Slashdot Mirror
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.""
In the nine months during which Firefox has "taken the Web by storm", they haven't even tripled their visitors? Is everyone installing it by apt-get/rpm? Starting from such a small base, that tiny multiple would really disappoint me if I were hoping for a real scale-up. Is anyone impressed by these numbers?
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make install -not war
You'll often find this task is accomplished by "web bugs", tiny 1x1 .GIF images that have no purpose other than to go to a third party to indicate the page was viewed, by what IP address, etc. They'll frequently try to give you cookies, too, in order to study browser habits. (I always block these cookies when requested, just to be obstinate.)
John
That little "close" X is mere pixels away from a "visit firefox" button... :)
Seriously I hit it by accident all the time.
vk.
At Network Mirror I'm showing 79.4% Mozilla, 18.9% IE. Since all traffic is Slashdot derived, it's probably a pretty good representative sample of the Slashdot population as a whole.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
The website I work for, a very large, very traditional 'user-facing customer portal' for a telco, now officially supports IE6 and Firefox 1.0. The announcement came last week. A year ago, we couldn't even get them to acknowledge that firefox EXISTED, much less provide full support for it.
And why did it happen? Tons of customer feedback directly on the site, and metrics showing that firefox use was climbing. Rapidly. And here i thought those 'feedback forms' wouldn't actually lead to any change.
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo - H. G. Wells
Actually, that's probably from you middle-clicking and opening new tabs like crazy everywhere you go.
(I ++love++ Firefox, but it should be noted that it's easier for FF users to load multiple sites rapidly [which it's Referrer tag keys])
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
Maybe if Mozilla had better documentation I wouldn't visit it so often, hoping to find documentation to explain things. Firefox does provide local (F1) help but that often sends you to the web - which ups Moz's page hits.
Also, Firefox has all sorts of neat hacking potential which dovetails with increasingly exposed hooks into Google things like Google maps.
Sadly, some basic browser commands and options are poorly documented and advanced information (on hacking) is largely non-existant. Which kinda sucks because some people find it easy to extend Firefox with bookmarklets, extensions, and GreaseMonkey scripts.
For example, a full Firefox contains a DOM (Document Object Model) Inspector which can help in traking down say how a page hid something in a style sheet. However there is no official documentation for this DOMi. Some outside web pages have helped by explaining what some of the buttons mean, but I have yet to see any discussion of "evalute javascript" and I can't seem to get it to work.
I am someone well versed in programming in many languages, but professionally never learned javascript. Yet I have written a few bookmarklets by example (e.g. find some js code examples that do things similar to what you want and imitate them).
I wish I could find a good discussion of javascript "namespaces" and Firefox hacking. My guess is that there is some contium. Bookmarklets only give you access to DOM stuff, GreaseMonkey exposes certain hooks into Firefox, Extensions expose more Firefox hooks, and hacking Firefox lets you do anything.
The plan is that it will actually drive the cost of web development down by forcing IE to get better.
Right now a lot of web developers' time is spent working around IE bugs. A random one of thousands of examples is making a dotted border - a simple, common request. The CSS is "border: 1px dotted blue". Non-IE browsers happily obey. To do this in IE you actually need to make/upload 2px GIFs, and set them to tile in such a way that they look like dotted borders.
If the popularity of standard browsers forces Microsoft to improve IE's standards support, and IE gets things like alpha transparency in graphics and a sane box model, the time/cost saved will outweigh that of having to deal with different event registering models.
In summary, now that there's competition again, web development can actually start to improve once more - it could end up being cheaper even.
- Allen Pike
Altering time, one time at a time.