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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.
It looks to me as though Firefox's natural marketshare has stabilized. It's just not a large as we hoped.
Thalasar
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?"
Actually, the decline is probably because everyone who wants it has it by now. ^_^
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
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.
One must remember that IE has just added tabbed browsing, among other "features." The average Joe, who is not hugely concerned with security, probably downloaded Firefox for the tabs and MAYBE extensions. With a browser that will come equipped with tabs, a significant number of people will lose their interest in a browser like Firefox.
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
As long as the distribute of IE comes on virtually all new machines IE will remain around 90%. People will not go thru the trouble to downloading a different component of software for what is now a commoditity.
After any surge of interest for a new product comes a period where disinterested users not entirely satisfied go back to the old product.
I mean, it's not like they can return their browser to Mozilla and ask for a different model or their cash back..
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
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.
That's only because some of us are forced to use IE at work. At least I am, it's absurd. I balance myself out, visiting the same sites with both IE & Firefox
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.
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
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
I use FF exclusively, whenever possible. At home I don't have a problem with it (on 3 PCs) but the install I have at work crashes randomly every hour or so. I suspect that it's a Flash issue (I run flashblock across all installs). My point is this: If my first experience with FF had been the same as my PC at work I would have uninstalled and left FF behind long ago, regardless of how good it really is for others.
Understand the fucking blurb at least before you comment. It's 0.64% loss, at 8% total.
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
You know what this means? Dutiful SysAdmins like myself will make sure that every system on campus has a copy of Mozilla running by the week's end.
"When I am king, you will be first against the wall..."
8% of PC users know what they are doing.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?
Firefox is a decent browser but it is NOT as good as the hype would have you believe. Someone who understands tech might be able to not only see but appreciate the benefits, but the AVERAGE user doesn't give a rats damn about it. What the average user gives a crap about is how long it takes to load, how much slower their machine is when it's running, and how often it crashes. Yeah yeah I know that the next 14 replies will be "HEY it runs fine on my pc!" and please don't bother, just because it works great on your pc doesn't have shit to do with how well it works on my grandma-jo's pc, or anyone elses for that matter. You can't talk about 80 mil downloads and 10 million users and also think that your one example means dick.
Geeks keep forgetting that it's regular average non-tech people who determine the failure or success of a product, not fellow geeks, and those regular average non-tech people don't really see much special about firefox.
This is statistical noise, pure and simple. There is no story here.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
The thing I am most worried about is the post being supposedly insightful...
Too bad someone doesn't pick this up. Imagine the PC ads, "Now with the latest Firefox [echo, echo, echo] Internet explorer!" "Surf the web at incredible speeds, with Firefox [echo, echo, echo]"
I would like to use Firefox as much and as often as is possible, but I find more and more multimedia pages are written exclusively for Internet Explorer. Certainly MSNBC is an example, but there are others. More surprising is the fact that WebCT, used to administer 'distance learning' programs doesn't support Firefox. When I'm taking a timed test, the last thing I want to deal with is a browser incompatibility. So, for me, my use of IE has gone up recently... but not because I want it to.
Firefox doesn't seem so gret anymore now that many sites are using flash to display popups. However this can be fixed easily.
from the the-sky-is-falling-the-sky-is-falling dept.
I take this is a sarcastic jibe meaning that you don't think it's such a huge deal... so why bother publishing it? Debating tenths of a percent of market share seems pointless regardless of whether it's up or down. By publishing the story it would just seem you're just contributing to the hype.
rooooar
I have to admit, it's an amusing bit of misrepresentation the community uses when citing download figures for Firefox as if they really truely mean something. One user may account for dozens of downloads alone if they have multiple PCs, or upgrade versions, or if they reinstall their OS and have to reget their apps. Then there's the user who gets Firefox but for whatever reason goes back to IE. I'm tired of the download number being heralded as some great victory when it means very little in terms of real market penetration.
Should we start counting every copy of windows sold or bundled with a PC as a "new IE user"? I bought a cheap dell recently to use as a quick and dirty Linux box. It came with WinXP Home and IE, but I don't use it. But by the reasoning usually given for Firefox, because I have it, I should be counted as a user, as a part of the marketshare.
Please stop using download counts to prove your argument that Firefox is toppling IE. It's not yet... While it's doing better than any competitor since Netscape, it's not the killing blow to IE just yet.
I think a lot of analysis over this loss of market share forgets where a good amount of internet browsers (the people part) are.
;)
Security and stability? B'ah! Honestly, nearly any issue that Firefox could run into seems rather paltry compared to what domintes the market share of web browsers (IE). What issues that do arise are usually fixed in relatively short order as well. If nothing else, Mozilla developers move at light speed when compared to Microsoft in the browser world.
I really honestly don't want to sound like a Troll, but I think bringing up topics like security and stability bugs to explain a loss of market share seems like a way out of pointing out the obvious: The majority of internet users are too lazy to install something when there's an alternative that's 'good enough' already.
Heck, I think it's pretty antiquated that most of the laymen internet users still use the term 'surf' when describing actions performed on the internet
Perfecting Discordia
www.stevenvansickle.com
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 ;)
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.
Now I'm no Firefox fanboi (I use it but don't evangelise it, and also still use IE), but didn't they consider the possibility that the change is instead in the readership of their monitored websites?
:-D
Of course, that would bring doubt into their business model so of course not - "the figures show it so it MUST be true."
Anyway, I think it's more than Firefox users have a better memory - so have less reason to revisit pages.
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%.
.64% drop in total users, but a 7.8% drop in FireFox's share.
Do the math. It's a
0.64% is 8% of 8%. Though it's actually only 7.3% of 8.71%. Hope that clears things up.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Yes, neither are particulary fantastic, but good enough to make it difficult to persuade people to move from something they already know.
We've discussed malware to dead and whilst it's a threat, the people I know don't go to sites which would try and do this sort of thing to. Which naturally means that they also have no need for the many (fantastic) extensions out there.
With IE now and the release of version 7, I suspect a lot of users won't consider jumping ship because what they have is just good enough. I mean you've got the tabbed browsing and the pop-up blocking that your geek friend harps on about, so why bother with a whole new application?
