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Firefox Achieves 10% Global Market Share
sebFlyte writes "ZDNet is reporting that according to OneStat's latest figures, Firefox has passed the 10 percent market share mark. At 11.5 percent, it's still got a long way to go to reach Internet Explorer's 85.5 percent, but it's heading in the right direction. The report also mentions some odd geographical variation: Firefox's market share is almost three times higher in the US than UK, for example." From the article: "...other companies have noticed a decline in Firefox over recent months. Last month, Web applications provider NetApplications reported that the open source browser's share of the market dropped by 0.7 percentage points from August to September. Although this wasn't the first time that Firefox' share has dropped, RedMonk analyst James Governor said he believes the overall trend for Firefox is upwards."
At 10% FireFox is starting to become interesting to malware producers. I guess I'll switch to Opera.
I disagree. It's very rare but every so often I come across a site that requires the use of IE. The larger the marketshare of Firefox grows, the less that will happen.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
No, it's not sad. Allowing employees to install unsupported/unmanaged applications is a critical mistake from a security perspective. By doing so, if and when vulnerabilities are found they must leave it up to the employee to make sure they've applied that patch. Clearly not a good idea.
And forcing them to use IE isn't? :p
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
For web developers the important thing is that we've passed the first inflection point: that is, companies can no longer afford to ignore Firefox.
But we're still a long way from the second inflection point: where can stop hacking to support IE (6, maybe 7). That's not happening for a long time, but if you look back 5 years, supporting IE 6 is really a piece of cake compared to IE 5, NS 4, etc.
According to somefakewebsite.com, which was created just a few moments ago as an imaginary source of invalid figures for the entertainment of others (or isifeo, as we like to call it here at randomslashdotcomments inc.), The number of windows viruses has decreased by another 1% due in part to the decreased use of web browsers that let websites install software on your computer, and also due to Norton's virus writing labs not keeping up with their anti-virus labs. (but marketing is right on schedule!)
It is also interesting to note that the linux virus ratio has increased to an estimated 0.01% this month, which is partly due to the windows users that recently switched to linux and installed the Bonzai Buddy via Wine, and the number of pop-tarts in my office has just decreased by 1 serving. ... make that 2 servings.
On a more serious note, I wonder what the market share ratio would be like if Internet Explorer wasn't part of the windows operating system.
"Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed." -C.S. Lewis
Why? Because there exists no proof that all parties involved in market share tracking can agree on. I will not be surprised if anoher party comes up and says something to the effect..."not so fast Firefox..."
Take my bank for instance. Their online banking doesn't work all that well in any other browser than IE.
Not all banks are like that, and you can always switch banks (or threaten to switch.)
I bank with TD/Canada Trust. I use their internet banking every day, and it works perfectly in Firefox.
Let them know that "Use IE" is not an acceptable answer.
Web applications provider NetApplications reported that the open source browser's share of the market dropped by 0.7 percentage points from August to September
I couldn't verify it in TFA, but my first thought is that millions of kids go back to school around the end of August and begin using a browser which they haven't chosen. So it probably doesn't mean anything except that schools tend to not be early adopters.
I am a free(dom) software user and fan. However, whenever I hear talk about ___ software being a revolution I always dismiss it as hype. It is not revolution until a piece of software has at least double digit market share.
I am happy to see that in the case of Firefox, that is is NOW, indeed, a revolution.
Steve
Not that it'd be the sanest way to secure anything, but if IE is locked down to use a proxy, but port 80 is still open outbound, then Firefox is getting around the security policy, as flawed as it may be.
Alternately, if the user can set up a proxy of his own, SSH tunneled outbound, having the ability to use that proxy in Firefox vs. a locked down IE means that he can violate the security policy as well.
