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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.
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.
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
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
This is statistical noise, pure and simple. There is no story here.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
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.
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...
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?
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.
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)
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.
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 had that same problem. One way to fix it is to go to plugins in the options and disable the PDF support, then anytime a website tries to load a PDF firefox will download it and open it on the external PDF reader instead.
If you say this variation is statistical noise, which is very probably is, why are you still reporting it as news???
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.
RE "... as Bogus and Firefox flaunting 80 million downloads"
No, the count is correct: they downloaded 80M copies, what is made of the figure is in dispute.
Next I was just hearing via my son that there is supposed to be one count per IP address, though we updated and downloaded multiple times for several machines we represent only one download. If that is correct then we have been under counted. Previously I had heard that a Window's machine that updates was not counted as a download, but a fresh install was.
Now if you really have a critical mind, you might recognize the ambiguity of the download count. If you had ANY scientific experience you would recognize that even precise, physical measurements have surprising few significant figures (a measure accuracy). Assuming you have such knowledge you would address my point about the overblown claim of precise measurement from a very imprecise data set.
Address that issue if you can.
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.
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...
Editorial fairness, perhaps? When the market share goes up by 0.64% everyone decries the editors for not publishing the other side of the coin. When they publish the bad news about our beloved products we should ask ourselves (and our development communities) "Why?" rather than "Who cares?"
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
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.
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.
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");
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.