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
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...
Be sure to factor in a stay in a federal "pound-you-in-the-ass" prison for whoever writes the worm as one of the "means."
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Also because no one on the web has reported it yet. No news organization, no blog, nothing. And this is not the sort of things ZDNet or CNET would keep silent about especially since Microsoft and browsers are involved.
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?
Which sort of makes it the ultimate WIndows application, I guess.
I still won't go back to IE, though. With IE these days I have to force quit hung browser windows on every fifth site.
Why don't someone create a worm that installs FireFox, while making it seem, to the average non-tech savvy Internet Explorer, that s/he is still using IE?
You're obviously an above-average tech savvy guy; why don't you create it?
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?
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.
What's worse? A browser that may occasionally crash or a browser that's full of security holes?
Given that a crash is a security hole there's no difference.
A crash will always loose information, i.e.. a malicious web site or plugin could crash Firefox causin loss of data.
A crash can potentially be exploited to execute arbitrary code and take over the machine, I believe the way many exploits are found is by trying to exploit crashes in applications.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Err, typo on my part. 7.4% is more like it.
Simply looking at market share doesn't tell you anything except for relative adoption with respect to the overall market, and that may or may not even be a useful measurement. It depends on if you care about relative share or absolute adoption, really.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Dear Sir,
It is YOU who must read the PARENT POST correctly. A loss of 0.64% total user base from an initial 8% total user base is an 8% loss of the previous Firefox user base. (8% of 8 is 0.64).
Have fun posting.
the mozilla store has re-opened, and they Now have a backpack .
:D
Now that I am 100% sure never to get a girlfriend sporting my newly ordered backpack, they may as well start offering thunderbird underwear.
In case people start trying to spam my crotch, I will have protection
I better add 20 new threads to my Firefox download script!
they might be tryin out the ie7.
I've always been wondering what the influence of holidays are on OSS development. E.g. do we see an increased number of commitments into CVS / releases during Christmas Holidays? Is there a difference how e.g. US OSS programmers spend independance day and Europeans spend their national Holidays?
The data available in the article does not provide any information other then "drop in share for July". Those data should be split up into: personal use, buisiness use and if possible by geographical area (continents). Show me as well the total internet usage (I'd expect a drop there as well, don't forget that in some European countries people are on Holiday for at least 4 weeks during July. Sweden and Finland comes to mind) and maybe I can say something about the significance of this drop.
A small percentage shift for the visitors, etc. doesn't really mean much. No one really explains how these visitor numbers are calculated.
I know how it is at my mom's house. First off, during the school year, she's the primary user, but in the summer, there are kids visiting sites all day. So their usage and number of sites visited goes up, likely resulting in more hits on those sites tracked.
Second, my mom uses Firefox all year round, but she dumps the kids into AOL's browser, which, in her version, is really IE with AOL surfing blocking. So, yeah, there's more IE stuff.
Third, a bunch of people are buying computers for their kids over the summer and graduation and going to college presents (or required items). And gee, I bet those machines have IE preinstalled. Ding! Increase in numbers again.
Lastly, since I bet that those sites are using cookies to track users, a number of people who use spybot and/or ad-aware will be wiping out those cookies and getting counted multiple times. During the year, my mom runs it once every two weeks, but in the summer, with all the crap those kids try to download, she runs it about every two or three days, meaning that she's wiping the cookie 10 times a month.
Multiply that to many, many households, and you start to wonder how much the IE figure could actually be inflated.
It's not that there can't be a drop in Firefox and a rise in IE. But without stats, reports, real academic information with methodology, well, it means diddly.
Linux - because it doesn't leave that Steve Ballmer aftertaste.
You have a great open source program that everyone raves about.
Said program gets out of the dark corners of the geek world and gains a significant market share.
People jump ship because now that it has been tested by several million people and has suffered the attention of the masses.
Original geek crowd start attacking it because it is no longer an obscure "cool" piece of software.
Not a troll here but I just want to know if this has been the trend of all open source software.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
I lost all the extensions, and there doesn't seem to be any way to store the extensions locally - it's all "active" content.
Not true. Everything is stored locally. The only problem is that the profiles internally are very complex and are rather prone to corruption. Profile corruption is the intermediary cause in $BIG_NUMBER% of all Firefox breakage. Extensions make this worse.
(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.)
This is where playing around with scripting is to your advantage. That, and start saving XPI files (extension installers) locally. This can be done through right click->Save Link As, or by saving through another browser or a file retrieval utility.
I noticed this at the very top of the linked article about the lack of stability ...
...
Things have really been going downhill since I upgraded to Mac OS X Tiger (10.4) a few weeks back.
Doesn't sound very fair to blame the app for a potentially botched OS upgrade
Not to mention IE wins the market share by default because it is installed on every new pc by default.
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.
LOL! quick find excuses and reasons while Bill's browser is a poorer choice and couldn't possibly be gaining any kind of market share over our beloved FireFox. Oh No! someone dared to post an article which contains a FF negative - scream - help - call the police
I betcha what we're seeing is the "new computer sales" preparing for the upcoming school year.
So, seeing as most computers sold ship with IE the school "sale" boom during the summer months preceeding the fall semester would account for a percentage increase.
*shrug*
Just a thought...
W3Schools' statistics (April-August 2005) seemed to forecast this slight IE rise/Firefox decline. Maybe not representative of the whole Web, but it's worth seeing.
I wonder how much MS' "Honeymonkeys" and cross-browser "security issues" can further help IE...
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
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.
the measurements have that degree of significant of digits to support such claims of accuracy!
Prima facie, these numbers are bogus. Why bother to add credence to a "study" that demonstrates a one-to-correlation at such "precision" missed by many other publized sets of numbers.
