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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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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
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