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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.
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
Nah, we're all using Konqueror...
Absit Invidia
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)
> a sample that is likely skewed towards the geek crowd
I don't follow your logic. The geek "crowd" is too small to change the numbers, most of the geeks use firefox in work as well, and someone who works in front of the monitor all week, propably would not spent the day-off surfing.
>there wasn't much you could do on a Sunday commercially
A good reason to shop on-line then.
Washington bullets will simply be known as the "Bulle
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?
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.
Nice flaming, but I just did an impromptu experiment, just to be fair.
FF 1.5, Opera 8.5, all extensions off.
Initially, Firefox 21MB RAM and Opera was 17MB RAM, both opening to a tab with Google.
I opened multiple tabs in each, same websites, alternating. Some flash (miniclip) some java (gmail) and some plain ol HTML. Throughout, memory usage was no more than 5MB apart, although I did notice Firefox using more CPU, most likely because I've increased maximum connections.
As for the load times, side by side they're nearly identical, each pulling ahead in a few instances.
Viral marketing probably does play its part, but I doubt that Firefox is "crap" and Opera is "much better."
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
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
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 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.
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.
Second only to Windows itself I'd presume?
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
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.
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".
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.
Well not that im entirely supporting the original post, it was a little blunt, but I do consider opera to come above firefox.
Not necessarily for its memory footprint or speed but while using opera extensively it has never once flooded my RAM like firefox does occaisionally. Its never crashed once while firefox did have an occaisional crash, mainly due to my stupidity, and a regular crash every time the feedback thingy me doo dah decided to pop up. That obviously doesnt happen to most people, but ive known more than just myself where every time it comes up the browser goes down. Opera also comes ready with a lot of features that firefox needs extensions for. Extensions which sometimes break the browser horribly. There are also features that im not sure exist even as extensions for firefox. (Though if they do see previous point.) The menu for tabs when you have too many open, the ability to remeber all web pages when you close and then reopen the browser. (Also works if you kill opera with task manager so Id assume it works in a crash.) the notes side bar, the IRC option, a better transfer manager.
Firefox isnt a bad browser I used it for a very long time but Opera just seems to be better. (Ive only been using Opera for a few weeks so that opinion may well change.)
Of course IE7 is coming and I used its beta for a fair while as well. It wasnt finished obviously so I cant say for certain how good it will be, but it did have the best tabs of all the browsers. Shrinks them to a point, then you use a button at the right hand side to cycle through them. Beats firefox's sort of just break a bit at the end of the tab bar and beats opera, because opera doenst shrink the tabs down at all. (Means opening up lots of pages will either make a wopping menu, or just fill up your entire screen with tabs, depending on which method your using.) As for IE7's other features it appeared to be just IE6. (Terrible, terrible search function included.)
If I had to choose a browser stand alone Opera comes out a little ahead of firefox. Otherwise I use IE7 beta with the Google bar and activex switched off.
"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 --
I installed Opera many years ago. The interface was crowded & clumsy, and i got lost trying to set the right preferences, due to the way Opera lets you totally micromanage every detail.
Fastforward 8 or so years: i installed the latest release from Opera and went to my homepage. Page is fully valid HTML & CSS. On Opera, the page looks crap [gaps between images and iframe] and one DIV simply isn't even shown at all.
On firefox [and Safari and IE] it works as intended.
I'm sorry, but that was again the end of Opera for me for a while.
Well, according to other news sites, they did a validation on the following monday, where the stats didn't change ...
i am a web developer using FF since it was called (codename) Firebird. Fireforx and the mozilla suite (aka Seamonkey) crash about 1 time in a year and i am running it on windows/linux with a couple of extensions.
I really don't get that instabillity crap.
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)
The menu for tabs when you have too many open,
...ChatZilla...
Tab Mix Plus gives you several option to deal with too many tabs. I currently prefer the one where extraneous tabs are hidden and you scroll with the mouse wheel to determine which ones get shown. I'd also prefer that over a menu (zero clutter and lower perceived overhead, as there are no clicks necessary to go through all tabs).
the ability to remeber all web pages when you close and then reopen the browser. (Also works if you kill opera with task manager so Id assume it works in a crash.)
Tab Mix Plus also does that. If you don't like TMP you can use the traditional one, Session Saver.
the notes side bar,
I had one but removed it as it saw no use.
the IRC option,
a better transfer manager.
I'm quite happy with Download Statusbar, which keeps all downloads in your sight without much clutter. If you prefer external download managers, FlashGot provides tie-ins for most popular ones. If you want to transfer something from your computer, Firefox also has an FTP client.
While Firefox might not be the most versatile browser out of the box it's extremely easy to install extensions and/or plugins which greatly increase its usefulness.
Besides, the stability and memory usage has much improved with version 1.5.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
I have to say that Opera's menues are far from the most intuitive. I like the fact I can modify more in Opera than the other browsers but finding where to modify it can be a chore sometimes.
s It shows quite clearly that Opera is more compliant than Firefox 1.0 and easily matches Firefox 1.5. IE on the other hand is famed for its poor standards implementation, something they say they are going to improve considerably in IE7 so im looking forward to that. (Oh and I looked at quite a few comparison charts Firefox and Opera were never far away from each other on any of them.)
CSS is a mess. Brilliant in theory total nightmare in practice I wrote a page in IE using CSS and then tried to modify it for firefox. I found to my annoyance that unless I redesigned the page there was no way of writing CSS that would work for both without writing browser specific code.
This is pretty much the same of any browser.
On the official side of things though Opera has some of the best CSS and DOM implementation of all the browsers. The best site I found for it is http://nanobox.chipx86.com/browser_support.php#cs
This isnt to say your site is incorrect its just that your site is built around firefox and IE (a good choice of browsers what with the majority of the world using one or the other). If you had built it with Opera in mind it would work just as well. If you built it specifically according to the standards then it would probably be broken, to some extent, in all three browsers. (As I say CSS = messy.) Opera and Firefox would be the browsers it would break the least in.
Of course that has no real baring, web sites are built around IE and then firefox. They are the top browsers and while they are, that will and should always be the case. Arguing that another browser has better CSS implementation is pointless if the browser cant support some of the functions that allow 99% odd of web sites to function. It is, however, an explanation for why Opera may break some sites,it isnt really Opera's fault. Until CSS is properly implemented in all browsers this will stay the same. (Something made much harder by the various browsers inventing new functions, and the W3C constantly trying to update, depricate and add new functions while the old ones are only half way there as they are. Makes me glad Im not purist enough to stop using tables to arrange things.)
That would, of course, be South Korea. In North Korea they eat Firefox.
How many beans make five, anyhow ?
Hi, and thanks for your reply :)
:(
:(
To be honest, i didn't build my site around any particular browser [although i'm involved in the Mozilla project since 2000]. It's simply a personal homepage, with strict adherence to HTML and CSS specifications, see patrickhendriks.com. Nothing fancy, just an iframe with some images as border and a floating DIV.
Of the four major browser, Opera is the only that that splendidly fails to render this valid page
So in this case, Opera is the one breaking most.
FWIW: unfortunately using valid HTML isn't the answer to all problems either. I've played around with this quite a bit, and triggering a "quirks" rendering mode gives a completely different rendering for nearly the same page, both of them valid 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.