There is a difference. A security hole can be exploited over and over again without alerting the user to a problem. A crash, although it may open one up to attack, cannot be exploited without alerting the user to a problem.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
That, and start saving XPI files (extension installers) locally. This can be done through right click->Save Link As, or by saving through another browser or a file retrieval utility
Yeah, I tried that (saving xpi files) to an "install" directory on my server - where I keep all my non-retail-box software (shareware/freeware/drivers/updates). They didn't work on a clean install. Or perhaps I should say that thay didn't work the way I expented them to, and the install would not start properly based on my limited experimentation. That is what prompted me to believe the content was not actually local, and the xpi was simply a pointer.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Firefox has gotten the attention it deserves, and people will continue to talk about it and more will continue to convert from Internet Exploder. If nothing else the world now knows without a shadow of a doubt that Open Source is good, reliable technology, and superior in many cases. I'd say that Firefox has done what others have not been able to do so well...get people's eyes of MS and on to something else.
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
i just bought as t-shirt from the mozilla store. i will wear often and in busy areas of my city. market share will begin to improve shortly.
If you seem to know that it is within the range of statistical noise and even state so in the summary, then why post it as news?
http://notanumber.net/
This is the kind of stuff that appears to be information and informative but really has no information. After all MS Office 2003 products have had a slip in usage (this has been mentioned on /.) but I doubt anyone will believe Office is anywhere but #1 for office productivity software. The truth about where FireFox is doesn't lie with usage statistics alone.
As for FireFox itself, I am pleasantly happy with it. I don't see the problems many others see. In any applicaiton framework the problems usually come up in the modules not the framework. I suspect most of the problems users see lie either in the plugins many use or the way plugins interact with everything else.
If I had any suggestion for the developers steering FireFox (and Thunderbird) it would be further isolating plugins. The developers should strive to have a framework that survives not only a catastrophic plugin failure (ie. a plugin crashes) but a plugin that is errant (ie. a plugin that malfunctions never handling memory correctly) without screwing up the core browser.
The extensions are the greatest thing about Firefox, IMHO.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
If you say this variation is statistical noise, which is very probably is, why are you still reporting it as news???
Well if it makes you feel any better, I use Firefox 1.0.6 all the time on Ubuntu, and I haven't had a crash yet. I tend to turn off esd, but I do have Flash.
Anything URL-specific?
WeRelate.org - wiki-based genealogy
It's the plugins that make Firefox for me, unfortunately there are problems here. There's no guarantee that plugins won't cause problems with Firefox or with each other, or that they'll continue to work after an update. Firefox breakage by this method has turned several non-technical types I know back to IE.
Plugins are so important to Firefox that I'd like to see a bunch of the most popular ones made "official", i.e. they will be tested to make sure that they work together, they will auto-update from the official site, and they will work after an update.
Oh no... it's the future.
To get people to use firefox who otherwise could give a rats ass about IE vs. Mozilla... just take a lesson from our government - use a bit of fear mongering!
Seriously, it works.
You know how you're the "computer guy" in your family or group of friends, the one that fixes EVERYONE'S computers whenever they get infested? You know how you've fixed those same machines multiple times?
Yeah well, since you "know it all" and they don't, explain to them, "You know why you get these viruses? Internet Explorer. Here, use this other browser."
I've done this on every one of my non-computer literate friends/family members and it works like a charm.
Now... if everyone were to follow suit...
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
You guys don't watch your investments this way do you?
0.64%? Seriously, call me when something happens.
Websites have figured out how to defeat the popup blocker withing Firefox - try drudgereport.com or unitedmedia.com and you'll see. Not sure where to go now for popup-free browsing. May have to create my own damn proxy
Few hours ago there was a post about Firefox downloads topping 80 million mark
Even in this article, The enquirer mentions that "Net measurement is a tricky business and whenever we quote Net application figures, someone always quotes figures to make it look all gloom and doom.."
So effectively, they say the share *might* have been dropped, but that may not necessarily be true!
http://efil.blogspot.com/
IE7 is only available to official betatesters, Beta 2 will be a public beta but beta 1 isn't
While this doesn't necessary concern the widespread adoption of Firefox, I would like to comment on embedding Gecko. For the past week or so I have been attempting to embed Gecko into a proprietary C++ graphical user interface toolkit. So far I have found it quite difficult.
The existing documentation is either extremely out of date (ie. 2002 or earlier), or partially complete. Some of the documentation contains old names for various XPCOM interfaces. While the various embedding examples are a start, they are very poorly commented and as such are quite useless.
Now, I realize that Gecko is a very complex piece of software, but in order for it to become widely accepted there needs to be many pieces of software which use it. But as of this time it is quite difficult for a developer to quickly embed Gecko within an existing application. That may very well be because there is a complete lack of documentation describing how to do so.
The path to more users is more products. The path to more products is easier development. And easier development is often due to accessible, correct and descriptive documentation. So please, if there is someone reading this who has the knowledge, write us developers a decent guide on embedding Gecko.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
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?"
If so, I have less faith in people than before. Years and years of pop-ups and other annoyances to downright garbage with IE and a news report would scare you off of Firefox?
I honestly don't know how people still use that browser unless things have improved in the meantime.
If nobody had reported this on the web yet, we wouldn't have a thread to discuss this in, would we? As it is, two separate individuals in this thread have reported this problem in Win2K.
Maybe instead of calling them liars (which is exactly what you're doing, and it's very rude), you could ask for details so you could reproduce the problem yourself.
A crash, although it may open one up to attack, cannot be exploited without alerting the user to a problem.
Crashes usually happen because of one of two things, an attempt to read a block of memory out of range, or an attempt to execute code in a block of memory out of range.
They are commonly caused by either, uninitilised pointers or buffer over or underruns modifying the data in the pointers.
in the first case it's very hard to exploit the crash, but it's certainly possible that it could be exploited, the expolit would relly on the uninitlised pointer pointing to an old block of ram that hasn't been cleared.
in the second case it's still difficult but a little easier since you can directly manipulate the memory that the appication has access to.
Both types of exploit would cause the the firefox process to seemlessly execute code inserted by a probably malicious party. A crash will not occure because the old random pointers and data now point to the inserted code.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I run Firefox regularity on OS X, and I never have seen the problems you descibe. Have used it on OS X 10.3 and 10.4. Just did a normal install, nothing special to set up or anything. Guess that doesn't solve your problem, but it seems like it might be sonething specific to your powerbook, not the FF/OS X combo
Cheers
I think new PCs is a major reason.
