engine was profitable, but that profits were shrinking as more and more turned to google.
It launches quickly, you just have to wait a minute.
I don't get it.
Every once in a while I get a call from a less-technical friend or colleague who needs something "technical" done to their PC. Lately, and with an alarming frequency, the "something technical" involved cleaning the system of spyware. Anti-spyware tools only catch a certain percentage of the culprits, and often the less damaging ones. Running Adaware and S&D takes a few unattended minutes. Rooting out the rest of the malware can take hours.
Since I don't feel like wiping my friends bums for them all the time, one of the first preventive measures I take is to try and remove as many hooks into IE as possible, and install Firefox as the default browser. I am not sure this helps, but the way I figure it should at least diminish the number of "support calls" I get.
I've seen references to the fact that people want to see alot of browsers with a medium sized market share because it stimulates inovation and that in turn makes it better for the "consumer". I beg to differ. I think there needs to always be a clear cut winnner in everything. If there's not, then it waters down the product so to speak.
Look at airlines for example. While we all have our favorites, there's not really a clear cut leader in air travel. This has led to average service and fares at best. If there was a clear cut leader, the others would bust their ass to try and overtake them.
Which leads us to things like operating systems and web browsers. Microsoft is obviously ahead in the OS department but that's led the *nix community to rally and do everything they can to try and overtake them. Same thing with the browser wars. IE has long had a dominant share of the market and that in turn has spawned Firefox, Opera, etc. Each struggling to overtake the giant. I for one love seeing the improvments browsers have made. Besides, we all like rooting for the underdog and that's exactly what Firefox is. For now....
My sig of choice is Marlboro
Explorer 73.4%
;)
Unknown 13.6%
Netscape/Mozilla 11.0%
Safari 0.9%
Opera 0.9%
GoogleBot 0.2%
Konqueror 0.1%
Galeon 0.0%
Links 0.0%
In my defence none of the thousands of sites hosted here are my own, so not my webstats
A quick glance at Unknown suggests "Misc" is a better name, browsers giving blank strings, the Yahoo search engine (slurp ~2%!!), a few MSNBOT entries (a very few, I hope they are buying data from Yahoo or Google), media players picking up movies, Dreamcasts and such like, I'll get my boss to make it my job to enhance the stats engine if I can to list these seperately.
After IE, Gecko based browsers are number one, and the VAST majority of these are Firefox (nearly 10%).
The stats are only based on only the last 500,000 hits, the sites are generally "best viewed in IE" (I'm working on that one), and so one might expect an IE bias.
From these figures one might conclude that any website that only works in IE is failing between 13% and 26.6% of the traffic depending how optimistic you are.
These figures haven't changed that much since the jump after Firefoxes release.
I would share the "OS" stats, but they are truely demoralising for a GNU/Linux die hard like me.
Here in Austria (no, not in Soviet Russia), websites are reporting ~20% Mozilla, ~70% MSIE ...
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
I run a snowboard store at www.snowdevil.ca and this months statistics are really surprising.
Obviously this is a pretty young clientele
Browsers:
Operating systems:
Go non MS stuff!
It is one thing to say that 1 in 20 users have installed Firefox. It is quite another thing to prove that 1 in 20 customers of Amazon.com or your local S&L are running Firefox.
Estimates of Firefox's success or IE's decline don't tell you much unless you can break them down geographically, and by age, income, usage patterns and so on.
Have you hugged your penguin today?
It used to be the policy of some organisations to only develop for IE viewing. That policy no longer makes sense. It would mean that more than 1 in 20 of your customers would have difficulties with your website.
1 in 10, not 1 in 20.
The important statistic here isn't the increasing Firefox usage, it's the decreasing IE usage. A year ago, IE had 95% market share, meaning that if you developed for IE only, 19 out of 20 users could use your site. That was good enough to allow IE-only development policies, especially since the majority of the 1 in 20 non-IE users out actually did have access to IE and were tech-savvy enough to realize that if it doesn't work with Opera/Netscape/Mozilla/Whatever, they should try IE. So the net effect is that a year ago, an IE-only web site annoyed about 1 in 20 users, but only drove maybe 1 in 100 away (that's a wild guess, obviously).
Now, only 9 out of 10 users have IE as their default browser, and a smaller percentage of non-IE users recognize that a site that doesn't work well will work with IE. So now an IE-only web site annoys 1 in 10 and drives away a larger percentage of those. Perhaps half? Who knows? Anyway, not only is the non-IE population twice as big, but it's more likely to be dissuaded from using your IE-only site, so the combination means the damage to your audience is several times larger.
