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Firefox Share Slipped in July for the First Time
prostoalex writes "Between June and July of this year, Firefox lost 0.64% of the users, while Microsoft IE gained the same amount, leaving other browsers at their usual zero point something share. Could recent security problems and lack of stability, reported by some users, lead to the decline of the browser that just passed 80 million downloads?" I think the other thing to remember is that while ~8% seems a lot, there's a still a huge amount of ground to cover -- and a number change like this is statistical noise. I should point out that my issue with noise isn't the absolute numbers; it's the somewhat inadequate measurements tools for this.
Mod parent down Is there any proof of this? Windows Update doesn't touch your browser settings usually. And if this had happened, there would have been more than a few reports of this. Please substantiate rather than spewing FUD.
Sheesh, you don't even have to RTFA, just read the /. summary correctly. Firefox didn't lose 8%. It lost 0.64%. It went from 8.71% to 8.07%.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
You can't gain all the time. Market share is a concept that is more akin to a rollercoaster than a straight upward or downward sloping line.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
Understand the fucking blurb at least before you comment. It's 0.64% loss, at 8% total.
One was a Win2k user - the security updates to IE6 changed his default settings. When he had to launch IE6 to access a bank site, IE6 became his default browser again, without prompting, and his shortcuts all changed to the little E.
I reproduced this effect on a test system.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
I have a WinXP machine with Firefox set as the default browser - and I didn't see any such effect. I have friends who use Firefox on Win2k and no one has reported such a problem to me yet.
Firefox doesn't seem so gret anymore now that many sites are using flash to display popups. However this can be fixed easily.
http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2005 /8/13/957, which points to the statistics from http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/08/12/HNfirefo xloses_1.html
Their view was that sampling errors were not discussed, and this affects the reliability of the numbers.
I must admit it's all my fault: I've been viewing Flash pages in IE because I haven't installed a Flash player to MoFo's Deer Park Alpha 2.
As I included in the version of this I submitted, this isn't the only study reporting a downturn.
a sp
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.
That study shows not only a one-month loss, but a 3-month downtrend for the first time ever. For the first time going all the way back to 2002 even. And the actual Mozilla browser is showing the same downtrend as well.
It may be backlash for the security promises Firefox couldn't meet. It may be that its shinyness has worn off. It may be people are just sick of the thing.
It's curious though and should probably concern the Firefox/Mozilla camp. When you're losing market share to a competitor that hasn't updated in recent memory, there's a definite problem...
RTFA yourself, Firefox did lose 8% of its market share. If, for example, it had a 50% market share in July and then it had a 25% share in August it would have lost 50% of it's market share while still holding a 25% share overall.
Your mind looks a little cramped. Why don't you stretch it a little?
Yes, I've been running into stability issues myself as I get more used to it. Under win32, highlighting text is outright dangerous, acrobat files are still risky, and occaisionally it seems to page itself out of existence - that is, I switch to another program, then go back to firefox, and wait several minutes before I see a page again... I think it doesn't handle having too many tabs well.
Indeed. Except, the article isn't about what broswer users have or have not downloaded/installed, but what browsers are accessing some 40,000 sites monitored by NetApplications.
2 problems.
1: superlong page, I highlight some text, accidentally scroll down to bottom of page. System slows to a crawl while it highlights all that.
2: sometimes, inexplicably, highlighted text doesn't unhighlight. It just gets suck that way. If I highlight it again, then part of the stuck highlighting goes away.
Another difficulty with Firefox is CPU usage. When Firefox bugs occur, sometimes Firefox CPU use climbs to 10% and even to 98%, even with no pages loading. Then ALL operations on that computer are slow, verrrrrry slow.
I should say that I use Firefox on Linux, Macintosh, and Windows and, despite its problems, it's my preferred browser, mostly because of the plug-ins and because it works the same on all platforms.
But I have to say, while it's better than the other browsers, it's not that good of a browser either. It's still far more bloated and slow than a browser should be. I find its GUI toolkit doesn't integrate well with the desktop and its redraw logic sucks, in particular under X11. I have a hard time finding my way through its mess of configuration files, many of them in inconsistent formats. And occasionally it crashes, and I have lost my bookmarks a few times.
Overall, I still recommend switching to Firefox, despite its problems. But I certainly can see why IE or Safari users wouldn't want to bother switching, in particular if they aren't aware of all the great plugins. And unless the Firefox team improves their quality, I think Firefox will increasingly face serious problems.
The statistics come from a large amount of web sites, I'm presuming Windows Update isn't one of the sites that provide their visitor details to this survey. They'd be fairly useless anyway, 100% IE.
:)
The only way this could have made a difference is if people use IE to download the updates and then keep using IE and forget about Firefox afterwards, but I don't think that can account for any real numbers. As somebody has suggested earlier people using IE to access IE only sites and then never bothering to go back to Firefox may be more of a factor, or maybe the statistics just mean nothing
This says that Gecko browsers overall have been growing in popularity every month. In fact, all major browser engines, including IE6, have been gaining share at the expense of IE5.
I have both IE and Firefox on my machine. Why? Because I can't access certain sites that are very MS specific with Firefox.
That being said, 95% of the time I use Firefox.