I'd be curious if there was any corrolation between IE usage and publically announced "major security patches." Many folks still check updates manually and I'd expect IE frequency to increase when the publicity of major vulnerability patches increases.
*scoove*
Geeze, guys I'm really sorry. It was me. I bought a new computer with XP (long-time critic, first time user) and actually liked the way IE rendered text. I SWEAR I'm planning to go back to using Firefox ANY DAY NOW. The numbers should be back up then...
XPIs are completely local and I have just what you described - directory on my own webserver with all extensions I need. Works perfectly, on clean installs and whatnot.
If you are serving XPIs via http, don't forget to add proper content type for the files, otherwise they won't install. I didn't try to install extensions from local files, but that should also work.
The report could be dismissed as statistical noise if the slight decline weren't also reflected at sites like w3schools.
As we all know, surveys are no more reliable than their sampling procedures and reliable surveys are not necessarily valid.
For the time being, I'm inclined to accept the argument for noise, but there are also many anti-firefox biases in standard browser counting methods.
Most are relatively consistent over time, but there is one obvious one which increases with firefox use.
With experience, Firefox users increasingly find and deploy extensions which block the images and scripts that research companies use to count user behaviour.
I try to avoid blocking the more obvious ones, but it's far from easy to distinguish them from spam-minded market research.
With 0.64% it could easily be so, but there might be another explanation:
Usual Firefox-users had their holidays, walking into internetcafés using their IE for surfing.
Thats what I did...
But same conclusion: There is no story here.
~Knaldgas
If you read it that way, Firefox lost 7.3%, meaning either the GP can't do math or is just trying to cover his ass and make it sound like he knew what he was talking about.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
After a while of trying to like Firefox I just got tired and gave up. It was just too much of a memory hog on an older laptop. It just left me waiting, waiting, waiting for pages to render. And the plugins (Flashblock) were of marginal use and quality. The honeymoon was over, so I uninstalled it and got back my disk space. I don't think that I'll bother trying it again.
Well, if you see years of persistent growth and then you see a dip, that's not just statistical noise. While it doesn't necessarily mean marketshare has gone down, it means that growth rate has slowed enough that it is now possible to see a dip (at high growth rates, that just won't happen).
In any case, while sampling error is a problem with these kinds of surveys, that's probably far from the biggest problem; non-representative samples and observer bias are probably far more serious.
This is just plain FUD, or some kind of commercial service provider has found a cheap and easy way too get a lot of publicity. Not only is the number so low that it is within the error margin of their results, furthermore, there are other sources which even say that Firefox' market share has risen 2% in the same period.
h tml#a000545
See also http://www.webstandards.org/buzz/archive/2005_08.
Nothing to see here people, move along!
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?"
Unlikely no-one would switch to IE on the basis of security given its long standing reputation.
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
Gosh....
I just tired from these doomsayers. Firefox is GAINING and various stats shows that. I just tired also from such "reporting" which easily can be called "I justify my point of view that FF won't gain more than this". Like we have to prove something to each other at any cost.
Get this - Firefox will be here as most popular alternative browser. There will be Opera. And there will be more and more people which will use them. Yes, IE will be still most popular, but not monopoly. So that is ALL what matters to ME and I think to most FF/Opera/Another Alternative Browser users.
Why we just can't avoid articles which causes religious vs. wars, touches sensitive topics without any kind of proof.
Just don't do this.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
Approximately 70% of the visitors to my site use Firefox. The site attracts mainly a techy crowd, though.
Expert Java EE Consulting
then why the hell did you post it if you in your limitless wisdom deem it to not be news at all?
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.
..seriously.
It's all of those people dumping Fiefox for IE so that they can get in on the prepub at the copyright officehttp://slashdot.org/articles/05/08/15/115022 9.shtml?tid=103&tid=1.
The trunk of the cvs tree has plenty of 64-bit specific fixes over the last year, but -- being unrelated to security -- they don't make their way into the 1.0.x branch, which is the only one released.
Having to maintain compatibility with the backwards OS/compiler combinations (like Win98/MSVC6) impedes development -- especially porting to the "obscure" new platforms like FreeBSD/amd64.
And if you happen to be lucky enough to have a working 64-bit firefox, try installing the Forecastfox extension and restarting... (Careful -- backup your ~/.mozilla first.)
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I think people are forgetting that a change in market share does not mean a loss in installed base ... Simply looking at market share doesn't tell you anything except for relative adoption with respect to the overall market, and that may or may not even be a useful measurement. It depends on if you care about relative share or absolute adoption, really.
The installed base / absolute adoption question is a bit trickier than market share. Downloads do not equal users, counting the absolute number of firefox users is questionable like the absolute number of Linux users. A lot of guesswork is required. I've downloaded Firefox for several personal computers. I've downloaded complete installers to update to a new revision. So that's 9 download for me personally. Unlike Linux I don't cart a CD to friends and family who want to give it a try. I download it, it's icons sit's there on the desktop next to Internet Explorer. Some members of the household that share the computer continue using IE. Things are terribly complicated. Regrettably marketshare is probably the best measurement available.
There are still people who are just getting their first computer. Most of those will at least start out with IE, since it's already there, and might later use something else such as Firefox. It's too early to say that Firefox has lost ground with people like this, since it will take a while for them to become aware of alternative browsers, much less feel comfortable switching.
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.
This comment is just a general FYI on the supposedly god-like feature that FF has that IE doesn't.
I used a browser with tabbed browsing on Windows 3.1. It was stable, fast, compatible with then-current standards, and it was written by a company owned by AOL. To date, it was the best browser I have ever used.
Those who think FF/Mozilla was original in this area are just ignorant, stupid or both.
Anyone who took a stats class would know that this is not 'noise'. It's just bad math to call it that. It doesn't, however, mean that FF is losing in popularity. Even Google's profits weren't as high as expected, but they explained that it was due to it being summer and more people going out. I would imagine it would be the same thing here. Less techy people browsing at home, while about the same amount of people browse at work with whatever IT forces upon them.
