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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.