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Firefox Gains on IE Again in June
kurtz_tan writes "Infoworld reported that Firefox increased its market share to 8.71 percent, up from 8 percent in May, while IE's share shrank to 86.56 percent from 87.23 percent. This is according to NetApplications.com. Since the beginning of the year, Firefox has increased its market share every month between 0.5 percent and 1 percent, mostly at the expense of IE. This means Firefox would cross the 10% market share by October."
Is it really news though? I like to see these stats as much as the next guy, but i mean, give me a shout when it hits 25%.
Well, as we can see, this starts with the most tech savvy users switching and continues to less tech savvy users, but by the 10% barrier, will enough people be even tech savvy enough to understand that the Big e isn't the internet? That's my major concern right there. People like that are the ones that keep me up at night, fearing for the future of our society that continues to depend more on technology but has less and less understanding of it.
You get only 8% market share and your main competitors haven't even tried in how many years?
As soon as MS decides to show up to this party, Firefox will follow the likes of Mosaic. It just isn't profitable for MS to play yet -- they are waiting to be "fashionably late."
As a MSFT shareholder I am pleased.
I read in an article the other day that FireFox was so successful because it automatically imported all the user info, settings, etc. from IE. It also speculated that Linux would have to be able to import all of one's Microsoft settings, info, etc. to become successful.
I wonder how important someone's browser settings are to them. Am I wrong in thinking that FireFox is gaining market share just because it is easy to download and install and it has a reputation for not getting viruses?
Anyway, 10% is not exactly a dominant market share. Why are we getting excited?
This means Firefox would cross the 10% market share by October.
What effect do you think the release of IE7 (maybe before October) will have on Firefox market share?
I know the IE haters won't switch. But what about the Firefox users who are using it because it's the latest thing and because of features IE6 doesn't have but IE7 will(tabbed browsing, RSS reader, etc.)?
Firefox has 8% and you call that a clock cleaning?
I don't know how Microsoft can stay in business with Firefox and Apple cleaning their clocks.
there's more than one way to do me.
Since the beginning of the year, Firefox has increased its market share every month between 0.5 percent and 1 percent, mostly at the expense of IE. This means Firefox would cross the 10% market share by October.
No, that doesn't mean anything. If the trend continues then Firefox will cross the 10% threshold, but in order to determine whether that will realistically happen, one has to examine the underlying reasons for the current trend.
What are those factors? My guess would be that home users are continuing to adopt Firefox in favor of IE, and so I think it would be fair to say that it is likely that Firefox's growth will continue.
However, I think Firefox will hit a stumbling block when it comes to the edge of "business workstation" browser territory. Unlike the article predicts, I don't think Firefox will begin to take over, and at that point one could expect the growth trend to slow as the home user region alone becomes saturated (whether that will happen before or after 10%--probably after--is uncertain).
IE is too well integrated into the operating system and works too well within the Windows environment for it to be displaced. When a company admin wants to lock down users to limited access so that they spend their time working and not surfing the Internet, why install Firefox?
At my office the Internet access is controlled by Websense. I use a limited number of applications (Outlook and proprietary software) in order to do my job. There is no need to upgrade/replace IE with Firefox because I don't visit unsafe sites, I don't need a lower impact browser, and I don't need Firefox's features. To install another browser (trust me, I would love to get Opera on there myself) would, in all aspects, unneeded.
It's going to take a lot more than the current advantages of Firefox for the browser to supplant IE in the workplace, and there's no telling where IE7 will move the standards (hah!) bar. In a business environment, there's a huge advantage given to that whole integrated-browser-into-the-OS thing.
The only issue here is if the momentum will keep going strong, or will they lose focus or face obstacles? One of their main advantages is security, but with popularity comes more people trying to penetrate security.
Voice your opinion!
Do the statistics allow for overlap; i.e.people who use multiple browsers? I realize that may be a small percentage, but if the published numbers are going to be to the second decimal point, it's got to weigh in there somewhere.
Those of us who use three (or more), either in regular use or for the purposes of testing - and just get accustomed to using multiples - should factor somewhere.
In addition to ff, the moz suite, epiphany, galeon, kmelon. Probably wouldn't add that much to the total as a couple of those are X only but still, would be interesting.
And I think that's the point of what firefox brings to the table. Some people like to say IE sucks FF rulez!!!
But the great thing about ff is that as it gains marketshare, since it adheres to standards, in the end it won't matter what browser you use as long as it conforms to the standard.
So in the end it won't matter if you use, konqueror, safari, opera, ff, etc. You know, kind of how it was meant to be.
That's just browsers hitting the W3Schools web site, which, as they say right at the top of your link, is a "special" website. It is certainly not representative of the entire Internet.
Brand loyalty is for morons, but this is about more than just a brand. This is about open vs closed source, free vs not free. If Microsoft wants to make IE open source, I will actually consider their browser. As long as it stays closed, it has to meet a much higher "apparent" standard of quality & security than Firefox does in order to get me interested in switching. While IE is closed, I worry about what security bugs haven't been found yet, and whether nor not MS will get to them in time. At least with Firefox I know two things -- first, the bugs are likely to be found more quickly, and second, it's beyond doubt that the bugs that are found are fixed much, much faster.
Whenever I see Opera cheerleaders, I have to wonder if they've ever done any web development. Opera's ECMAScript is attrocious compared to Firefox's. If Opera would spend more time on following the standards and less time on stupid eyecandy like making buttons animate when you mouseover, it might actually deserve the l337 reputation it has.
Its a pity firefox is such an usuable POS on a slower computer. Its very much IO bound, even to memory: try running on an "old" pentium 2 with 66 mhz ram. It doesnt scale well at all; start adding tabs and it goes slower and slower, converging very rapidly on unsuable.
On the other hand, both IE and opera remain respectably speedy.
Firefox was supposed to be a cut down slimmed up version of mozilla. Instead I've found ti to have little configurability (wihtou a horde of plugins), to be inconsiderately slow, and worst off to have hideous scalability problems. I'm one of those jerks web developers hate: I install netscape 4.7 on new computers. Why? Because in my experience it works better. Firefox is bloat.
I seriously hope open source has something better up their sleeves for those of us who dont feel web browsing requires 1 Ghz+ and 512 MB ram.
Myren
"But still, word."
Errr, what are you trying to say?
Ruby is a pretty much insignificant language and only popular with a certain marginal group, so I would expect these kinds of stats.