...that people wise enough not to use IE are also wise enough to spend less time browsing the web and more time having a good time outside during summer!
Perhaps the drop is due to users customizing their User Agent to report to be something other than Mozilla/Firefox.
... well you can read about it (need some cleaning up).
" );
I myself modified my Firefox so that it browser info returns
user_pref("general.useragent.override", "NSACarnivore/13.7(X11;Multix;Multix;US;1776;HLS)
user_pref("general.useragent.oscpu.override", "OpenVAX/VMS");
user_pref("general.useragent.vendor", "Carnivore");
user_pref("general.useragent.vendorSub", "13.7");
user_pref("general.useragent.vendorComment", "Carnivore 13.7");
user_pref("general.useragent.product", "Carnivore");
user_pref("general.useragent.productSub", "13.7");
user_pref("general.useragent.ProductComment", "Carnivore 13.7");
user_pref("general.platform.override", "OpenVAX/VMS");
user_pref("general.appcodename.override", "Carnivore");
user_pref("general.appCodeName.override", "Carnivore");
user_pref("general.appversion.override", "13.7 (Multex;en-US)");
user_pref("general.appname.override", "Carnivore");
user_pref("general.oscpu.override", "PPC128");
user_pref("general.vendor.override", "Carnivore");
user_pref("general.vendorSub.override", "Carnivore");
user_pref("general.product.override", "Carnivore");
user_pref("general.useragent.vendor.override", "Carnivore");
user_pref("window.navigator.appName.override", "Carnivore");
user_pref("window.navigator.product.override", "Carnivore");
user_pref("window.navigator.productSub.override", "13.7");
user_pref("window.navigator.vendor.override", "Carnivore");
user_pref("window.navigator.vendorSub.override", "13.7");
Strange.
I've never seen Talkback crash, and, with SessionSaver, Firefox crashes don't mean I lose all my work.
Want a high quality FOSS RTS game? Try Warzone 2100!
To me, the issue isn't whether more or fewer people use firefox. The issue is whether or not all of the big browsers follow standards.
As long as that's the case, I can run my browser on linux, and I'll have access to the web.
I think that people tend to downplay the value that open source products have as disciplining forces for prorprietary companies.
Firefox is forcing IE to improve on features and security, and by all accounts the next version is going to be much better on standards. That's the victory.
I belive that it will take a lot of effort for FireFox to make inroads in the industry. It is necessary to look at, and be realistic about, some of the problems which FF has encountered so far.
First of all, the amount of udpates which have been released over the last little while, are trying - even to die-hard users of the product. I believe that better QA is necessary. More effort has to be put into the software update process as well. I know that "a better installer" is coming. But, so far, you have to uninstall, and re-install the entire thing. That's just not very slick. Remember: users see something like Windows Update - and I have to admit - it's slick, painless, and automatic. Gates & Co. have put a lot of effort and thought into that one. FF auto-update is not. In fact, simply telliing me that there are updates available does not really solve any problems.
I am glad that FF is the knight in shining armour, which has decided to support all of the W3C standards to the tee. Unfortunately, IE has not. The reasons for this lack of support, are beyond the scope of this comment - you can read about the speculation all over the web. The net effect is that browsing those sites with FF, yields unpredictable results. Instead of griping about it, we should just learn to imitate what IE does (badly), but at the same time, definitely do it more securely.
The rally which has caused FF to become so popular is great - we just need to ensure that it's for the right people. Your average person does not really care what browser they use, or whether the browser was built by the Open Source Movement or not. They just want to see the information they requested.
I think that in order to make a difference, we'll have to think outside of the box - we'll have to truly ask some people out there what it would take to make the switch. The crux of the matter is, we could find out (quite harshly), that there is no interest in a second (or alternative) browser for the rest of the world. Perhaps (as was indicated in other posts), this is something of a niche market, and it may just remain as such. We also have to remember that, for the average person change is hard, the path of least resistance prevails. We, somehow, have to get on that path.
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.
87% of the time I am using Firefox on Windows & on Linux.
8% of time I HAVE to use IE. (Media/Updates)
Occasionally for compat testing I use KonQueror, Glinks and links (or if I am stuck in a console).
Sorry Opera, Don't feel the need.
All of these numbers are meaningless to anyone but me. Same goes for their numbers. Write your sites to the standards and who cares what accesses it, just be happy anyone did.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
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.
The standard Slashdot response will be that it isn't FF's problem that web sites don't have valid code or "follow standards". However, that's not the point. The quality of web site code is not something that will ever be perfect, and a browser should fail them gracefully as (yes) IE does. Mozilla Org cannot demand that every web site be perfect, it's just not reasonable.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
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.
Internet Explorer is default set to download a page, even if its in the cache. This of course causes internet explorer to appear to be doing more than a browser that uses the cache, when both are doing the same user speed...
Also if you are downloading firefox via wget then you may find you downloaded a windows version regardless if you were wanting a linux version. They may have fixed this "default" oversite by now, but it went on for several versions of Firefox.
In short, Internet explorer isn't as popular as MS marketing has caused to appear and Firefox downloads are not as high if you were counting intentional downloads....
Also missing from a legacy browser is a spelling checker. There is a good one available for FireFox as a downloadable add-on extension.
Now I don't look like an illiterate idiot because of misspelled words in my messages. With a legacy browser, I would have to write the message, load MS Word, cut-and-paste the message text to Word, do a spelling check, and cut-and-paste the corrected text back to the message box on the legacy browser.
No more. I hope to never have to go back to the legacy browser.
Cliff: Hello, this is Mozilla tech spt, how can I help you? Biff: Yeah, this is Biff over in marketing. We've just gotten word of a market shift due to a bug call the ..., um,... wait a minute, it's here somewhere...oh yeah, it's the "User Agent Switcher" bug. You guys can fix that quick, can't ya.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Your figures seem low compared to other monitoring sites. And what do they say about browser use in Europe, Australia and Asia? Here are some figures from XTI check the link for details. I expect to see use in Asia and South America climb very soon. Australia 14.4 % Europe 14.1% North America 11.8% Asia 5.8% South America 5.2% Africa 4.3% some of the national figures in Europe are very high Finland 31% Germany 24.5% Tcheque Rep 22.4% http://www.xitimonitor.com/etudes/equipement10.asp
No, you're not missing anything. Firefox gobbles up insane amounts of memory and the process hangs much more often than Safari (as measured by Apple's developer tools), not to mention the ghastly interface and dork-centric design. If you like all these things, Firefox is for you; otherwise, you'll probably be happier with Safari.
