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Firefox Slides, IE Gains?
limber writes "InformationWeek is reporting that a Dutch Web metrics company is stating that Microsoft's Internet Explorer has gained market share, contrary to other recent studies, while Firefox has lost market share, during the last two months. 'People are not switching so often to Firefox as before,' said Niels Brinkman, co-founder of OneStat."
Slashdot viewers are slipping against other sites, prompting the editors to post more articles about Firefox vs. IE in a hope to gain eyeballs.
I'm so sick of statistics. Who really cares whether IE or Firefox has more market share? Even if Firefox has .005% market share, and IE has 99.999% market share, I will continue to use Firefox. If 99.999% of the world jumped off a bridge, would you do the same thing?
Do we really need an update every 2 weeks of the status of FF vs. IE?
I love my phoe-firebird/fox/something, but that's my choice.
Alternatively, could slash include a ticker on the frontpage?
What I'm interested in is the CAUSE of such numbers. Why do people switch to Firefox or, like in this case, favor Internet Explorer? Is it the new Internet Explorer 7.0 beta? Maybe it's just that important governmental issues are coming up which allow people to check out sites about them that only work with Internet Explorer. Are there any known reasons out there?
I suspect Firefox et al will always ride a +/- 2 percent sinewave with IE displaying a similar leading edge ripple. Rolls Royce and Ferrari do not think or speak in terms of "market share." They have a core following that will always remain, and will always be small. The masses will always drive Chevys, Toyotas, or whatever.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
Could it be that everyone using Firefox switched to Seamonkey?
"Yields falsehood when preceded by its own quotation" yields falsehood when preceded by its own quotation.
...which means that all those new computer sold to students are using IE. Not all those students are migrating to FF.
Every new computer that runs Windows is a new IE user. Not so for Firefox or any other browser. Nothing to see here. Move on.
Many regular users of Firefox like myself are forced to use IE for some things like Launchcast and many other nonFF friendly sites. Also, many people employ FF extensions like IE Tab to use IE within FF. Of course, this may also have something to do with the IE 7.0 beta usage.
http://religiousfreaks.com/The big things like if something had 1% 10% to 100% share.. yes those might matter, but is something 11.2% or 11.5% in things like this... totally irrelevant.
But I'll admit I've slowed down on my evangelism.. Honestly, Firefox seems to perform worse now for me than it did at .9 (or so). It's getting to be fairly regular that I see the "Firefox is already running - go kill the process" dialog. It's getting to be fairly regular that I see All-In-One Gestures in wacky mode where it's building a huge string while I don't have the button down (and then usually crashing). It's a little annoying, too, that the association with QuickTime (for playing .WAVs or .MP3s) doesn't ever "just work". I was thinking about writing a little game based on the Canvas object - but when it came to adding sound in a manner that was going to work for people I just gave up.
Maybe I've just had bad luck, but Firefox seems bigger, slower and less stable than it did a year ago - and I can't think of any added feature that I've cared about during that same period.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
In other news, all statistic that is done on a small sample are really susceptible to noise.
Also, note that many of Firefox users will block any advertising and counting scum, thus reducing the visible usage. IE users tend to be non-technical, and thus they simply don't have the means to do so, at least until the bad evil sysadmin at their company blocks the relevant spies on DNS/squid level.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
It's a nice browser, so why don't you just use without beeing "concerned" that your neighbour and the cat uses it as well.
I think it's more a case of more new PC purchases during the Christmas/New Year periods, that's why IE (preinstalled with most new PCs) "gained" some market share.
I can't imagine anyone would actively download and install IE, so unlike Firefox, IE's gain is not a real gain, but a side effect of its parent -- Windows.
Uncensored Google results requested and delivered by email
Firefox is rubbish. Use IE instead. I'll use firefox so nobody else has to. And I guess there's no point writing adware that targets just one person, right?
If this study is merely the number of users visiting a site(s)? If so, then it could be nothing more than fewer FF users visiting these sites. These studies can't go on a user's computer to see what the user is using, so it's just another statistic. Unless that's what the spyware was doing...
One for firefox, one for IE, and a red stapler - the editors' way of saying that they're doing a Troll Tuesday article on the readers.
Its a bit more subtle than posting "this story from the YHB[TT] YFI HAND department"
Now, if you were to talk about 99% of Internet Explorer die-hards jumping off a bridge, that would be another matter. I'd even be willing to help them look for a suitable bridge.