Managing risk is the company's business. Part of managing risk is knowing what the risk is, and accounting for it. If the company's done that and is still using IE, that's the company's choice.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
However, this still might be bad news for Microsoft, and may lead to a drop in IE use anyhow. The reason is, if they're supporting Firefox, then they're more likely to be following real standards, and paying attention to their cross-browser incompatibility. This means fewer pages will be IE only, and pages developed for Firefox (and therefore more towards real standards) are very likely to work in any standards-compliant browser.
10% might be enough that poorly-written IE-only pages will be viewed as a problem. Once there's no penalty for using a non-IE browser, we may see more people switching.
At 10% FireFox is starting to become interesting to malware producers. I guess I'll switch to Opera.
That's what's good about web standards. It's becoming increasingly possibly for you to make a choice like that because content less and less tied to one browser.
FF and Opera are both commited to implementing and supporting web standards like XML, SVG, and CSS. The bigger share they get, the more reason people have to develop standards-compliant content.
A virtuous cycle.
I think this is the wrong attitude for proponents of open source software.
OSS is not in competition with closed-source software and thus we shouldn't care about market share. We should simply be happy that our products are useful and successful in general.
If anything, the real reason to enjoy an increased market share is that it implies an increased total usage, and that this in turn implies that more people will be willing to participate actively in its development and extension.
(Not that I don't enjoy seeing the evil empire[tm] shudder in fear...)
Hmm.... "download this browser to view our site" tends to be viewed with suspicion where porn sites are concerned. So I hear.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
You know, it's exactly that attitude of "world domination" that got the Web into the mess it is today. Firefox is not for everyone. I don't want to see it become "what you have to use whether you like it or not", because we've been down that road.
What is nice to see is that users of alternative browsers do make more than single-digit percentages, which of course means they're harder to dismiss. If Apple, The Mozilla Foundation, and Opera can all assure they take the high road at all times with regards to fixing rendering/parsing/etc bugs, MS won't be guaranteed to be the same, but it'll certainly make life easier on web designers.
If designers have to somehow work around 3, 4, 5 different browsers' rendering habits and bugs- things will be a disaster, they'll be frustrated and tempted to just support IE and "the next biggest fish", etc.
Also- I hope all the non-IE browsers are now 'shipping' by default with their own browser strings, not set to pretend to be IE...
Please help metamoderate.
I onced worked at such a place, IE/Outlook only and had to remove FF/TB when I installed it. The problem is , every time a worm was on the loose, these guys would lose half the pcs in the network and kept sending emails about not opening emails containing so-and-so subject.
Having a strict software control policy is good if only it helps in achiving the target goal of a secure and stable network. Otherwise it preety much works like DRM, locks out honest folks and the pirates are not even affected by it.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
Therefore, if we want a free web where any browser can allow users to interact with any page properly, we, as customers, need to choose non-Microsoft browsers for our daily needs. The point isn't to run MS out of business, but to gain enough hits on major web sites to force Microsoft into standards-complaince.
"Web applications provider NetApplications reported that the open source browser's share of the market dropped by 0.7 percentage points from August to September."
Sure... it's the new school year, new computers ship with IE installed, I am not surprised at all.
\u262D = \u5350
Personally, I find zealotry towards any browser annoying. Fact is that people use different browsers. It's not rocket science to code cross-browser and still be standards compliant.
I mean, yeah, Firefox is vastly superior to IE, but I wouldn't make a website that was incompatible with either.
Excuse my speling.
Making The Bar Project
Agreed, that's all we need. We go to all the trouble of promoting a superior alternative that makes the market competitive again, and what do we do? Push for a new monopolist? No way.
I am optimistic, but if firefox can get around 25-50% of the market we could see more people using open source products. I think with many Open source products that are not popular is the fact they are not so easy to use. Firefox has figured that out. They have even made it easier in Firefox 1.5 by having automatic updates and force pop-ups into tabs. If the rest of the open source community can look at firefox and take some ideas like ease of use people may start going toward open source other than people like myself. Some already have like Novell and IBM putting a nice GUI to many difficult applications to make it easier for everyday people to admin or use as a desktop.Hay, If i can get my girlfriend into open source like firefox and thunderbird i think their might be a new era of applications coming from open source development.
