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.""
But that's just me clicking reload a lot.
Does this take into account of the auto software update checks?
And how does NetRatings know the gender of the visitors? Maybe if a visitor is quick and direct, it's a male; If a visitor is browsing around few sections back and forward, it's a female?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
This article is about visits to mozilla's website, not people using mozilla browser.
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?
--
make install -not war
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.
So put that in your pipe and grep it
I didn't realize my browser reported whether I was male or female as part of the browser Id string!
well most men I know started using firefox because it cured that little popup issue they had while surfing for porn. Most women I know don't complain anywhere near as much about popups and I've always assumed they don't hunt for porn as much.
I know thats why I switched and i wouldn't be shocked if I'm not the only one.
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
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
"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."
The study also reported that nearly 71% of the men were visiting sites promising 100% women.
If you use Konqueror and you're bothered by servers tracking your gender, it's quick and painless to disable this reporting. Just click on:
...and in the "Default Identification" panel, uncheck the box labeled "Add gender information".
Settings -> Configure Konqueror -> Browser Identification
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
Why is the sex of a computer user important? Is the next firefox update give a choice of pink or blue coloring?
Please, please, please. No more "Firefox is gaining ground" stories until we have some solid numbers, not some contorted gee-whiz stats.
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
You can visit the Nielsen-NetRatings site and bone up a bit, and if you want, grab a a PDF of their corporate brochure which mentions that their techniques include the usual image tag bugs, but also techniques just like they use when they do TV ratings: interviews with "recall" information, journals, and other (for us web folks) seemingly unlikely approaches. It's all about doing sanity checking against traditional (and easily polluted) web stats. Big companies like to have their facts audited and tested by alternate methods, and Nielsen's been doing it for a long time with other hard-to-measure stuff.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Um, no. Neilson bought RedSheriff last year. RedSheriff is a web analytics and data collection service that many sites pay for. The site would drop a piece of code onto their pages, including some Javascript, Java applet and a 1x1 gif.
From there the site owners would have access to an online reporting tool that is quite good.
AFAIK, RedSheriff didn't share or use their customers' site traffic logs for any purpose other than to report back to the site whose logs they were. Nielson may have re-jigged their privacy policy to allow it.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
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...
Sunny
Be my Friend
It looks like there's a lot of confusion about the gender data gathered, mostly along the lines of "How'd they do that?"
o n= ps
I know it sounds crazy, but I went ahead and visited the the Nielsen site and read up on their strategy. I realize this goes against the techie tradition of never RTFM, but that's a risk I was willing to take.
Turns out they use a "holistic" approach to their data gathering. Everything from "server side blabbity-blah blah blah" to conducting surveys, hiring people to browse, and tracking ad clicks.
I'm guessing that the gender comes from the surveys, but I don't want to upset anybody who might be really excited about a new gender-aware version of HTTP.
If you want to read up on this stuff yourself, you can check out some info here:
http://www.nielsennetratings.com/mktg.jsp?secti
Click on a few products to see the range of apps/services offered. You'll see where all this data comes from.
- Rory [Microsoft Employee] | Free dirt: neopoleon.com
12 months ago, IE accounted for a steady 94% of hits. Gecko-based browsers (Netscape 6+, Mozilla, Firefox) accounted for 3%. Netscape 4 had around 1.5% of the hits, Safari just under 1%, Opera about 0.5%, and Konqueror 0.1%.
Firefox started registering in my logs around July, when the Gecko share jumped to 4.3%, rising steadily to 5.7% in October. In December Gecko jumped up to 7%, and is currently around 8.2% (March-April). Firefox now represents about 80% of Gecko-based browsers. The number of non-Firefox Gecko hits (ie. Netscape 6+, etc) has remained more-or-less steady.
IE's decline matches Firefox's rise - by October, it was down to 92%. IE now rates around 87% of hits on our site.
Safari has increased to about 2.5%. Netscape 4 has (finally) declined to virtual insignificance. Sadly, Konqueror has also declined steadily, maybe 0.03% in a good month (looks like a lot of Konqueror users have switched to Firefox too).
These stats come from an Australian state government website that receives about 3 million hits per month. The site is not technology-oriented, and about half of the hits come from overseas, so I believe that this is a reasonably good sample of browser use.
My ex-girlfriend was a 1337 hax0r... or at least she thought she was. Basically her 1337ness boiled down to having a few 'hacking tools' (nukers and the like) lying around in a folder on her Windows desktop, all (or almost all) of which were clearly just trojans. She had Norton AntiVirus installed, and it did it's valiant best to warn her that her 1337 hax0ring 't00lz' were doing nothing but fucking up her own box, but to no avail. There was no telling this girl that she wasn't a 1337 hax0r. A conversation to try to explain the concept of trojans to her went, as far as I can recall, something like this...
Me: You know those programs there are trojans, don't you?
Her: No hun, they're my little proggies... and anyway, I've got antivirus, so can't damage my machine anyway!
Me: You have antivirus? Surely that'd stop them running - how come you can still run them?
Her: Oh, when I run them now I get a red box come up that tells me it's a dangerous program or whatever, but it has a 'Run Anyway' option so it's OK.
Me: Umm.. you realise that choosing 'Run Anyway'... lets it do all the nasty stuff it was trying to do before the AntiVirus stopped it, don't you?
Her: Yeah, but it's OK, cos it's AntiVirus!
Me: Have you ever *run* a scan on it?
Her: Yeah, but it deleted them all, and I had to download them all again! Then the boxes came back!
Me: Because they're trying to tell you that they're fucking TROJANS!
Her: But it's OK, I've got AntiVirus!
Me: THAT'S WHAT THE FUCKING RED BOXES ARE! AND YOU'RE TELLING IT IT'S OK TO RUN THEM!
This went on for a good 20 minutes, went nowhere, and in the end I just went into the configuration and 'turned the red boxes off'. She was happy with that.
Her computer is fucked. She still thinks she's a 1337 hax0r.
It's cute now I'm not the one that has to clean it up.
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
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.