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Firefox Usage Climbing In Europe
sebFlyte writes "ZDNet is reporting that, according to the most recent set of statistics from Web monitoring firm XiTi, Mozilla's most popular brower is now the browser of choice for one in five of Europe's surfers, at least at home. The fact that all the measurements were taken on a Sunday means that the figure isn't accurate for the whole market, though, since business PCs tend to have lower Firefox usage rates." From the article: "Other Web metrics companies produce more conservative estimates of Firefox' market share. In November, OneStat.com reported that Firefox had achieved a global market share of 11.5 percent, although it found that only 4.9 percent of people were using it in the UK."
There's a famous statistic on browser usage at w3schools.com, which is a decidedly pro-Microsoft site. They have Firefox at close to 25% in recent months, and they were quick to add a comment that this is probably not representative, because w3schools visitors are likely quite interested in the technology and likely to try out alternatives to the browser that comes installed with their operating system. Interesting, though, that most of those who do try it out seem to stick with it...
Yet another useless statistic.
Clearly, Google is the next Microsoft.
Is it just me or is this a BS Microsoftesque stat? Digging it up on a Sunday to me suggests that while they are looking to get a good sampling of home users they are also getting a sample that is likely skewed towards the geek crowd as opposed to a weekday sample when you'd get more non-technical people using the browser to surf the web for information to complete the tasks in their daily life. When I was living in France almost 9 years ago there wasn't much you could do on a Sunday commercially this may have changed though.
Bravo, Firefox.
We've always known that fire-breathing monster > 800 lb. gorilla. It just takes some time for the Old World to realize it.
It's complete truth. It's not even a suitably obfuscated statistic like many religions will use when they say "FASTEST GROWING."
Fucking worthless story. Bravo.
Last I checked, Firefox useage is increasing everywhere, not just in europe... When something makes sense, it grows in use quickly.
Also, downloads don't count all the uses, I know in my work enviroment, we downloaded it once, but its on over 500 machines.
My college requires people install it when they connect to the internet (and most of 'em use it once they've tried it).
So, where are the hordes of IE fanboys trying to kill off Firefox? Anyone have a more accurate number? It's gotta be higher than TFA says.
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
That is such FUD! To analyze any two languages, you have to take into account the various situations in which it might be used. Is a hammer better than a wrench? Depends on whether you want to drive a nail or turn a bolt. That being said, Python is better than Ruby in every real world circumstance I have ever seen. I can write programs faster in Python with less code, and they're more secure too. I have never once seen a program written in Ruby that was better/easier to write than in Python. Python has bigger libraries and a better user community than Ruby. Plus there's a larger install base of Python interpreters.
Long story short, if you want to be fair and compare apples to apples, Ruby loses to Python.
In the original French article, they do say that there is a little variation in Europe between the browser statistics on Sunday and those during the week, due to the tendency of businesses to be wary (of what they don't understand).
Look at the chart at the bottom of this page:
http://www.xitimonitor.com/etudes/equipement12.as
The variation is notable but not very much.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
... is not the precise market share, but that the market share is big enough so that sites can't afford to be IE-only any more. I really don't care if the market share of Firefox (and other Mozilla browsers) is 10%, 25%, or even 50% -- what I care about is that the sites I need to go to are standards-compliant and don't rely on crap like ActiveX. Ideally, I'd like to see several major browsers, using several different rendering engines, and a host of minor ones, none having more than 50%, all rendering sites that conform to W3C standards reasonably well, all competing with each other. Doesn't seem like too much to ask.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Having checked my website over the last few months, I was surprised at the statistics. Firefox has 56.15%, IE 17.48%, Mozilla 7.35% and the rest was Safari, Opera and even a few Netscape users! FF has done an incredible job thus far and I hope they continue to produce a great product. What has browser usage been like on your site?
http://religiousfreaks.com/> although it found that only 4.9 percent of people were using it in the UK
Fascinating. I never used firefox in the UK and I wouldn't have guessed that 4.9% of firefox' users did.
Sorry.
... since Firefox 1.5. Really, like Linus said, I can't stand Gnome 2.10 integration.
Konqueror is becoming better and better, and is really an alternative to firefox now
Ruby is for Chinamen and Wapanese.
I work for a company (A Canadian credit union) as a web-master.