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.
Who is this "we" that everyone keeps talking about?
What did "we" do, and what did "we" get in the whole firefox process?
These firefox-linux-i-hate-m$ nuts talk like every single one of them helped create firefox!
on my country's independance day, i use a phrase to make a point:
"Just because you wear khadi - that doesn't make you an Indian"
"Just because you use firefox, doesn't make you any smarter than me"
Let's put the whole Firefox thing in perspective. A solid, alternative browser, with some great ideas (user-created plugins) - but they've also had the advantage to study IEs shortcomings over the years. Let's look forward to a good browser competition (not a fucking "war") where, hopefully, the winner is the end-user.
If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants.
It can probably still be regarded as noise though.
If these statistics are compiled from the User Agent string in the browser these numbers probably aren't accurate. If my browser is polled many times it will show I am running IE6 on Windows XP. I haven't used a Windows OS since 1995! I use a "User Agent" switcher program so several critical non-compliant web sites (banking for one) will operate properly. I don't see any slow down in the adoption of Mozilla/Firefox browsers in my travels.
It seems more to be anti-(Apple-zealotry) rather than (anti-Apple) zealotry. For instance, here on Slashdot most anti Apple sentiment is expressed through jokes about sexuality. That's more like button pushing than serious arguments against the platform.
Also, your personal experience regarding browser preference has almost nothing to do with the usage of the browser. For example, I work in a software firm with about 70 employees, and only 6 of us use firefox regularly. In my experience, people just don't care about what browser they use, as long as it works. In the wide world, however, my experience means nothing.
I do agree with your contention, however. Safari seems to be vastsly underrepresented, unless the Apple market share is a lie.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
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.
Firefox's market share falling has really made me sad. It was only last month that it was reported that its market share was growing month on month. I can only think of three possible explanations, the first is the most obvious, that the browser market for tech savvy users has been saturated. Or, that a lot of these tech savvy users are trying out the beta version of Internet Explorer 7 which as we all know contains legendry tabbed browsing (could this be their solution to bringing back users won over by Firefox?). Or it is of course possible that with growing sales of new Windows PCs the market is being diluted with 'run of the mill' uneducated browser users!
Let's just hope this doesn't turn into a lasting trend....
I bet I'm adblocking NetApplications' servers. It would surprise me if that's a non-trivial variable in the mix, though.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I was thinking "crash" in the looser "application stops working, or is perpetually busy, or suddenly disappears, or the mouse and keyboard stop responding, or the machine locks up, or the machine bluescreens (or panics), or exhibits blatant non-expected behaviour" definition.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
My Machines have not slipped up on their firefox share, they are 100% fox today, just like they were many moons ago.
Check journal for info on Anti-TextBook, an idea by me.
It's summer time and even though I usually use Firefox and Opera (for email), the only way to use (fully) the music.yahoo.com and radio.yahoo.com sites is to use IE, since Firefox won't properly render them (at least since version 1.00 according to bugtraq).
So, in the summer I turn on the radio and let my son watch videos cause he's not in school - which means a lot more IE usage than usual.
Fix the bug and numbers will skyrocket.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
At work, they did a mass purge of all firefox on all systems. The head IT guy had heard that firefox has openings. So he wanted everybody to run MSIE as the more secure browser. He should have been fired for being a total idiot.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Why does Firefox's copy and paste always break on Windows? I often can't copy and paste stuff from Firefox and vice versa.
Same with GAIM, what's the deal?
The first time your average users hit a site that doesn't work with Browser X (be it Mozilla, Firefox, Safari, Amaya or whatever), they will try the first other browser available, which is likely to be IE. And then they'll never look back until they encounter pages that won't work in IE.
It's unfortunate, and arguably isn't the best thing the users can do, but as long as there's enough sites out there that require IE, users will switch to IE, even from "better" browsers.
Exactly. My son wants to watch streaming music and video on yahoo.com - it's summer - the music.yahoo.com and radio.yahoo.com sites don't work in Firefox - but they work in IE.
So in the summer he uses that.
Fix the bug and maybe you'll get the users. Whine about Noone Loves Me and people will ignore your excuses and switch anyway.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I went to my parents house one day, and saw my sister using my parent's Linux desktop.
She had opened up Crossover Office, installed IE in Linux, and was using that to explore the web.
I was flabbergasted. Shes not terribly computer literate.
She knew how to find Crossover Office?
She installed IE?????
She skipped over Firefox for IE.... On Linux?????
I didn't know whether to be angry or happy.
Showing the power and flexibility of Linux by using a piece of software I abhor. Oh....the conflicting zealotry.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
IE6 has a popup blocker as part of the browser, has for like a year now. So I don't know how old this cut and paste is, but it's seriously misinformed.
Really? It's in the View Objects list. Sort by cookie.
I'm not sure what you're trying to do, but this seems more of a case of inexperience than a feature. Mozilla's is a little bit easier to find, but it also provides less information and doesn't appear to let me easily view the contents of the cookie.
And of course there are none for Mozilla, because it's really super secure and you don't need to worry about patching or anything.
*snark*
Yep. Because they also sell a lot of server and development tools which make use of the internet. As such, they develop the browser to promote new technologies made available to developers...
But out of curiousity. Have you ever stopped to wonder why Mozilla has spent so much time and money on a product that they give away for free?
Is it to fight Microsoft, or is it to introduce new technology which makes the user and developer experience better? Frankly, I think it's the latter... Netscape tried the Former and failed.
What browser you use doesn't matter. Just like it doesn't matter what car you drive, or what golf club you want to use.
Is 0.64% of users switched to Opera.
