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'"

Comments

But wont..

[Anonymous Coward]

IE7 pull this back for them with:

Better security
Tab Browsing
Conformance to standards

Nearly 30% on my site

[ttlgDaveh]

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 %

Re:Nearly 30% on my site

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd bet a lot of those "Firefox" hits will actually be Internet Explorer users, spoofing their user-agent strings, so they can "sneak" into poorly written Gecko-only sites...

Re:Nearly 30% on my site

[trboyden]

Yeah well my site gets 100% Firefox users.

Sub BrowserDetect()

If Browser != "Firefox";

RedirectBrowser("www.getfirefox.com");

End If
End Sub

What about Mozilla?

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

comeback

[Sv-Manowar]

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.

Re:comeback

[FidelCatsro]

IIRC tabbed browsing first apeared in NetCaptor an alt IE GUI browser , then in opera 4.
Wikipedia seems to agree with me
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetCaptor

XUL IDE

[haeger]

Great news.
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?

.haeger

I wonder

[Ckwop]

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.

Re:Next IE version.

[rbarreira]

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...

Other browsers gained more.

[dannytaggart]

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.

Firefox for the masses...

[asciimonster]

If the uses of firefox increases, shouldn't we think about makeing this broser more appealing for "the masses"? In other words how do we make a better browsing experience for everybody? (I mean: How do we have Firefox protect John Doe from doing dumb things on the internet?)

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.

Re:A "Beta?"

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.frontmotion.com/Firefox/

MSI Package can be rolled out with Group Policy in an Active Directory domain.

Microsoft could easily win this (minor) war

[FlynnMP3]

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.

Then for the final business reason to keep IE. Make a .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 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.

Fighting for Market Share of a Free Product

[bender647]

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?

Stop navel-gazing. Password protect your stats.

[zxSpectrum]

Hey, you know that by making your stats available on the web you are doing the following:

You are helping (referer) spammers!

1. Thousands, if not millions of websites are beginning to experience real problems with Referer spam
2. The prime motivation for referer spam is PageRank whoring
3. Web sites that publish refererers, give spammers the illusion referrer spamming helps.

So, for the love of [insert deity here], would you please password protect such pages

Re:Uhh

[Decaff]

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.

Do they count popups?

[DeathAndTaxes]

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. ;-)

Closer to 30% according to my server stats.

[SoupIsGood Food]

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