While a more technologically-focussed person will likely use FireFox over Internet Explorer, I can give out with reasonable certainty, statistics that encompass a large sample size of people who fall across a broad spectrum of computer skill. Anyone with a bank account and the internet has likely at one time or another logged on to their bank to check out balances, pay bills, etc.
Looking at the statistics returned, I find:
90.89% use IE in all it's iterations
(97.81% of that use IE6, less than 1% per each preceding version)
6.82% use a version of Mozilla
(35.2% of that use 1.8, 29.48% use 1.7.12, 11% use 1.7.5)
1.26% use Safari.
We try to make sure that all customers have the ability to log in (It's kind of important)
"Anybody who tells me I can't use a program because it's not open source, go suck on rms. I'm not interested." (LT 2004)
Percentages all over Europe (in french, but the pretty pictures speak for themselves).
Not in itself all that meaningful, perhaps (other than that the average has now reached over 20% for Europe worldwide), but when you see the changes through previous editions:
...you get a pretty decent idea of the growth. (Anyone want to turn that into an animated gif?)
For the record, here's their map of the world, showing ~15.88% in the USA, and 18.60% in Australia. And finally, the difference between percentages during the weekend and during the week appears to be 0.05% (if I interpret that graph correctly)
Girls that shave their underarms are also one in five. We need more!
Took delivery at ork of 3 Dell small business PC things - They all had Firefox pre-installed which surprised me. It was an older version, but even so quite nice to see for a change.
This reminds me from yesterday's news.
Rather than the EU wasting resources on a Google clone, I'd rather see them investing in a browser (preferably FF, but any proprietary standards-compliant one works just as well). Of course with that line of thinking, I would hope they could also invest in Linux. If they're so afraid of an American company taking over the world and abusing its monopoly, they should start by helping its top, non-corporate-US, competitors.
Probably won't alter the results much, but I'm sure it impacts them some.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
38,4% Firefox users.
My other SIG is a Sauer.
In November, OneStat.com reported that Firefox had achieved a global market share of 11.5 percent, although it found that only 4.9 percent of people were using it in the UK.
A. 4.9 percent of all people use Firefox in the UK?
B. 4.9 percent of all Firefox users use it within the UK?
C. 4.9 percent of all people residing in UK use Firefox?
D. 4.9 percent of all internet users use Firefox in the UK?
E. 4.9 percent of all internet users in the UK use Firefox?
F. 4.9 percent of all Sunday morning internet users in UK use Firefox?
G. All of the above?
H. None of the above?
Only reason I think people use Firefox is its viral marketing... and like sheep, people follow. I just wish I had waited till Opera was free ;)
Its about mindshare. Firefox is popular with developers and innovators, because its a platform open to pluralistic innovation. Opera has done some things first and so have other browsers, but firefox can take the ideas from all of these browsers with a little elbow grease as well as new ideas. Why is firefox better than konqueror? Well it probably isn't better technologically (just as Linux probably isn't better than FreeBSD technologically), but it has been able to market itself well, it works on many platforms, and has a simple expansion system that allows hacks with a low entry cost. I think there is some elasticity when it comes to cpu cycles and memory, but you're welcome to claim sheep if it makes you feel better... Opera has had their share of marketing gimmicks, they just didn't work.
w3schools is most definitly not pro microsoft. Wherever did you get a silly idea like that? It'd make more sense for them to be pro firefox anyway, hs just look at the css documentation on the site - most of the cool stuff is supported by firefox but not ie of any version.
The reason so many companies use Internet Explorer is because Microsoft makes deals with them that forbid the use of any third-party software on the companies' networks. This was the case at my former company.
Technoli
I'm tracking browser and platform trends on a big Canadian government Web site. Firefox has an average of 9.21% of the market and is growing. Home usage is 14.72%. As we all know, browser types can easily be spoofed, but this at least gives you a hint on that W3School is pointed out the fact about its figures. And yes, I'm using Firefox myself, both at home and at work.
For what it's worth, here are the statistics for MagPortal.com (excluding search engine spiders and other browsers) for December 2005 compared to December 2004:
MSIE 6.0: 81.35% (down from 83.39% in Dec 2004)
Mozilla/5.0: 15.17% (up from 8.82% in Dec 2004)
MSIE 5.0 + 5.01 + 5.5: 2.75% (down from 7.22% in Dec 2004)
Mozilla/4.0: 0.75% (up from 0.56% in Dec 2004)
I have two different sites that I use Google Analytics to track traffic on. They target very different people and the results returned are very different.
