Slashdot Mirror
Opera: Firefox User Figures 'Inflated'
Anonymous Coward writes "ZDNet
notes, 'The chief executive of Opera Software claimed on Monday that the market share figures for Mozilla Firefox are inflated, due to its support for link prefetching" In addition, "Opera has a better caching mechanism so it doesn't access Web sites as often as other browsers" and "Opera is configured by default to identify itself as Internet Explorer' "
If Opera is identifying itself as IE, isn't IE getting overcounted and Opera undercounted?
What the heck is this guy von Tetzchner smoking? Doesn't he realize yet that nobody cares about the technical details? People (web developers, plugin writers, users) only care about the big numbers. They don't want to think about the results, they only want to know: who is first, and by how much? Is the second place browser big enough to notice?
Opera is nice, but the Opera execs should realize already that they can't sell their browser when their customers can download a perfectly good one for free.
"There's companies that are just so cool that you just can't even deal with it," - Bill Gates, about Google
That would mean that IE's market share figures are inflated too (mod me insightful)!
Aren't all market share numbers hyped?
I bet I have reinstalled Windows 10 times in the past few years, and each time I update IE and download several other software packages over and over again.
And as far as actual web usage, those stats must be all over the place because some sites do a better job of cross browser compatibility than others and other sites, like Slashdot, appeal to a non-IE crowd while still others, like MSN, do not.
So this whole article should really just be a reminder to not believe everything someone else wants you to.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
A ZDNet article indicates the prefetching is for Google searches only. I am not sure this would account for a 9 point spread between browsers.
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
Mozilla on the other hand fires off two requests. Thus doubling its market
You've got to be joking? Yes, sure it is wasteful to send another request when there could be the option to catch and ignore double clicks... but doubling market share? Nobody in their right mind decides marketshare by counting GET requests - even the simplest stats package will count the number of visits rather than number of hits ('visits' is a very vague term, but generally it groups all the hits from the same IP/browser/hour as a single visit)
Homme petit d'homme petit, s'attend, n'avale
Yup.
And Google only supports Mozilla's prefetching for a couple of weeks. Before that, Firefox's market share wasn't significantly lower, was it? Besides, only the raw source code gets prefetched as far as I know. Scripts, images and the like are only executed/loaded when a user actually visits the page. So, when Firefox prefetches a site, it should be visible in the site's logs, but I don't think it could trigger a third-party counter/tracker. Also, Google only prefetches certain sites, not any site.
And that Opera identifies itself as IE is a valid concern, but that's Opera's fault, and nothing that would inflate Firefox's version numbers, just IE's.
If I ran around telling everyone my name is Frank, would it be a suprise to find out that nobody knows my name?/p>
If many major department stores and government buildings had someone at the door asking, "is your name Frank," and then refusing entry to anyone who said "no" and then most newspapers reported that Frank is the most popular name in the country after asking department stores and government agencies who would be at fault?
It's perfectly valid to question the accuracy of browser market share statistics given the fact that it is often technologically advantageous or even necessary to misidentify.
Unfortunately, everyone just misinforms you about everything unless you say your name is either Frank or Steven. So either you are gonna end up believing a bunch of lies...or you just lie to everyone.
Actually, I'm being serious. It's not quite everyone, but there a good portion of websites will give non-working output or refuse to give full functionality if you give them the opera user agent string. If you give them IE or even usually Mozilla, they give complete working output.
Off the top of my head, I know msdn (thinks opera is a bot that wants feeds or something) and gmail (just reverts to basic non-js functionality) do this. Personally, when I use opera, I always just leave it identifying itself as IE or moz since I forget to change it back.
I think a point to Opera is that they aren't so small as everyone thinks, but they ended up in a corner. They can't tell the truth or certain sites won't work (oh noes, opera sucks) or they lie (oh noes, noone uses it!) so they work, which is where they are now.
Nobodys... Opera can render IE pages just fine, but when configured to send an Opera user agent, some sites send malformed pages.
.NET CLR 1.1.4322) .NET CLR 1.1.4322; MSN 6.1; MSNbMSFT; MSNmen-us; MSNc00; v5m)
MSIE UserAgent strings are already full of extra garbage.
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1;
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1;
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98) via Avirt Gateway Server v4.2
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; FunWebProducts; SV1)
You tag the useragent as "Opera" without ruining the MSIE spoofing by simply adding "Opera; " or "OWB; " after the OS string.
It's a stupid issue anyway. Opera Software knows exactly how many users have current licenses and how many users are downloading banners for the adware version. Opera's userbase is simple to track without making any estimations.
Actually Webmasters thinking like you lead to the problem in the first place. Neither webmasters nor the browsers should work around and tweak for specific instances of the other, they should just both use the standard.
Linux is not Windows
Well, perhaps you are only interested in a "browser that doesn't suck", but other people (i.e. me) may be interested in how well a browser supports web standards, whether it is open source, and how many platforms it runs on. This is on top of "does it suck?
No, this is about not sucking. The standards are out there, and do not require comparisons to other browsers. I know browsers are important software, but they still don't justify continuing this idiotic "browser war" nonsense. I'm sick of war, I'm sick of war metaphors, and "silly" was the kindest euphimism I could use to describe the negative reaction I'm having to all the god damned posturing.
I use a web browser that doesn't suck, and it happens to be Firefox, but I will not join your damn crusades.
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
I'll take a +1 insightful please. Thank you.
Preach on!
I conform to standards as best I can when building web pages, surf with Safari on my Mac and Firefox on my work PC... but I would gladly switch to IE without hesitation if Microsoft were to make a browser that does the job better, just as I once dropped Netscape Navigator for IE 5.
I love western civilization in general, but this is the one part of our culture which drives me nuts lately: the completely vicarious "us"-versus-them cheerleading... what I like to call the "sports fan" mentality.
"I usually vote Democrat, so everytime a car-bomb goes off in Iraq, I'm happy because it makes Bush's decision to go to war look worse."
"I'm a protestant, so every time another story about a cover-up of pedophile priests comes out, I'm giddy with laughter over the human tragedy, because it's a huge embarrassment to Catholics."
"I'm a Linux user, so every time Microsoft users are hit with a virus which shuts down entire companies for the day and costs the US economy millions of dollars, I can barely contain my joy."
Fuck all of you! Groups you are "rooting against" doing poorly, or even groups you are "rooting for" doing well, does nothing to make you a better person, nor does it actually make the world a better place. Get some goddamn perspective and stop being so myopic about your little meaningless dogma! You sound just like a little kid arguing with the neighbor kid over who's faster, Superman or The Flash.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
The thought just occurred to me that we could use one problem to fix another here. We want to get webmasters coding for standards-compliant web browsers, right? Problem Number 1 is that they generally don't. Problem Number 2 is that Windows is highly susceptible to malware and viruses. So how about someone just write a virus that changes IE's user agent string to a random pick from Firefox, Opera, Safari, Mozilla or any other browser out there? Webmasters would no longer be able to trust the user agent strings they receive, so they'll have to just code to standards instead.
Then we'll see just how fast Microsoft can get a security update out when their web monopoly is being threatened.