Forrum support may also be a reason for many to have IE. I personally use firefox and i love it for its features, but when Im browsing forums Posted dates are all wrong. It seems to add 1 day to the date posted. Now is that a feature or what? FF Tells me what will be posted tomorrow! The sad thing is that the fix for this problem is to leave IE open in the background and FF will show the correct dates. :|
If the situation has stabilized with an 85% market share for Microsoft, that's very bad, because it means that Firefox will continue to be a niche. Developers will continue to test their apps against IE and then tell you it's your own stupid fault for running a "nonstandard" browser.
This is supposed to be Firefox's easy time, when IE hasn't been updated in a while and is still obviously full of bugs. If IE 7 comes out and is less buggy and less dangerous, it'll get even harder to convince users to switch to Firefox.
This should be an inflection point, where we see if people are willing to do the minimal but nonzero effort to get a browser other than IE on their computers. If that number turns out to be 10%, that's too bad. I'd really hoped for something closer to 40%, given how terrible IE is.
The only good news is that I don't trust these studies very far, so I'll hold out until at least next month before getting depressed.
Firefox DOES use more memory and I consider that a problem, however let's not get on firefox's case about this. Other OS X apps use just as much memory (Proteus) and hang just as much (Finder, just try searching for files with the Kind > Other entry). Also, Firefox is THEMEABLE. You know what that means? It means you can change how it looks, and I have seen a few good aqua-based themes for it. As for the interface design issues, could you be a bit more specific? The latest release fixes many Aqua inconsistencies and the main browsing window functions a lot like Safari's (less the brushed metal appearance and square buttons). In effect, I can think of other great apps that hang, use a lot of memory and have a "ghastly interface and dork-centric design": Unreal Tournament 2004. However it is a great game, and the Unreal engine is one of the best out there (in MY opinion, I don't want to start a flame war or big discussion on this). People don't shun it for high memory usage, hanging, or the ghastly interface.They love it for its rendering and physics engines. For the same reason why people love Firefox over IE.. It supports PNG transparencies! Woah! So, next time, think for a while before you post something like that about a great app. Also, you are sure it is like that, you may want to try installing a version higher then 0.9.0.
However....Has any computer company thought (as a value added feature) of including Firefox on all machines shipped out the door. Or is this a EULA violation that whould cost them their OEM privs with Micro$oft?
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
What is the accuracy and reliability of any of these market share tests? Perhaps a previous poll gave a result in the high end of the margin of error and this one gave on the low end. You can't follow these polls as if they were actually accurate. Any one poll is unreliable, it is a series of polls which can show a trend.
You do, sure, and I do (actually on Windows it's Foobar rather than Winamp), but most people really don't see the need to use anything other than the defaults that come with their computer.
If it ain't broke, why fix it - and even if it is, people still need to know that there is an alternative and how to install it.
Both among friends and family and at work, the majority are still IE users. Hardly anyone on XP has disabled XP's attempts to process zip files (which it seems to do really badly), and most still use "default" installs of WMP or Real (with whichever was installed last grabbing all the extensions).
As long as it works "well enough", they're willing to put up with it. Maybe they've tried to install software that "looked attractive" before but it turned out to be riddled with spyware - so they're resistant to change.
For a web browser that could die in the alley, get rejected before even been looked at. It's 5% but that is a lot. It's a matter of seeing the glass 5% full and filling up...
Java Oracle Linux Enthusiast
Yeah, actually, I've tried the latest version of Firefox and the interface still sucks. All the Cocoa elements are still faked, and badly at that. Buttons don't pulse, fonts are subtly different, translucency is wrong, contextual menus don't blink, and there's a million other little look-and-feel details that serve to make Firefox feel like nothing more than a reanimated corpse of a real Cocoa app. Text boxes are a pain in the ass to work with (no spell checking, perverse linewrapping). The preferences dialog is a fucking sheet, of all things, and it's badly organized. Passwords aren't stored in Keychain and proxy settings aren't inherited from System Preferences. Want me to go on?
As for themes, that's a poor substitute for designing the fucking thing right to begin with. I don't want to have to apply a skin in Firefox in order to make it less ugly, especially considering that no skin I've ever seen can cover up its battered pizzaface of flaws.
Ooh, sorry, I just get worked up about this for some reason.
Perhaps a Slashdot Interview with Tim Berners-Lee (Director of the W3C) would be in order?
After all, "One of W3C's primary goals is to make these benefits available to all people, whatever their hardware, software, network infrastructure, native language, culture, geographical location, or physical or mental ability." Quote came from this page.
To that end, a web designer (especially that of a company) should be encouraged to comply with standards put forth by an organization like the W3C. A compliance program (logo based?) should be initiated which would recognize sites that are accessible and fully functional from any modern platform. A check and balance approach, by way of complaint forms (or something along those lines), would be ideal to keep sites from straying after being awarded the logo. A major campaign to distribute open-source/W3C compliant web design tools would be encouraged. An online workshop could be put forth to help web admins during the transition.
Wishful thinking? Perhaps. But I think interviewing the director of the W3C and having the response widely publicized on the 'net would definitely garner some attention.
2) pop-ups have started to appear which somehow bypass Firefox popup blocking.
3) many Web pages do not work correctly on Firefox, or specifically require IE, or have browser checks which recognise some Netscapes but not Firefox.
I am not advocating for IE; I use Firefox for about 90% of my browsing.
How do you measure market share: based on pages downloaded? pages downloaded excluding 'bots? Bytes downloaded? Analog gives me numbers that vary by a couple of percent depending what I am counting.
The only reason I use FireFox at all is for tabbed browsing. Since IE 7 will have tabbed browsing and whole lot more, there will be no reason for me to use FireFox anymore. I expect a lot of people (not the Microsoft haters, of course) will feel the same way. I have no spyware problems with IE because I keep my system well protected using a combination of Microsoft's Antispyware and a couple of others for backup. Plus IE gives me 100% compatibility with all the sites I visit (there are still some sites that don't work with FireFox).
This is not a significant drop by any means. And with only the difference between one month and another, there is not enough data here to have any meaning.
Hell this may just be as a result of school letting out and more kiddies who don't know any better doing more browsing with IE during the summer months.