:)
:)
Site #1 is WiTendoFi.com
It is a gaming site about finding other Nintendo players online.
1) Firefox 75%
2) IE 16%
3) The rest
Site #2 is CSpost.com (I work for them)
It is a web based store for a lot of housewares and such.
1) IE 75%
2) Firefox 11%
3) The rest
The difference is of course huge, but that 11% is up from around 7-8% last year...
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck
Deploying Linux in business environments, I haven't seen a site that absolutely required IE in a long time. Even the banks I deal with have long supported Mozilla and Firefox.
But, just for fun, last week I did a little experiment. I made a list of as many sites with embedded videos that I could, mostly news sites, and tested them against Konqueror and Firefox. I came up with 18 sites in total. The results were that eleven sites worked with both Konqueror and Firefox, three more worked in Firefox only, and only four had absolute requirements that precluded any Linux browser. These ranged from Flash 8.0, which doesn't yet exist for Linux, to ActiveX detection routines.
So, from a small, completely unstatistical sample of the most popular sites I could find, 77% were compatible with Firefox on Linux. 61% were compatible enough to work even in Konqueror. And of the sites that required IE, one was msnbc.com, and two were Viacom companies, mtv.com and vh1.com, that excluded Linux intentionally, citing "Windows DRM" as the reason.
For the tests, I used KMplayer and Xine as the video player, with both Real and Windows Media codecs. I needed the KMplayer plugin for Konqueror and the MediaPlayerconnectivity and User Agent Switcher extensions for Firefox.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Funny how there is a correlation between the wealtier countries and firefox use
It's the demography, stupid
By Mark Steyn
From: http://www.newcriterion.com/archives/24/01/its-the -demography/
Most people reading this have strong stomachs, so let me lay it out as baldly as I can: Much of what we loosely call the western world will survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most western European countries. There'll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands-- probably--just as in Istanbul there's still a building called St. Sophia's Cathedral. But it's not a cathedral; it's merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate. The challenge for those who reckon western civilization is on balance better than the alternatives is to figure out a way to save at least some parts of the west.
One obstacle to doing that is the fact that, in the typical election campaign in your advanced industrial democracy, the political platforms of at least one party in the United States and pretty much all parties in the rest of the west are largely about what one would call the secondary impulses of society--government health care, government day care (which Canada's thinking of introducing), government paternity leave (which Britain's just introduced). We've prioritized the secondary impulse over the primary ones: national defense, family, faith, and, most basic of all, reproductive activity--"Go forth and multiply," because if you don't you won't be able to afford all those secondary-impulse issues, like cradle-to-grave welfare. Americans sometimes don't understand how far gone most of the rest of the developed world is down this path: In the Canadian and most Continental cabinets, the defense ministry is somewhere an ambitious politician passes through on his way up to important jobs like the health department. I don't think Don Rumsfeld would regard it as a promotion if he were moved to Health & Human Services.
The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it requires a religious-society birth rate to sustain it. Post-Christian hyper-rationalism is, in the objective sense, a lot less rational than Catholicism or Mormonism. Indeed, in its reliance on immigration to ensure its future, the European Union has adopted a twenty-first-century variation on the strategy of the Shakers, who were forbidden from reproducing and thus could only increase their numbers by conversion. The problem is that secondary- impulse societies mistake their weaknesses for strengths--or, at any rate, virtues--and that's why they're proving so feeble at dealing with a primal force like Islam.
Speaking of which, if we are at war--and half the American people and significantly higher percentages in Britain, Canada, and Europe don't accept that proposition--than what exactly is the war about?
We know it's not really a "war on terror." Nor is it, at heart, a war against Islam, or even "radical Islam." The Muslim faith, whatever its merits for the believers, is a problematic business for the rest of us. There are many trouble spots around the world, but as a general rule, it's easy to make an educated guess at one of the participants: Muslims vs. Jews in "Palestine," Muslims vs. Hindus in Kashmir, Muslims vs. Christians in Africa, Muslims vs. Buddhists in Thailand, Muslims vs. Russians in the Caucasus, Muslims vs. backpacking tourists in Bali. Like the environmentalists, these guys think globally but act locally.
Yet while Islamism is the enemy, it's not what this thing's about. Radical Islam is an opportunist infection, like AIDS: it's not the HIV that kills you, it's the pneumonia you get when your body's too weak to fight it off. When the jihadists engage with the U.S. military, they lose--as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. If this were like World War I with those fellows in one trench and us in ours fac
It is reported that 99.3% of firefox users use firefox! OMGLOLBBQ!
i've always liked wondering the internet on my brower...