If you get IE it work, it's most likely locked down so that all Internet sites run with ActiveX disabled, often up to the point where it pops up that damn dialog when you go to a flash site. It gets patched regularly, especially recently, so it's pretty tough. Also, most of the dodgy sites get blocked by some intranet content filter, as to phishing emails by a spam filter. All this is assuming a competent network admin of course.
It's the people running it at home, with all sites in the lowest security zone, no patches and no filtering that tend to get screwed.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
the overall trend for Firefox is upwards.
That's the point. There are too many people in the news business today who only went to one week of statistics in university, the one where they were told how to "lie with statistics" (and yes, my prof had a special lecture about that in his curriculum).
Posting "Firefox down 0.7%" one month, and another "Firefox share declines again" a few months later is misleading and dishonest if it refers to two dips in an overal upwards trend. Everyone who's ever done statistics knows that very few graphs are monotonously rising, and even the strong rising ones have some dips in them.
The overal longterm trend can be calculated and extrapolated, and it's much more important than what it's been up or down this week, except on the stock exchange where you can actually make money on a moment-by-moment trading basis.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
That's pretty lame.
All it really shows is that you can't do what most other sites can, which is design a website that works at least pretty well in most browsers, and by making the message large and bold, it seems more important than your services and you just come off as either too arrogant or too lazy to find a few little workarounds.
After all, at first glance, the only things that seem to be "buggy and broken" are a few alignment problems that anyone who spent a few days learning HTML and CSS1 could have fixed.
If there is actually some part of your site that simply doesn't work, I'd understand if you put a small note on that page, but telling people that the web browser that came with their brand new computer is old/obsolete just makes you look as foolish to them as the sites that tell me I don't have the required browser/plugins installed when I know my version of Firefox and installed plugins can handle the site do to me.
I like your thinking about your site, but for people who are using a standards compliant browser but who CHOOSE to use their own stylesheet (for accessibility reasons etc) they will get this big dopey message.
I wonder how it would work for blind access? Will the screenreader need to go through this block everytime unless specified?
I personally think a small footnote indicating "Built to standards, click here for more info" would be more professional (after all, you made space for the firefox and validator icons)
One other small note, you may actually be putting people off looking at your site by displaying such a big notice - I am lucky, I get to choose my own work browser, many others in a work environment are locked to the company default.
You might just be losing business because of it.
liqbase
Although I agree that IE7 will slow down the growth of firefox I doubt it will really diminish the current market share. Slightly better support for web features will cut a little bit out of the "it only works in IE" problem, and most of the new stuff in IE7 is in firefox, or a plugin. In the end a lack of new features combined with any possible previous bad IE experiences will keep the new FF users where they are.
In the future I see technologies like xul as "where things are going".(and yes microsoft has one too) HTML+Javascript is only going to get us so far, and although using the javascript to dynamically update pages can do some (comparatively) awesome things, it does not have the feel of a real solution to it. So if I were a web developer[1] I would start playing with these tools now to be ready in ~3-5 years when they become a preferable alternative.
[1] I am not a web developer. If you are one, and I sound like I don't know what I am talking about, that is probably because I don't.
Slashdot: Where anecdotes and generalizations can be freely substituted for facts, logic, or intelligence
The most popular browsers on the web are:
1. Microsoft IE 85.45 %
2. Mozilla Firefox 11.51 %
3. Apple Safari 1.75 %
4. Netscape 0.26 %
5. Opera 0.77 %
Is that the new l33t alphabet or something, because I don't see it.
Since when did 10% marketshare become anything close to a monopoly?
I disagree, why should the coder HAVE to do work arounds/fixes just to get his site to work with non standards compliant browsers?