If IE usage continues to decline, eventually IE-only development policies are going to become untenable for most web sites. I would guess that if IE usage drops as far as 80%, most developers of non-intranet web sites are going to have to test on multiple browsers and focus on standards compliance.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
someone needs to write a float blocker, it shouldn't be too hard to block divs that are positioned over a block of text.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
This could be especially bad news for Firefox if IE 7.0 incorporates MySoft Technology's Maxthon code. I've been running Maxthon for over a month (I started with Version 1.12.00 and recently updated to 1.2.00) and believe me, once you're used to Maxthon it's hard to go back to the "stripped down" Firefox. Not only does Maxthon have tabbed browsing, but also true mouse gestures and the very powerful AD Hunter function, which can block out many online ads that slow down the computer and/or install spyware/adware without your knowledge in addition to blocking out most pop-up ad windows.
But Maxthon is still completely vulnerable to all those nice IE exploits that are dropping spyware on people's machines. *THAT'S* why a lot of people are dropping IE, rather than some usability or feature issue. Heck, I made the mistake of checking out a site in IE for my girlfriend when she was visiting. It auto-installed spyware on my fully patched WinXPSP2 laptop (hadn't installed any BHO protection).
As for ads, just drop in the powerful, full-featured AdBlock extension. The fact is, just about any feature you can think of (and every feature in a shell like maxthon) is available for Firefox as a free, open-source, easily installable extension.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
The idea is that some bots are going to load web pages using a selected 'spam' referer value so that they can try to get on the 'referer list'.
Once they are on the list, and a search bot indexes the page, that page now increases the selected_'spam'_referer_value_site's number_of_pages_that_reference_the_site.
The more pages on the web that reference a site, the higher its ranking will be in the search engine.
The theory is that, if I have a bot that does nothing but load pages from the internet with the refer of viagra-p1mp.com, and this bot's tenacious loading of pages causes the viagra-p1mp.com site to appear on referer logs, then search engines might actually rank the site slightly higher than if I wasn't hiting those sites with GET requests every 20 seconds.
And about the password protect thing mentioned GGGP and GGP post, I believe that the idea is if you need a password to access the stats, then the bots won't index them. If that is the idea, however, wouldn't a quick edit to robot.txt be better? Not sure, since I didn't make the original posts.
BTW!!!, viagra-p1mp.com is AVAilable. Register it TODAY and GEt a frEE RQLEX.
You're forgetting one very important thing. As a matter of fact, everyone who is a big Moz suite fan says the same thing as you, but they forget one of the biggest reasons for FF/TB: seperating the memory of the various suite applications.
Does no one remember that there was (and may still be, I use FF/TB instead of the suite now) a major problem with one part of the suite crashing and taking the rest with it? Many times I was bitten by a buggy Moz Mail plugin crashing and pulling my 10+ tab web session off the cliff with it. I was very happy to hear that they were going to redo the various components as stand-alone apps and then later reintegrate them into a single cohesive suite, but one with more protection between its various pieces.
Now the latter part of the plan seems to have fallen by the wayside and only time will tell if it will eventually happen. I understand and agree that running both FF and TB takes an inordinate amount of resources when compared to the suite, but I'm hesitant to lose that safety separation. I'm hoping that there is a happy medium that can be reached (and please educate me if you know what that would be). But what you suggest sounds to me like an invitation to the disasters of old.
Thanks to Haeleth for finding the bugzilla link. The URL is (paste into browser): bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=233625
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I remember having read this some time ago...
A friend is the admin for a major hotel chain here in Europe, they have 5 different names for their hotels based on the rating. The servers are all together in a big farm with load balancers and multi-homed links. Their traffic is a mix of home users, business users, and travel agencies.
His stats run about 19% for Firefox, and no more than 65% for all versions of IE combined. Contrast that with 88% market share this time last year for IE.
Because of the dynamic business nature of his sites, they have over 1% spider-bot traffic, he suspects the number is closer to 5%, since many spiders identify themselves as IE to avoid simple anti-spider countermeasures. Home users and travel agencies make up the bulk of the Firefox traffic, its only the brainless business users still using IE.
He also says that Macs now account for over 10% of their traffic, requiring their web developers to test all pages on Macs as well.
Firefox is quickly becoming a major player in the market, despite claims that "overall" it has only 5% or 6% share.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on