Firefox Growth Slowing?

ninja_assault_kitten writes "Silicon.com has an interesting article on the apparently slowing growth of Firefox. To quote the article, 'The slackening of Firefox's growth could mean that the browser has converted a substantial proportion of its natural constituency, thought to be early adopters and the technically savvy. It could also show that the browser's widely publicised security flaws have begun to undermine the foundation's argument that people should switch from IE to be safer.' One thing's for sure, with the release of 1.0.3 and now 1.0.4 we can probably expect to breach the 80 million download mark shortly."

Comments

Re:Translation to layman's term-

[Brandybuck]

Except for those using Safari, Konqueror, Opera, OmniWeb, Netscape, Mozilla, several dozen gecko-based browsers that are indistinguishable from each other, emacs in web mode, xemacs in web mode, lynx, links, other text mode browser, etc, etc.

Article sponsored by Microsoft?

[otisg]

I think that's completely made up.
To see some Alexa graphs for Firefox, Mozilla, Microsoft, etc. see what I posted earlier today:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=149252&cid=125 13459

Over on http://simpy.com/ I see this:

Netscape/Mozilla 29971 (36.3%)
Unknown 24985 (30.3%)
Explorer 22249 (26.9%)
Safari 2441 (3.0%)
Opera 1560 (1.9%)

Opera CEO's cross-Atlantic swimming trick didn't help the browser's market share. Safari appears stagnant. Mozilla % keeps growing slowly.

apathy

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm apathectic about firefox.
IE works, both have holes and the taskbar is my 'tabs'
The only thing that nearly made me switch was mouse gestures. But then I found strokeit http://www.tcbmi.com/strokeit/

So here's a geek with ie instead of ff.

Re:How many unique downloads?

[VortexMK]

Some companies downloads just one copy of Firefox and then everyone in the company installs that one copy... at least my company (30+ people) does it to save bandwidth. I bet that that many other companies use the same practice.

Who needs Firefox?

[liangzai]

If every person reading Slashdot and having a web site made their respective sites compliant with the standards (and thereby with Gecko/KDE browsers) and completely ignored IE, Firefox growth would really explode. It is a common mistake thinking that the mega portals drive the development in the market; it is actually the many many less important sites combined that make a difference.

But even Slashdot people (and other tech savvy people) are so conservative as to still respecting the impact of IE, and since even their web sites generally don't require Gecko/KDE, there's no reason for the more clueless masses to switch. Extensions for spoofing and such do not appeal to the non-savvy people.

It is that simple. We have these great new cars (the Fox, Safari, Mozilla, etc.), but the roads need to be rebuilt to allow these cars to utilize their full power.

Re:Who needs Firefox?

[emurphy42]

Many web sites generally don't require Gecko/KDE, not because the authors have IE in mind, but because the authors don't bother with more than simple years-old things that pretty much any browser (IE included) renders just fine.

Re:Widely Publicized?

[GarfBond]

It was actually originally reported to the Mozilla Foundation as a critical security bug (bug 292691, still closed access since May 2), and was actively being worked on with the original bug reporter under wraps before someone managed to leak it without anyone's permission, at which point FrSirt (or whatever their name is) and Secunia repackaged it as their own security advisory.

True credit belongs to Paul from Greyhats Security Group and Michael Krax (and in the spirit of this post, I'm going to give credit to mozillazine for originally posting the summary I'm writing this off of).

I am still trying to gather all the details as to how my research was leaked, but recent conversations are leading me to believe that it was a misplacement of trust, not a server compromise. However, I do not want to jump to conclusions too quickly, as this will only lead to more problems. That's all I will say about that subject, as I don't want to offend anybody.

Re:Firefox extensions broke on my Powerbook

[yourexhalekiss]

I dunno if this'll help... but I had a similar problem running as user in Suse 9.3.

Firefox came pre-installed with the distribution, and I couldn't add new search engines whatsoever. Then, I figured out that it was installed as root, and I had to add them as root for everything to show up in my user profile.

Stats from my site

[mjtg]

Here are some stats from a site that I help maintain. It is 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 they're probably a reasonably good sample of browser use.

Here are some running percentages for IE and Firefox over the past year:

2004-05: IE 94.1%, Firefox 0.6%
2004-06: IE 94.0%, Firefox 0.9%
2004-07: IE 93.1%, Firefox 1.3%
2004-08: IE 93.1%, Firefox 1.8%
2004-09: IE 92.6%, Firefox 2.0%
2004-10: IE 92.5%, Firefox 2.5%
2004-11: IE 91.9%, Firefox 3.1%
2004-12: IE 89.3%, Firefox 4.5%
2005-01: IE 88.0%, Firefox 5.6%
2005-02: IE 87.9%, Firefox 5.7%
2005-03: IE 88.0%, Firefox 5.9%
2005-04: IE 87.3%, Firefox 6.2%
2005-05 (first 12 days): IE 88.8%, Firefox 5.9%

The big jump towards Firefox occured late last year with the Mozilla Foundation's marketing blitz. Since then, there does indeed appear to be a slowing up in migration towards Firefox. This month's stats so far actually show a reversal.

Re:How many unique downloads?

[outsider007]

Just wait till Safari causes your HFS+ partition to crash and burn... you'll be a Firefox on mac convert as well.

More likely a camino convert. Firefox is buggy as hell on os x

Silver bullet?

[DarkMorph]

Okay when I saw the /. entry, I knew I had to say what I got here. The announcement of a security flaw in Firefox is the cause of the decelerating growth? This is insane; immediately I think that everyone assumed that Firefox is totally safe. Gah! It's not a silver bullet! It's good but it can't be perfect. Nothing is! Oh, so Firefox has one problem which will be fixed pretty quickly like most of the OSS world, but people will go and hide behind IE again since they think that the reports are false.

Ugh, how long does it take for IE patches to come out, if ever??? Only if there's a widely-spreading virus or trojan exploiting it, then you get a patch miraculously within a day or two. Otherwise they just wipe your complaining away like a speck of dust. On top of that I bet IE has a lot more problems to worry about than Firefox could ever have. I know it's possible for IE to wipe out files on the hard disk; I doubt Firefox could do it unless there is some sort of ported ActiveX support forcefully ported to Firefox.

Since I mentioned MS wiping you off like dust, I say that because way back when I submitted a report about the Up button not working when IE was in FTP mode. The Up button was calling the same routine that Back did. I tested it by going down a few directories and dumping the entire history cache. Up did not work as Back did not. I knew that was proof that Up didn't work right because you don't need a history to `cd ..'!! Every e-mail I got back from their "support" was garbage; all about searching their "Knowledge Base" (which lacked any knowledge about this by the way) and some FAQ URLs. Screw 'em. Let IE burn, it's garbage ever since it's been forced down Windows's throat.

By the way, I remember the IE4 alpha PNG on the feature list. I was shocked to see it again for IE7. Took long enough! but wait we don't know if they'll actually do it this time.

Re:How many unique downloads?

[John Bokma]

The number of installs is unknown of course. Some people download for every computer they own, some download the same version twice. Some burn it on CD and install it on 200+ machines. Some upload it over MSN, etc, etc.

Re:How many unique downloads?

[Trillan]

Downloads initiated through update don't count.