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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.
All the geeks on planet earth are now using Firefox.
That was just warmer days coming and more people going outside.
...Firefox will reach the 80.592 million mark. Then we have a long wait until the 94.68715 million mark.
What's with the arbitrary "marks"? 80 million? What about 75 million? That's 3/4 of 100 million which is much nicer than saying 4/5 of 100 million. Better yet, what about 100 million being the next "mark"? That's 7/7 of 100 million.
It seemed like the publication of those security flaws came from Mozilla itself... and a fix was out in about a week.
Who tells us about IE flaws and how long does it take for them to get fixed?
Simple Machines in Higher Dimensions
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...
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.
Um... I don't think that's it. While the security flaws might be causing some to think twice, the real issue is market saturation. There does not exist a desktop computer sold in the last 10 years that didn't come with a web browser. They are essentially entering a 100% saturated market. Nonetheless, I think their accomplishments are stunning.
50ish? whenever I fix a spyware infested machine, first thing added is SP2, second is firefox
Douglas P. Price
Don't forget about "sensitive dependence upon initial conditions", and inherant unpredictability.
Could it be that Firefox users are blocking marketing firm WebSideStory's tracking images? These guys are just as evil as DoubleClick in assembling a massive database of information on web users' browsing history. Wouldn't ignorant IE users be more likely to allow WebSideStory to track them?
That's funny. The first thing I install is Linux.
Oh I'll burn for that.
Moof.
So, the rate of growth of the number of Firefox users is slowing, or for you calculus geeks out there, the second time derivative of the number of Firefox users is presently negative.
The good news is, the *third* derivative is positive, which means that the change rate of the growth rate is increasing. Soon enough, the growth rate will even out and eventually start increasing again!
Oh, and don't even get me started about the 5th derivative...
"In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user. You've got your own newsgroup, alt.total.loser." -Weird Al
Personally I install it on any friends or familys computers that require my support. Its part of the price for free tech support.
If I find they have been using IE they get a 1 strike & they're out. If I find they have been using it a second time.
"Sorry, my time is more important to me & I prefer not to keep fixing the same ol' same ol'"
Go Away! Not for Sale
that and I download it about 1000 times a day for no good reason except to fudge with the numbers.
If you have to look at the second derivative before you start finding bad news, maybe the news isn't really all that bad
Simple version: if you used the Firefox upgrade mechanism, they don't.
IIRC, it's slightly more complicated than that. Even so, the number is incredibly hard to guess: lots of people download more than once, and lots of people (think office rollouts or the like) download only once fore many machines. It's a guesstimate, and even if it were a good guesstimate it still is pretty meaningless, since it doesn't take into account how much people actually use the browser.
One of the people on http://planet.mozilla.org/ had a good post on this recently (that I can't find right now), what I've said here is pretty much a ripoff of my memory of what they said.
There are 11 types of people in the world: those who can count in binary, and those who can't.
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.
For once, I'd like to actually see some empirical evidence.
Every mega-corporation hires it's own sub/pseudo company to do an "audit" of the market saturation/absorbtion rate.
Much like politics, it's not newsworthy to report that candidate X has lost +/-4 points. Let's see what browser the people choose.
Unlike the US election, I'm sure that the people will make the right decision (when it affects them directly - [ex. No Popups, No Spyware, No viruses, etc.]).
People may be stupid and they should be guided, but they should never be abused or manipulated.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
People that say the "taskbar is my tabs" make me laugh.
Seriously... try some tabbed browsing... even if you just buy an addon for IE... you should really try it.
Using the taskbar makes a mess when you are doing more than just browsing the web. All of your websites get mixed in with your regular programs. Tabbed browsing keeps everything nice a neat. You can also browse a lot faster (Run down slashdot middle clicking on the interesting links then just close off tabs as you read them... much better than click a link... read.... click back... click a link... read).
Just try it already.
Friedmud
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Using IE instead of Firefox over security concerns is like keeping your eyes closed when hooking up with a drugged up bag of herpes prostitute.
Just stick with Firefox. It's like using a rubber, which at least is 90+% effective at keeping out the herpes.