Standards are there for exactly this reason, the only reason why people NEED to do work arounds etc, is because IE is so damn entrenched on the internet.
I aplaud the GP for his firm stance and I hope it doesn't affect him economically, although maybe a change of phrasing could make his IE visitors less put out.
cheers G
'By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes'
IE can be controlled under the Group Policy system of a Windows domain, setting proxies and controlling access to sites. It would be good if FireFox integrated into the Group Policy, it would speed its adoption.
There's a difference between declaring that your site doesn't work in one particular browser, and declaring that your site requires one particular browser. Fact is, IE is seriously flawed, from security to basic CSS, and the sooner people realise it and move to better browsers, the better it'll be for the web as a whole.
* Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konqueror, Mozilla/Seamonkey, Netscape, etc...
>As wierd as it may be to you, Firefox is the NON Standard browser until it gains the majority marketshare.
It's not "the" standard browser, but it is based on published "standards". The contention is that MS takes standards, then deviates from them just enough so that they can control and dominate it. If you have a browser in a dominant position, such as IE, deviating from established standards make those standards meaningless in the first place. Suddenly instead of having a democratic body determining how the web "works" with technologies like http, html, java, css, etc., MS takes their majority marketshare and uses it to their advantage by implementing those technologies, but just a little differently than they're supposed to.
Lazy web designers who only bother to ensure their page works in IE are not doing the world any favours.
I think you miss the GP's point: the site makes a statement by adhering to standards and subsequently not working with IE. Imagine how much of a better place the web would be, from a standards perspective, if all web designers did this.
Like it or not (and I certainly don't), IE is the de facto standard. We can whine about standards compliance until we're blue in the face (and believe me, I have), but the fact is that if your site doesn't work in IE, upwards of 85% of your potential visitors are excluded. Now, that may well not matter if it's just a personal vanity site, but for companies that's not a good idea.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
LOL, I got "insightful" and "flamebait" modded.
You're right: it isn't anywhere near a monopoly. I use Firefox myself and love it.
What I'm referring to are people who set their servers and code pages that to try to break IE on purpose. Most of IE's problems stem from Microsoft's monopoly status. Anyone on the monopolist throne will start to exhibit these flaws.
So 'defeating' IE isn't the goal, creating multiple browsers that are all solid, established competitors and are all innovative and standards compliant is the goal. You advance Firefox by helping contribute to its features and functionality, and by educating people about its advantages. Not by breaking the other guy's browser, as a couple on this thread have suggested.
Seriously, while FF reaching 10% is good news, we do need to avoid pushing for another monoculture. The world would be better off with a flock of browsers designed to work well (which included efficiently) for different people and different environments.
A flock of different browsers, all standards-compliant of course, would really help to avoid a situation where a single piece of malware can bring down zillions of machines.
And there are good technical reasons for wanting browsers designed differently. There are all sorts of special situations where one might want an unusual browser. Thus, lynx does pretty well for the visually impaired, and it's also a browser that can be run from scripts (since it doesn't do full graphics). A browser running on a handheld with a tiny screen is going to render things differently that something on a huge screen, and code that does both kinds of renderings is going to be inherently slower than code that's more specialized.
Lots of readers can probably give situations where they'd really like a browser that's unusual in some way. I know I can think of lots of things I'd like done differently from how FF does them.
So, good as firefox may be, we should treat its success as grounds for pushing for still more good browsers. Some may be based on FF. But we'd probably be even better off if they are independent code. Monocultures are dangerous, and should be consciously avoided.
Of course, right now we might start the anti-FF action by pushing for opera. OK; it's not open-source, which is a mark against it. But it's good, and the company is a bunch of nice guys (so far). They just made it ad-free. So everyone should grab a copy and start running up the server stats for it.
And use konqueror some more. Can it run on Windows yet? That'd be fun to foist on the MS crowd.
The ideal would be no browser over 10% of the stats.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.