For what it's worth, my company's website, which receives about 3 million hits a month and has a steady stream of business and consumer visitors (almost always adults), saw an increase in Firefox use from 17.3% to 17.7%. This is also about the 18th month in a row we've seen a drop in IE traffic.
Firefox lost 0.64% of the users, while Microsoft IE gained the same amount
;-)
OK...I admit it...I was on vacation, and they only had IE at the resort I was at.
0.64% of the web browser market? WTF?
I tried for 5 years to come up with a clever sig...only to realize that I am not clever.
Why? Brianiac: NetApplications report on Firefox stats
IDG has acknowledge the problem: Brianiac: IDG accepts criticism of Firefox stats article
Why? Brianiac: NetApplications report on Firefox stats
IDG has acknowledge the problem: Brianiac: IDG accepts criticism of Firefox stats article
That's really scraping for some reason not to use Firefox over IE.
Not to mention that Bill probably gave away 100,000 copies of IE to some kids in Africa or something as part of his "charity" work just to boost the numbers...
It's ridiculous the way the tech press seizes on every little change in a situation to prognosticate on how the entire industry has been changed.
Somebody drops a percentage point, they're doomed forever in the minds of the IT press. Somebody goes up a percentage point, they're going to dominate IT forever and we all have to change our ways to implement whatever it is yesterday.
Wannabe journalists who would like to be covering Iraq but you could get killed there so instead they cover Intel vrs. AMD.
Reminds me of "since 9/11, the world has changed". Bullshit. Nothing has changed except people's fantasies about reality - and they fluctuate with the wind.
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Some of us care :)
I try my best to get my stuff working on:
* Firefox
* Opera 7/8
* KHTML
* IE 5/6
* Text
* WebTV / PDA
* 800/600 resolution.
* Linux / Windows XP / 98
What many people don't realize is that the "minority" are usually pretty faithful and grateful customers.
I only can't do more cos of my own limitation and budget (wished I could test on IE for Mac and Safari also - no Mac-minis for me yet).
There's a shocking dark secret to the FF-IE battle, in which IE (through experience) wins. Every time IE has a bug, you only have to patch the offending file(s). Every time FF has a bug, you have to download the entire browser and reinstall.
FF's stats should quote the total number of downloads divided by the number of bugfix releases. 1.0? Download. 1.01? Download. 1.02? Download. Etc. A loyal FF user would count as seven downloads for production versions. Can you imagine IE's user stats if it counted every patch download as a new 'install'? It would be several times the population of the earth.
...everyone's just testing their newly downloaded copy of IE7 this month. Look for the climb to resume in September. :-)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Set your comment threshold to 5, and all you see is the token "I for one welcome," post, and some goatse link purporting to be an article mirror.
Oh slashdot, how do I love thee...
I suspect at least some of these numbers can be attributed to people playing with IE7 in MS Vista Beta 1. Although it wasn't released until late in the month, so that certainly couldn't be the sole reason for the switch.
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The only reason to flip to IE is because it handles printing better than Firefox. Add a right mouse button, selected text printing option that works and there will be no looking back.
Hmm, Firefox downloads continue to climb exponentially, and yet Firefox's browser share dropped this month. About a month ago, the Honeymonkey project, which is a few thousand MSIE browsers hammering the internet as fast as possible, went online. Gee, any connection?
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I think it has to be the exorbitant amount of memory that Firefox uses.
The coffee cup logo on a PC has a really bad rap in some circles.
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After reading this, I realized that I didn't finish converting all of my users over to FF. I spent some time today making sure that the non-exec's can't use IE on their workstations. I'm sure I'll have one or two sales guys that can't access their favorite poker sites tomorrow, but it won't take much to convince them that "the internet is up" and that "that site is down because it doesn't work on anyone else's computer either".
If they complain, I'll casually mention the Cyberguard logs and how I need to go review them for non-work-related activity.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
This is one reason I use Opera over FireFox. I do have lots of time, but I prefer to spend it on what I want to do rather than tinkering with my browser. That said, I still have to do some work because of the IE only sites, bad browser sniffing, and my enjoyment of blocking ads using proxomitron.
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Is there a measured study about why Firefox slipped? If none, there is no point is speculating, be it bugs discovered in FF or IE becomming stronger.
...that since installing 1.0.6 I can no longer open new browser windows, use Adblock, passwords sometimes fail to enter, and sometimes other extensions don't work when I start Firefox. Also, I never have been able to remove the extension (of no known purpose, which I don't remember installing) called DOM Inspector. I may as well say all of this here, since I'd have better luck becoming immortal by immolating myself than trying to get fixes specific to me from Mozilla. And, no, my computer is not infested with [known] viruses. Still better than IE though!!!
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Firefox is good I admit, far better than IE. I'm an Opera user, but Firefox is second in line. I used to use Mozilla (before Firefox), but I found it too unstable. MS could probably increase the amount of IE users a lot if they included tabbed browsing, though a lot of us wouldn't care. Anyway, I think it's great that average users are trying other software. Now if only we could make Lynx mainstream....
Would the realse of tabbed browsing for IE have any thing to do with this?
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I, for one, know that I've been lax in introducing the Firefox browser to my IE-using brethren of late. That could be, however, due to the fact that everyone's sick of hearing about how great Firefox is, from me and others in my group.
I wonder how many others are in the same boat. We're in the browser business where I work, and our product managers have expressed a certain weariness with the hardcore Firefox crowd, simply referring to them as "the Jihad".
Not sure what the point of your site is but it sure as hell won't validate and is littered with cruddy table markeup, extraneous/missing elements and invalid attributes!
Perhaps, but it renders correctly in IE, Opera, Firefox and lynx, which is what I meant by 'proper' way to create a site. Most of my sites aren't perfect, few people have the time or inclination to create sites that are, and I don't have a problem with that. The issues I have
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I don't use winzip and winamp.
For winzip, I find the build in funcitonality in XP way superior. It doesn what I need, and nothing else.
For winamp, I loathe Media Player. It has a totally bloated and confusing interface. I just never have gotten around to exploring the market for alternatives.
I do use FireFox though.