The browser distribution does matter, however. At the present time, many sites are IE-specific and will not function under Firefox, SeaMonkey or Konqueror. I do not accept the argument that to be good, browser-specific code must be used. Nor do I accept the argument that nobody can test on all the browsers in use - that is why we have standards. And I definitely don't accept the argument that you'd design for the browser most in use, because a good design will work just as well on IE as a specific design, it'll just work everywhere else too.
Think global and long-term, not just next-cube-down and next-week.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It's sad, but it's expected.
Firefox, Opera, etc (and even avantbrowser) for advanced users only. Nowadays it's considered "difficult" to install software by clicking "next, next, next".
Do not get me wrong. It's not that Firefox is not user friendly or easier to use, however there are so many "PC users" below "novice" level which will disable an antivirus if they're unable to open an infected file. And there are many "system admins", (which are in charge of internet cafes or school labs) who only knows how to install Windows and Office (and probably from "recovery CDs"). Times are different now.
(Previously everybody not only knew what every file in their C:\DOS and C:\WINDOWS were for, they could also program in at least in one language).
We cannot expect any more growth until PC users are more educated.
...probably what parent said. That was my first reaction - I'd love to compare next Christmas if someone big (Dell maybe? HP?) starts packaging other browsers, or the Google Pack takes off. Also, what about all the Mac sales in the past two months? Apple posted pretty good numbers (for them, but still), and I sure hope none of those new Mac users dug through their Applications folder to find IE5 for Mac...sheesh.
Haven't you guys heard? The new IE7 beta has such revolutionary features as Popup Blockers, and even Tabbed Browsing! Of course Firefox can't compete. They'll have to come to their senses if they want to lead the pack.
People are not switching so often to Firefox
Yeah I never switch to Firefox anymore, once was enough. The same is true for most of the people I know using it. Something about switching to it that first time, they never switch to it again, I wonder what causes that. For awhile I tried downloading it from mozilla.org every time I wanted to surf, but that got tedious rapidly. I'm sorry I guess I'm just not doing my part. Hey I know, I could load up IE then close it, then load Firefox again, would that count as another switch? I promise to do it more often if it will help.
Oh great! Now Firefox is losing ground to IE. May as well just throw the damn laptop out the window now!!!
So that would suggest that their statistics only count people who visit their customers' websites. I don't think I'd count that as a complete, objective picture of the Internet as a whole. Plus, whether or not you accept cookies from a site might skew their data further. [For the record, I use Firefox and only accept cookies when I have to].
you get counted as buying IE.
Every time you download Firefox, you get counted as "buying" Firefox.
Of course:
1. if you have twenty boxen like we do, you only download Firefox once and then roll it onto each boxen internally - 20 copies, one download.
2. if you stop using IE on your laptop and use Firefox, noone REDUCES the count of IE users by one, they only INCREASE the count of Firefox users. Thus, IE will always have more users, since they never LOSE them when you switch to Firefox or Opera.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
To track visitors you have to implement a small piece of javascript in your HTML pages.
So, if I use Adblocker to block the javascript - which I do for most ad sites unless it's a poll or something I need - then they aren't counting you AT ALL when you use Firefox, since you blocked their ads and their popups.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
1) Its faster,
2) Tabbed browsing,
3) Adblock,
4) More secure.
Items 1 & 4 are difficult to present to new users. Item 2 is also in IE7. Item 3 does not come standard with Firefox.
In addition to Adblock, there are several other really great extensions that make Firefox the browser for me. I use other extensions to sync my bookmarks between computers, provide thumbnails of all open tabs (available in IE7), and to more tightly lock-down pop-ups and javascript.
What Firefox needs is a bundle that includes several "essential" extensions pre-installed. As MS plays catch-up with where Firefox was a year ago, the Mozilla Foundation could stay way ahead bundling these great tools. The average user is not going to go out and find these free additions on their own. By adding only a couple of MBs for the initial download, I bet you could bundle several great extensions and market the additional functionality.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
if anything, I'm an old school netscape fanboy. My first browser was Lynx, then I eventually jumped on the bandwagon and got netscape 3, then eventually moved on to long lasting netscape 4.x series. Netscape 6 sucked so I stayed with netscape 4.x during that time. I eventually starting using the Mozilla suite pre 1.0 after stumbling upon it. The lack of AOL branding at the time was a major reason for my jump from Netscape proper. Since then I've been using Mozilla, then Phoneix, then Firebird, then eventually Firefox. When 1.5 came out, it really sucked major ass for me. FF1.5 would crash at least 7 to 10 times per day. I'm fairly computer savy and I followed explicit instructions on making sure it was a clean install. I was browsing with hardly any extensions at all, which sucked.