Let's see YOUR top executive swim across the Atlantic! Oh, wait...
I was hoping that the growth rate would keep on growing forever...
Lasers Controlled Games!
The big picture is that people are realizing there are viable alternatives to Microsoft products, and they are using those alternatives. For a long time it was essentially IE reigning supreme, and now there are a variety of alternatives, with Firefox leading the pack and picking up new users by the millions.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
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).
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.
Oh, and while I'm at it, the following will show you the relative popularity and trend of mozilla.org (the link/URL/site) that, I imagine, is directly related to the popularity of Mozilla/Firefox (as well as Simpy):
t p://www.mozilla.org/
http://www.simpy.com/simpy/LinkHistory.do?href=ht
Try plugging in Microsoft's URL. It's not that popular.
Simpy
Yea I'll troll: if MSIE didn't have all those exploits FF would have browser share equal to netscape today.
Bugs which annoy me (YMMV):
- After some browsing FF windows may stop redrawing (including browse buttons)- you need to resize/scroll down or restart windoze. All other progs work just fine.
- Java don't work here on my FF. Works in msie, Opera and standalone. Maybe I just have too many different java installs. No biggie but occasionally I just have to fire msie (I noticed almost everyone using FF *HAS TO* go msie for some sites and it is not only for activex stuff)
- http authentication is a mess - FF don't understand there can be more then one authentication within one url (it just seems to remember one set of user/pass per url)
- FF grabs wrong icons for sites occasionally.
- worst bug I stumbled upon twice: if you happen to hard-reset a comp with FF open you may lose all your bookmarks.
- FF wants to save everything in same directory. How about remembering where I last saved pics, html or zip/tar files? How about title of document becoming saved file name? msie is a bit better about that.
There are some nice features, sure. Personally I don't care about tab browsing. I love being able to search within wikipedia or IMDB. I love developer plugin and DOM inspector. But for today FF is still ridden with bugs annoying the shit out of me.And my point is? You can't expect everyone to love FF as it is. And you can expect (fear?) MS will learn a lesson and top FF. Let's be more humble and critic about FF and less in love with its success, please. Remember, FF success lies more in msie bugs then in FF greatness.
I very much dislike it when a company engages in phony accounting. Can you imagine if Microsoft claimed each patch download as a new sale of Windows? Likewise, I dislike it when people misrepresent facts.
Hitting 80 million downloads is not as impressive as it sounds when a lot of those downloads are because FF does not have a patch infrastructure in place.
Please try not to misrepresent. Yes it's true, FF may be downloaded 80 million times, but a certain percentage of those downloads are users upgrading a minor revision, which is effectively downloading a patch.
The Mozilla foundation is not (or should not be) interested in maximizing the number of downloads of the software, but maximizing the number of happy users of their software. That's how they will accomplish their mission: "The mission of the Mozilla project is to preserve choice and innovation on the Internet." ref: http://www.mozilla.org/about/
Saying the recent security flaws in Firefox is causing people to stay with IE is like saying people would rather drive a Ford Pinto because they realized that BMWs aren't completely safe. No one with an ounce of intelligence said Firefox is completely safe. The advantage to Firefox and OSS in general is the process. There's a great deal more transparency. If Firefox has a bug, at least I would know about it and can take actions on my own initiative to mitigate it. With non-OSS software, however, I'm at the mercy of the people who wrote the software.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
Firefox is just coming off of a growth spurt.
Most things do not grow evenly through their whole life. Firefox grew explosivly in part due to the Wall Street Journal ad and a lot analysts pushing the security benefits. Now that there's been an equal amount of noise about the near-trivial exploit, people are getting cold feet.
I mean, some of the people who were considering switching are now asking about the exploit. One that did switch is asking how hard it is to switch back.
I say that it's a theoritical exploit that nobody has actually used to compromise a computer. If they're still listening, I add a joke contrasting IE's real world exploits. The news has hurt adoption rates of Firefox, but that's just because it's bad news, not because it's real.
