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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...
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.
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
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").
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)
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.
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, in particular, thinking of the public sector here (libraries, schools, universities, colleges, council and government offices) where MSIE is nearly always the only browser and the idea that one could do anything on the Internet not using MSIE and OE alone can be met with shock (even by the IT folks).
For instance my local library say they have a policy of not installing any software not from Microsoft for security reasons, and my local FE & HE college say the same. The director of IT at the college (where I'm glad to say I no longer go but I know people who still do and it hasn't changed) tells students who ask to use Firefox that it, I quote, "is a hacking [sic] tool like `Kuhzuh' [sic]" and makes it clear that running it off a USB dongle will get your account removed. From my experience and that of friends, universities tend to be more sympathetic to user choice but may be slow in getting around to actually installing Firefox across their networks (as in they've been meaning to install it since before 1.0 but haven't got around to it yet).
Although it is probably partly home users (esp. who use the WWW infrequently), most even totally computer-illiterate people who use the Internet any significant amount who I know seem to have converted on their own machines, so I see that is a much less significant problem.
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
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
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.