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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.
...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.
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.
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
If you have to look at the second derivative before you start finding bad news, maybe the news isn't really all that bad
Outside? What's that? Oh, yes, the unhappy place where I can't program. Why would anyone want to go there?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.