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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.
Could be that it's the time of year for lots of people to buy new computers (back to school, lots of deals to be had), none of which SHIP with Firefox. And it may just take a bit of IE use to remind them why they need to get to mozilla.org after all.
A few of the folks I set up with Firefox have gone back to IE because their default browser settings changed with a Windows Update, and they were not interested enough to change them back.
Then the spyware came back...
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
I'm sure one can measure ~8% roughly, but how can you know if a browser loses .60%?
Most likely users are trying the IE7 beta to find out what's new.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Don't blame me. I recently got a die-hard IE/OE user to switch to FF/TB. He was tired of paying me my standard rates to come and clean spyware...
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
I have started going back to IE, to my surprise because firefox regularly locks up and has to be restarted, and also starts eating the pagefile like it's going out of style.
I assumed it was just my machine, but then saw the same behavior on two other machines.
I don't use Firefox because of stability issues on Windows.
Then again - it might not be Firefox, but the end result is the same.
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
I don't know because the numbers you give are meaningless.
/. to be accurate with scientific analysis when it can't even get the basics of the English language right.)
This is why you should always give error bars for values obtained in a supposedly scientific way, then it would be obvious if it's noise or not.
You also shouldn't give values to inappropriate levels of precision. if you're going to say share went down by 0.64% and not give an error bar, then it's reasonable to assume your error was +/- 0.005%, in which case it is NOT statistical noise.
(I know I'm asking a lot for
That would account for a decline in the rate of downloads, but not a decline in use. Maybe millions of web developers testing IE7 is lowering Firefox's share, or maybe people tried Firefox, didn't like it, and went back to whatever they'd been using.
rooooar
Why should I care what browser other people are using?
There were a few major win2k updates last month, and as Windows update is IE only, surely most will have had to get it from there. may account for a *tiny* amount of deviation. But hell, there is deviation in every statistic. We will jsut have to wait till next month - if it was a blip, hey, it may shoot up to 10% for August ;)
Me too, but its annoying as hell to install. The extensions are wonderful, but the last time I had to do a clean install, I lost all the extensions, and there doesn't seem to be any way to store the extensions locally - it's all "active" content. Pisses me off, 'cause I don't have mouse gestures, and don't want to go wading through mozzilla.org to find the one I'm already using.
The extensions are one of the biggest advantages for folks with no life or no job, and one of the biggest frustrations for busy people. Firefox is like building a car from scratch everytime you intall it - You have to re-find all the extensions you liked by navagating through mounds and mounds of extensions. It's one of the things I miss about Opera...everything installs at once. Yes, I know you're stuck with the single tab-model they offer, but since I dont' really have time to "try out" a dozen different styles, I'm happier to learn to use a good one than search for hours for a really great one.
(I have a sligtly unusual setup - two logins on a single xp install - one for work, one for play. I've set up firefox to use the same profile in the past, but it just takes to freakin long to look up the instructions and re-do all the installs. Sue me, I'm impatient. I want a "use this profile" button.)
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I get a fair amount of traffic on my personal web site (4gigs monthly traffic, 27,000 hits/month). As with all things, data I directly personally measure trumps any media report. It seems the more direct information I have about anything reported in the media, the more aware I am of what they get wrong, distort, or just plain lie about. While last month was certainly statistically interesting for my site, it was for another reason. For the first time ever, IE was NOT the most popular web browser used to reach my site. Firefox came in at 45%, and IE scored 43%. Firefox has been steadily gaining each month, with the gains being more and more dramatic as each month goes by.
Is my personal web traffic representative of the Internet as a whole? Certainly not. Does it rebut the cited article? No. Is it the only information in which I have any confidence at all? Yes. My advice to you? Look at your own web logs and react accordingly, in so much as it matters to do so.
Don't be surprised when Microsoft applies for a patent on 'Tabbed Browsing'. I would bet that its at least been discussed at some point somewhere at some large round conference table.
And they said zombies weren't real!
Since when does "stabilize" mean "shrink"? And who modded this insightful instead of funny?
Anyway, 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, with 2-3 crashes each day. As an extra annoyance, keyboard focus handling is pretty much broken by design and sometimes parts of pages get drawn at random 1 pixel left/right/up/down positions of where they should really be, turning a whole page into a stricken out, partially expanded/contracted mess, and that's on multiple platforms (linux, irix, windows). Hopefully, those things will be fixed in 1.5 (and Seamonkey), so that the marketshare can rise again (and my frustration decline).
I assume you run firefox on Windows. In my experience (YMMV) firefox crashes so often on my linux box it's not even funny. It's either some conflict with esd, some nasty flash thing that leaves such a nice dump of cores in my $HOME, or just slow degradation of performance (aka leaks).
Who would've thought to make firefox on linux (the platform it actually dominate the market on) stable? At least in my experience IE rarely crashes on a windose box.
sure I'll have a sig.
With your parent post's numbers:
It started at 8.71%
0.64/8.71 = A loss of ~7.3%
So it looks like nobody knows what they are talking about.
PS: Did not RTFA.
I like firefox, but I don't like the browser, I like the plugins.
If I had created the world I wouldn't have messed about with butterflies and daffodils. I would have started with lasers
If you look that the traffic for mozilla.org you see a slight downward trend during summer and a massive spike just recently in august, coinciding with the kids going back to school.
So basically the kids using firefox at school stopped for the summer because some of them were using their parents computers that had IE. Now that the kids have gone back to school the ones that weren't using firefox are downloading it in huge numbers (probably mostly to be cool). Next set of statistics will probably show a 2% rise for firefox, imho due to this.
No, it looks to me like slashdot is once again getting it's "news" about OSS projects from a ^&#$^&%#^& zdnet blog.
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
as long as there's enough sites out there that require IE, users will switch to IE, even from "better" browsers.
How many sites ARE there that require IE and/or fail miserably in Firefox, though? I keep seeing people cite this as a major factor in IE's retention of so much browser market share, and yet outside of a few shameful intranet pages at work, I don't think I've encountered an IE-only page in the wild since I made the switch to Mozilla Phoenix, over two years ago.
Has anyone compiled a list of public web sites that truly are IE-only? I'd like to know how big a problem this really is.