One of the reasons used to pimp firefox was that as the majority of people use IE, nasty people focus their nastyness towards the flaws in IE. Now it would obviously be ignorant to say there are *NO* holes in the security of the fox. Will the recent migration of users to firefox cause attacks to be aimed at it rather than IE? I did switch to firefox - mainly because I have witnessed IE die on a good few computers, and I like tabbed browsing, and the mouse gesture plugin. And although I dont know if I'm any more secure, it's not a huge issue - Hell I spend most of my time on unsecured wireless networks.
So, where are the hordes of IE fanboys trying to kill off Firefox?
Unfortunately, most corporate environments do not allow users to install their favorite browsers OR tools. These users are forced to use whatever software the IT/security groups have blessed. Most of these machines are probably created from images anyhow, so I'd guess that 95+% of corporate machines are still using IE.The firefox team has done a great job but there are still many glitches that are a pain at times:
- You have to partly disable video acceleration for some types of content to play properly in some pages.
- Huge memory usage. Memory leaks in some situations but I can't put my finger on what is causing it. (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5)
- Java plugins frequently cause problems.
- Random download manager crashes (Usually with many concurrent downloads, some of them stalled).
Plus some little irks like the fact that if a live bookmark goes down, firefox doesn't notify you and keeps displaying the old stories indefinitely.
It's great software, but it still has a little way to go before it's perfect.
Imperium et libertas
Autocracy and freedom
hopefully it will become best practise and be sent across London
Thumbs up people!
http://www.met.police.uk/saferneighbourhoods/
It's well known that Opera has a much higher usage share in Europe than in other parts of the world. I've seen the map showing Firefox usage per country, but I'd like to see what the IE, Opera, and Safari figures are as well. Maybe a map that turns each country into a pie chart with the top four?
I was actually surprised to spot firefox on the computers at the community college. I thought it was going to be like in high schools where Microsoft and Dell have contracts and you only get to use dell computers (might be new, might be ancient) and Internet Exploder. I am glad to see they are offering options. They are also offering Netscape.
I suspect the previous poster was referring to some of the DHTML tutorials on W3Schools, which IIRC include IE-only techniques. It's been a long time since I've gone there for anything other than stats, though, so I'm not entirely sure.
Firefox is the most unstable program commonly used with Windows.
in Korea, only old people use Firefox!
My other account has mod points.
I wish I had Mozilla's Brower. Have the /. editors ever heard of a spell check?
Google shows 173,000 hits on Firefox "memory leak".
There's also very, very serious CPU hogging.
If you had read the F*** article you would have noticed the similar data from a Monday. But no you wanted to mouth off rather than spend same amount of time actually finding stuff out.
Help fight continental drift.
I hate the way they have dumbed down the UI to make it more appealing to the mass market. I sure hope the seamonkey project works out.
Seamonkey is counted as Mozilla 1.8. Try the beta by the way Faster and better than FF.
Help fight continental drift.
i use it on one machine, but have downloaded it 500 times! :-D
I don't think that's fair at all. I love Firefox, but using it at the office sucks. The senior developers love their security to such an extent that their browser is useless for using the intranet at work. At home, I can choose not to use sites with ActiveX or whatever, and frankly I've never found this a problem. At work, I have no choice, and it's a showstopper.
The problem attitude is exemplified by the mess that is CAPS, introduced in Firefox 1.5. We used to be able to set a single preference in about:config to stop Firefox blocking links to local files. Now you have to set a whole range of options, and the senior devs are deliberately not advertising the equivalent of the old option because for some reason they think this will help us. Their super-new, highly-configurable system apparently can't handle the single most obvious configuration -- allow unchecked access only to machines on my own network -- or if it can, the docs are so cryptic that a whole group of us who looked, all experienced Firefox users, couldn't work out how to do it in ten minutes without basically listing every machine explicitly in the CAPS entry.
In any case, the result is the same either way: a well known problem for many business users remains inadequately addressed, Firefox developers continue to think they're doing the world a favour, and businesses continue to consider Firefox substandard regardless of its other merits. The solution is easy, but first the senior developers have to accept that they don't know their users' requirements better than their users.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
"Autriche" is that big old bird from africer that a buncha bubbas around here thought would take off as a meat critter for ranchin', but they charge too much for it and all them soopermarkets scared to take it on. Mostly used for boot leather, though I prefer rattler. In the olden days, the burly-q gals would prance around with them autriche feathers hidin' their private parts.
geez, this is a geek site, thought everybody new that stuff.
