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.

Comments

New computer purchases?

[darylb]

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.

Re:New computer purchases?

[diegocgteleline.es]

Why all this fud about "if it comes installed, everyone will use it"? Why is that everyone uses winzip and winamp, then?

Netscape didn't lost the browser war because of not being installed by default. It helped, but that was not the main reason: Ars Technica sits down with Scott Collins from Mozilla.org:

"Ars: You mention mistakes made by Microsoft. What do you feel are mistakes that Mozilla has made in the past?"

One: There was a fundamental mistake made by Netscape management, twice, which cost us a release at the most inopportune time. I think we can attribute a great deal of our market share loss to this mistake that was pretty much based completely on lies from one executive, who has since left the company (and left very rich) and who was an impediment to everything that we did. He was an awful person, and it is completely on him that we missed a release. We had a "Netscape 5" that was within weeks of being ready to go, and this person said that we needed to ship something based on Gecko within 6 months instead. Every single engineer in the company told management "No, it will be two years at least before we ship something based on Gecko." Management agreed with the engineers in order to get 5.0 out.a

Three months later they came back and said "We've changed our mind, this other executive has convinced us, except now instead of six months, you need to do it in three months." Well, you can't put 50 pounds of [crap] in a ten pound bag, it took two years. And we didn't get out a 5.0, and that cost of us everything, it was the biggest mistake ever, and I put it all on the feet of this one individual, whom I will not name.

Pseudopod

[Stanistani]

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...

Re:Pseudopod

[Iriel]

After a while, on my Win2K machine, I started to have problems similar to the ones described by the parent post actually. Besides, I could conceive that it could have been a bug consisting of a series of software conflicts after a Windows Update screwed up one small detail.

I have had that happen several times. Not enough to consider it the norm, but I think the originating post serves a purpose to explain that there are plenty of users that hit one small point that requires effort to change something, and so they give up. Not everyone is like this and I've heard all too many tales of people teaching someone in their 80's to use Linux for everyday tasks, but that isn't the normal situation. The majority of users want something that works the way they are used to (the way it's been/IE) and when they have to think to change something, they just give up. Why bother when you can just ask your friend to clean out your spyware each month or so? I don't mean to Troll, but this is a growing trend that I see in many places.

I tried

[thc69]

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...

Is it statistical noise?

[Yahweh Doesn't Exist]

I don't know because the numbers you give are meaningless.

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 /. to be accurate with scientific analysis when it can't even get the basics of the English language right.)

Re:The reason for the downturn.

[Evro]

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.

Re:Marketshare Stabilized

[ugmoe]

Why should I care what browser other people are using?

Possibly due to win2k updates?

[domipheus]

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 ;)

Massive surge coming, just look

[0xABADC0DA]

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.