Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
... 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.
Actually, I find the variation to be very encouraging. Winning the home users is a powerful accomplishment. The past history of the PC has been that what people use at work is what they end up using at home due to familiarity. If people are increasingly using Firefox at home in spite of being forced to use IE at work (as is the case with many jobs) then Firefox is in fact doing better than work time statistics would suggest.
On the other hand, it could be that the difference is not between work and home but between the kind of people who would web surf on Sunday instead of going to church or visiting family.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
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.
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.
I was going to say something sarcastic about you conspiracy theory, but then I noticed your user name... Anyway, there are 2 reasons that IE is the predominant browser in the coperate world. 1. It can be easily managed using Group Policy along with the rest of the OS. 2. Integrated Windows Authentication. I use FF on my work PC, but I switch to IE whenever I need to access an Intranet site. While it is true that you could check that "Remeber password" box, my company has literally hundreds of intranet sites (it is a very large company) and I'd always be coming accross sites that prompt me to login. These is a big requirement for corperations and if FF wants to break into this market, they will need to consider managability and integration.
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.