Everyone associated with Mozilla and Firefox seem to me to be in a deep state of denial. Why should someone spend hours trying things to make Firefox work? That's not necessary with Opera.
Also, even if I fix the memory problems, there are the CPU hogging and crashes.
Firefox needs to be fixed. Pretending otherwise is a mistake.
Again, Firefox is the most unstable program in common use. In my tests, the problems are the same under Linux. I've seen the same complaints from Mac people, too.
Hi Foxy FireFox, I Hope U Live Forever, because you are my little FireFox! And you are the greatest, And you are the spirit of a new beginning Like nothing ever happened, we can start all over again May the dark path of incompetence forever be in the shadow of my dear little FireFox!
With regards to memory leaks, it is not all Firefox' fault. I just updated Adblock this morning to the latest version and it definitely lowered Firefox memory footprint on my PC. Whereas Firefox memory usage would steadily grow to around 250 - 300 megs after a couple hours use before I installed the latest Adblock now it appears that it has stabilized to 100 - 125 megabytes, again after a couple hours use. Adblock even acknowledges it on their download area in Mozilla's extension site that the new version "mends memory-management for Firefox".
Second that. I've been jumping back and forth for a week now using both the latest FF 1.5 and Seamonkey 1.0 beta, going to my same normal places. The Seamonkey browser is remarkably *better* rendering pages and speed wise. Why this is so I can't say, but it is. Hats off to the devs there, they've done something right. I also appreciate a real traditional "preferences" section, not that..well, it's a "dumbed down" cutsie pie looking thing that FF uses for preferences. It's atrocious. FF devs, get real, lose the disney looking crap, it's embarassing. Let MS do that, they are good at it.
If Safari was available for PC, I would use it hands down
Any KDE based Linux live CD should have the Konqueror browser, which is very similar. Microsoft Windows is pretty much the only major desktop operating system where it's a pain to get a khtml browser working, as you have to install Cygwin, X, and KDE in order to run Konqueror.
"Pro-Microsoft" doesn't mean "Microsoft-only". I'm referring to a Microsoft-leaning bias on their site, which is always difficult to pin down to any single statement, but here's a number of observations:
I'm not saying that they are "evil" because of all that. But a Microsoft-leaning bias is undeniable if you ask me.
This is the original news piece (french) which shows much larger statistics. http://www.xitimonitor.com/etudes/equipement12.asp ?xtor=6/
-- life is such and it gets sucher and sucher --
Well, according to other news sites, they did a validation on the following monday, where the stats didn't change ...
As a webmaster, if someone has a problem with my site(s), I tell them to switch to Firefox. Then I ask them if they still get ice from a vendor for an icebox, or if they prefer the wonders of electrified refrigeration. Just me being a prick like that I'm sure has changed a couple of people over.
I'm tired of being "nice" to IE users. Call a retard a retard, and maybe they'll want to change, or maybe they'll get all huffy and leave. Either way, eventually nobody is gonna use the icebox and vendor anymore.
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
On Ukraine Opera has more users than all Gecko browsers, and that's in Europe too.
But Ruby on Rails is so Web 2.0. All hip people use it to deliver their AJAXified XHTML websites. Is Web 2.0 about TurboGears? Do people socially organize their tagged bookmarks on Spring-powered websites? No, Web 2.0 is not only too hip to be used in conjunction with a "the", it's also powered by Ruby. Because Ruby is the big thing, which it is because it's part of the Web 2.0 hype, which it is because it's the big thing. Ruby is so incredibly more en vogue than Python that I want to make a glorified link list with rounded corners whenever I think about it. You better stay away from me or you might infect me with your 1.0ness.
I mean, look at my coffee. This isn't just ergular coffee. It's French or something. You probably don't even know what France is.
My name is Jesus_666 and I'm an elitist asshole.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
I am so offended. Behold:
http://toastytech.com/evil/index.html
Nowhere in the article (http://news.zdnet.co.uk/0,39020330,39247539,00.ht m) says that. It clearly says that the measurement was done on a sunday. No other measurements are mentioned. The word Monday doesn't show in the article. Every other survey available points to around 10%. Please shut up and go live in your fantasy world.