People want to hear "Firefox is a pancea for all your ills", not "Every piece of software can have problems". Expect Firefox growth to pick up again after people don't remember this recent bug, and expect a few people to remember this bug years from today.
----
Evil will always win because good is dumb. -- Spaceballs.
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.
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.
They could have said "reaches saturation point", but that doesn't make a sellable/clickable headline.
Let's not forget that is
a) 80 million, only assisted with a single ad and word of mouth
b) 80 million, DESPITE a pre-installed, um, "alternative"
c) 80 million that saw those features first that may or may not make it into IE7. Note that IE had been going stale for lack of competition - natural consequence of the MS approach to, um, "innovation".
d) 80 million that are not exposed to the bad and insecure excuse for a coding platform that is ActiveX.
e) 80 million that don't care on which platform they browse, which together with OpenOffice represents a good 90% of the end user community.
Now, the last one is where the threat to MS resides. Usability is very rapidly dissappearing as a distinguishing factor.
Insert
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.
..'!! 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.
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
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.
Gentoo Linux - Wouldn't have it any other way. And fuck beta.
I pushed out Firefox at work (university). It on all the machines. I didn't make it manditory, though it did cross my mind.
Well lately, I am reconsidering. At this point I've deicded Firefox stays on all images, and I'll recommend people use it, but I'm not going to push it any harder.
Why?
Well the honeymoon is now over in regards to security. I know as well as anyone that OSS doesn't magically mean secure. Many programmers have an arrogance about them that they think all security bugs are perfectly obvious and if only THEY looked at the code they could get rid of them. No, if they were obvious, probably wouldn't be there in the first place. So you can have a ton of eyes, doesn't mean you are bug free.
Initally the low usage was enough to make it worth while. No one was tarrgeting it so who cares? Well now it's getting popular, and the bugs are rolling in. It's not a bad record at this point, but it's enough I want to see how it develops. It's also an increased concern since Firefox won't patch itself. Unfortunately we have no central patch system and it doesn't look like we'll be given money to get one any time soon. The only way things get patched is if they do it themselves, if we do it manually, or if we reghost the system.
So since Windows knows how to update itself, and thus IE gets updated as well, the only concern is that the bugs are patched before they can be exploited. With Firefox we need to worry that they are patched with enough time for us to get the patch out before there's exploits going around.
This is a real concern, and probably much larger than IE only sites. I haven't encountered one of those in ages, and I use Firefox as my exclusive browser at home and work. As of now the only pages it seems to have problems on are ones with embedded video and that's a FF problem, not a design one.
The security issue though, that's a concern. If FF doesn't learn to autopatch and if we start seeing exploits in the wild beofre or a short time after a patch, I'll probably have to pull it and go with Opera instead (our instution just secured a site license for Opera) or perhaps back to IE.
The security isn't much worry to geeks for personal systems, that can patch their own shit with minimal fuss, but it's worrysome to instutions where having to manual deal with a patch to 3rd party software can be a pain.
When assume that download counter at spreadfirefox.com counts updates. Well, it doesn't.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
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!
Since the majority desktop OS is Windows and most computer users don't care which browser to use as long as their browser work (by that I mean, able to browse webpages with a few occassional spyware distractions and virus infection), what else besides IE do you expect them to use?
They don't care if their browser pass the Acid2 or not.
Even if Mozilla pumps out a kitchen-sink Firefox tomorrow, Microsoft will release the same thing the day after. What else do you think MS is releasing IE7 as an independent release before Longhorn?
However, once Linux gains ground on desktop computing (that remains to be seen, however), I think Firefox usage will grow tremendously.
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.
Trivialize any security bug in OSS as no big deal and "theoretical". Call any MS bug horrible and say "OMG everyone should switch".
Doesn't anyone else find this hilarious?
No, you're the only one.
Most every MS bug has a real-life gaping security hole, and most of the time the code to exploit it is rolling through the 0-day exploit sites in no time.
So.. no, no one else finds it hilarious.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
Use of the word 'meh' instantly identifies you as annoying, and to be ignored.
It is on the level of "talk to the hand" or "what-ev-er."
Please, in the interest of not annoying me, stop.