Firefox Site Visits Up 237%

prostoalex writes "Nielsen//NetRatings, a top Web reporting and metrics agency, started tracking the Firefox Web site in June 2004 and has announced 237% growth since then. Nielsen tracks Firefox Web site visits, not downloads or usage patterns, but it notes that "Men accounted for 71% or nearly 1.9 mln site visitors, compared to the women who comprised 29% or the minority population who visited in March 2005.""

Comments

Just be happy

[Nate53085]

I don't understand why everyone is so angry. I think we should all be happy that there is a strong alternative to IE and that its gaining ground. Competition for IE means inovation, and regardless of how pissed off you are about whatever, thats a good thing.

Really?

[proteonic]

"Men accounted for 71% or nearly 1.9 mln site visitors, compared to the women who comprised 29% or the minority population who visited in March 2005."

I didn't realize my browser reported whether I was male or female as part of the browser Id string!

Impact of Firefox

[shirai]

The biggest impact Firefox will have on web development is it will increase the cost of entry into run-almost-anywhere scripted websites.

Note that I'm not saying this is bad or that there aren't good effects Firefox has (in fact, I believe it is a great browser). Just that the biggest impact on *development* is it will increase the cost of entry on scripted sites.

This may be a good or bad thing. When the web first started, it was possible to be an "HTML Expert" by doing layouts with tables. I kid you not. This was advanced at one time and people had to figure out how to do it.

With browsers having pretty much settled down (meaning that Microsoft stopped releasing new browsers and 90% market share belonged to Microsoft), the wealth of knowledge on HTML coding has grown considerably. It was hard to be an *expert* at HTML or Scripting because everyone had done it before. That said, there are some truly brilliant people at sites like QuirksMode.

Now I feel that the new direction that uber-coders are going for is *useful* DHTML scripting (also known as JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets and the Document Object Model to manipulate HTML live). By useful, I don't mean a cursor with a trail of stars. I mean things like popup calendars for date selectors, rich text editors, GMail and WYSIWYG page editors with live previews.

DHTML is still hard and mostly poorly documented. Anybody who has made a rich text editor for MSIE knows that it isn't too bad anymore. There is more documentation on how to do it. Definitely not *a lot* but enough that you can find your way through it.

Try this though: Make an iframe window that simulates a regular window. Okay. Now do it so that is supports MSIE, FireFox and Safari. If you want to (eventually) support more than 75% of the market, you have to support FireFox now and I'd throw Safari on the list as it is the default browser (I think) on the Mac.

Some of the toughies are the event handlers for these browsers which are quite different. I've written code to make them both work with one code base but there is virtually no documentation on this. There are dozens of quirks not listed and the only way you can figure 'em out is through trial and error.

Okay, I know I haven't covered all my bases in making this argument, but I think the smarts you will need to be an uber-coder for DHTML just got harder. This is good because there is room for new experts. If you are a great coder, there is a chance to be a brilliant cross-browser DHTML coder. If you are strictly average (nothing wrong with that), your job may have got harder.

Ironically, code re-use on JavaScript seems to be very low.

By the way, if you need evidence that cross-browser DHTML is hard, it even took Google a while to get Firefox compatible with GMail. Think how much cash they've got.

Signing out...