I'd like to see IE go away but it just isn't going to happen anytime soon. But remember, IE was once a marginal and buggy browser too.
Like someone said, it's probably due to more people buying windows PCs. Because since windows comes with IE, the only way for IE to gain users is either Mac users download it, which I would highly doubt, or more people buy windows.
For those that need a pointer in the right direction, it's call spellbound. Don't forget to add the dictionary(s) like it instructs or spellbound will silently fail to catch any mistakes.
One BIG reason. Intranet.
Yes our intranet uses windows authentication. But if I open up my browser and point it to an internal site and have to type in my damn password ten times a day, then there is no way I am going to use it. (And yes, I can store the password, but that is against company policy).
The moment that firefox comes out and it just works, you bet IE is getting deprecated.
...since I'm using Mozilla Suite and Firefox exclusively, I can fully understand anyone who abandons it - stability has been awful for me in the last half year or so...
Hmm. I've had the opposite experience. I've been using Mozilla since v1.2 or thereabouts, on both Win2K and XP, and it very rarely crashes - perhaps once a month. Less often than IE did when I was using IE. When it does crash, it's almost always related to a media plugin like WMP losing its mind. I haven't noticed the rendering problems you mention, either.
Not that I disbelieve you. I'm just pointing out that one person's experience may not correlate well with the average experience.
I haven't had the issues he has, but here are some of the ones I DO have:
- Copy/paste is flaky and very frustrating. Especially when trying to paste into other applications (seems to be better pasting to itself). Particularly when trying to copy/paste URLs in the address bar. It seems I have to click the address, then click again to get a blinking cursor. Then highlight the entire string, THEN I can successfully copy it.
- Sometimes it just kinda disappears. Meaning the taskbar icon. I've had it just disappear. The first time it happened I thought I must've inadvertantly closed the program. When Alt-Tabbing a little later I noticed I had three FF icons when I only thought I had two open (as indicated in the taskbar). I switched to the mystery one and lo and behold it was the window that disappeared. And the taskbar icon even came back. This has happened several times.
- I don't like how it behaves sometimes when launching from other applications. When launching a URL (I tell FF to not reuse windows) from another app, it ALWAYS restores or brings to the front one of the existing FF windows and then loads a new one. This is just annoying and sloppy, especially for someone that relies heavily on Alt-Tab to move between applications very quickly (it really screws up your mental view of what order your windows are in).
- More of just a UI preference, I really like the Ctrl-O that IE has for opening WHATEVER. It's stupid to have two commands to open files. It shouldn't matter if they're on your local system or online. One box to put in a URI!
I can understand why people wouldn't want to use IE and choose FF. I do think it's amusing how some people ignore (forgive?) some of the real shortcomings just because it's "not IE". I guess I can't talk too much. I tried loading IE7 beta on my machine and now IE won't load (the full UI anyway, any app that uses the IE controls works fine) so I'm stuck using FF. It's growing on me, but still has a long way to go before I'd consider using it as my main browser.
Oh you mean like this downloadable add-on extension... for IE.
http://www.iespell.com/
That, or 0.64% of it's users discovered the browser ID tag extentions and how to make websites stop targetting them for refusal of services or other stupid crap. You realize that people keep track of what browser is being used by looking at this very tag as users visit sites? Then again, uhm, last I checked, 0.64% isn't exactly a large number.
Opera has a similar problem, except that since it gets an even worse end of the deal, it just DEFAULTS to identifying as IE straight out of the box (well download) so it's less experienced users won't have to find out the hard way how many sites out there will refuse to work because the programmer decided to glob all unrecognized IDs in the "crappy page" pile without actually bothering to recognize anything but IE.
No, a web designer wants to design his website to hit the majority of his audience. A web designer may not care what Internet program people use,(even if he prefers one over the other), he just wants to know how he can affect the majority of his audiance.
Actually, a web designer wants to keep his sanity. As someone who just finished a portal website for 2000 users, let me tell you this: The absolutely worst thing about IE is doing a code change, and never having any idea if it'll work or not without clicking reload.
Opera, Firefox and the W3C validator all seem to agree on what is valid code and not. You can read tutorials, standards and things will actually work as expected. With IE, it will randomly trash the layout.
Example: I'm doing a CSS layout, and I have a background image. Now someone wants the top part to be clickable.
Opera, Firefox, W3C: Place image over background with a link tag, done.
IE: Try the same. Layout FUBAR. Find out it doesn't like the right edge, and will throw the entire div below the other content, even though the image is inside the div's area. Cut image so it'll have 12 pixels margin to the edge. Reload. Not enough. Try it again, cut with 60 pixels margin. Reload. The div is now right, image wrong. Count pixels: IE will move the image 5 pixels to the right for no particular reason. Cut image (again), add IE-specific code since the image is no longer the same as the original, place a crippled image in the center of the background. Works. Now by trial and error find that an image size 20 pixels less than the original works (but since it's moved 5 pixels to the right, you have effectively 5 pixels margin on the left, and 15 on the right). Done (and sorta works unless someone wants to click on the edges).
That is why I design to standards, and provide workarounds for IE, not the other way around. I simply have no clue what the fsck IE is doing half the time, and the other half I wish I didn't.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings