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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."
80 million I'm assuming a composite...
Arash Partow
Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
As opposed to Camino, Opera, Safari, lynx, or Shiira?
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
And IBM is encouraging in-house employees to use Firefox.
There are still several "business" websites such as financial services, B2B and corporate intranets that rely on ActiveX and IE.
While Firefox's growth may be slowing, it is still growing -- just not as fast. When the IE-only sites start to get more complaints about usability from their customers, then you will start to see a steady stream of corporate support for Firefox.
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
According to this article on silicon.com, Firefox is still growing! As of April 29th, Firefox had captured 6.8 percent of the browser market and IE slipped to 88.9 percent market share. Break out the champagne, folks!
Uh yeah, nice article. Glass half empty...
Don't forget about "sensitive dependence upon initial conditions", and inherant unpredictability.
Sorry - that's FUD. Mozilla knew the vulnerability long back but made the Bugzilla page secret. They released a fix a week after widespread hue and cry. This is not too dissimilair from Microsoft breaking its "patch Tuesday" policy for a critical fix.
If you look at last week's security advisory, it was published by Secunia, the same company that's published various IE security holes in the past.
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
Or it could mean that firefox's growth just isn't exponential, 'cause that would be pretty hard to keep up for very long...
There are 11 types of people in the world: those who can count in binary, and those who can't.
It's funny, I read a web book ('The Unusually Useful Web Book') that said precisely that. Traffic trends on the whole web go down during summer, possibly due to people going outside. It also said that traffic trends go up in January after Xmas (maybe people getting their nwe computers).
People using OS X are usually using Safari, for a good reason. It is the *only* browser taking advantage of OS X technology such as ATSUI. A few percent still use the bundled IE, and yet a few percent use a Gecko browser.
Although the Gecko browsers (pick your choice) perform excellent on OS X, Safari is still a bit better in most regards, especially in rendering and standards compliance (Acid test passed).
And there's a difference between arbitrary coding standards, and expecting code to be intuitive. A function's behavior should at the very least not be inconsistent with what an educated reader would expect from looking at the signature. That sort of behavior is asking for someone to use the function in something and then have to deal with figuring out why their list got reodered (or worse, why what they thought were two lists are actually the same and are now causing interactions between disparate pieces of code).
Wouldn't it be better or augment the pure download numbers if they also ran some statistics over the 'Check for available updates' requests?
Per default this setting is turned on and it is known at which intervals Firefox checks for new updates, thus it should be possible to calculate a ballpark figure on how many people are actually USING Firefox.
Dyslectics of the world, untie!
I had to download Firefox three times today because the first two times the files were 56K and corrupted. After uninstalling the old version (no automatic upgrade will help push up the download count) I dumped the old log and config files and fired up InCtrl5 for the install. I chose just the browser option. I was politely asked if I wanted extra shortcuts - then after I declined they were created anyway. I was given the option of using the Firefox 'start' page as my home page - once again I declined to no avail. The installer kindly put a 'View in Firefox' button on my IE toolbar, no notice required. None of those things are a big deal, and obviously less intrusive than many big name installations (what the hell is with Adobe?). Still, for what's billed as the 'alternative' browser it sure resembles the 'same old, same old'.
Before I get told to "rot in hell" I want to point out that I cut my teeth on Navigator and used it exclusively until the REAL evil empire (AOL) got hold of it. After that it went downhill fast. Then I went to Opera, which in all ways was superior to IE. I PAID for Opera, partly because I was in an early stage of learning to defang Windows and would have slapped Bill Gates if I could have got a hold of him. I was naive and no longer feel that way, to keep the record straight. I also bought Red Hat Linux - I still have the box and all - but frankly, I'm a laptop kind of guy, and Linux in those days was a far cry from the functional, working option it is now. I was disappointed with Opera 7 and tried everything from K-Meleon to Lynx. I finally found MyIE2 which is now Maxthon. Maxthon is an IE based shell that features tabs, enhanced security, and built in RSS as well as ad, pop-up, and active-x filters. It also has built in mouse gestures, sidebars, and supports skins and plug-ins. It has a huge array of customization options, runs fast and lean, and there's an active user community. It has been downloaded just under 26 Million times. I tried Firefox, but I like Maxthon better. It even has an experimental mode that runs the gecko engine.
The point of all that is that I don't have a hidden agenda or receive a damn thing from MS. I just believe that any real long-lasting answers to the problems facing the internet and IT in general can only be resolved in positive ways if they are based on the best estimate of the truth possible. Every sincere person's viewpoint adds value to our shared understanding. We live in a complex world without clear boundaries between good and bad. Most things are are somewhere in the middle, with good and bad characteristics dependent largely on the observer's point of view. Anything less than an open minded evaluation of the truth is a disservice to ourselves, our community, and our future. Fud is fud, no matter the source. Don't let ANYONE use your beliefs to cloud your vision. If it comes out of their mouths and it sounds like bull shit, it probably is.
billy - no fud here...please read the warning at page bottom
You know about Firefox. I know about firefox. But Joe User might not know about it/remember it. And we can't tell everyone about it now, can we?
AFAIK, its growth was pretty much tied to the full-page ad in the NYT. If growth is slowing, they need to pump out some TV commercials, start advertising on google, and keep up the print campaign.
Non-technical people tend to have a very short attention span on things like this. They just need to be reminded that it's out there.
There are 01 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and me.