There have been other major changes behind the scenes that might not be so apparent to the average user. In my attempts to create an extension for FF1.5 extension contest I came accross a shitload of bugs. Very simple XUL markup could make the browser disappear by simply clicking on a hyperlink. And by disappear I mean as in invisibile, except for plain text. And there are others, but my attempts at using Bugzilla have sucked. I've reported bugs in the past only to have them recently deleted because no one want's to fix them.
OSS is fine, but it seems to foster a mentality that if a developer can't reproduce a bug then the end user must be stupid. That's annoying, especially for a company that's marketing its browser to everyone, including urging people that don't know what a browser even is to upgrade.
The feeling I've gotten from this open source netscape project is that I'm using a product, such that if it ever gives me serious problems, I'm left with no recourse since there is no focused method for attaining a definitive solution or fix for something. It's like the bystander effect when it comes to fixing or even acknowleding problems.
Since I use IETab, the phrase "only works with IE" no longer holds much meaning for me.
(Well, actually, if there's an IE only page, I guess I have to click one button to make it work. But that's all.)
When I use IETab, I wonder if it reports my browser as IE or FF for these statistics?
I mean, if 99.999% of the world jumps off a bridge, the corpses should be at least at the height of the bridge, so it should not be a hard fall. And then you can examine the bodies of those who jumped before searching for money, jewels and i-pods.
Maybe a little off-topic, but so I am too.
Why can't
> People are not switching so often to Firefox as before
:)
Mostly everyone who needed support for web standarts and that geekly interface has already switched.
And the rest are people who simply doesn't care what browser to use or don't know about firefox.
And maybe the fashion has gone from these shores.
So it's up to advertisement and marketing to make them switch, I guess
Someone should just post a fucking banner ad or pop-up on some popular website that installs Firefox automatically. That way all the lusers would install it. It could be the freakin' smiley-face skinned version to ensure that all the people that would never install Firefox do "just because".
The usage statistics would flip-flop overnight.
Hey, that's what gets the masses to install everything else.
"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." - Shepard Book Quoting Malcolm Reynolds
annoying.
Secondly, they count browser usage based on network traffic, not based on number of downloads/PC's sold.
RTFA.
Modesty is one of life's greatest attributes
Does this mean that IE is now the next 'Firefox Killer'?
Now if it only ran on my SUSE 10.0 laptop....
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
It's "Windows" but you called it "Windoze", how cute.
Microsoft sabotages the better programs on it's platform
Please go ahead and provide some proof that Microsoft is sabotaging Firefox. Please, I'm sure every single Slashdot reader would like to get their hands on that kind of evidence. Really, you need to provide some proof of what you just said. Thanks.
you need to change your evangelism to platform migration
"Evangelism" - is that your term for making insane, ridiculous claims about "Windoze" and "M$"?
There's enough to take Microsoft to task without people like you "helping" those of us who are working for broader acceptance of free software. Thanks, but no thanks.
Firefox used to be around 8% for my site, it is now 19.6%.
This is for a music related website.
Steve Ballmer says, "I'm going to f**king kill FireFox!"
Modesty is one of life's greatest attributes
I predicted we'd see an article like this months back when Opera was released as a free browser. Rembmer that Opera, still to this day, identifies itself as IE by default.
It's an ugly fact, but Firefox is the most unstable program in common use. For me, that's ugly because it is my favorite browser. Perhaps people get tired of the crashing and CPU hogging, and have moved to Opera, which has no stability problems that I'm able to detect.
The CPU and memory hogging bug in Firefox 1.5 is well known. In two extensive articles, Information Week reports that opening and closing many Firefox windows and tabs causes crashes and CPU and memory hogging. That kind of heavy user often sees Firefox consuming 99% CPU while idle and/or more than 400 Megabytes. See Firefox 1.5: Not Ready For Prime Time? and Firefox 1.5 Stability Problems? Readers And Mozilla Respond.
The bug seems to be due to insufficient allocation of resources inside Firefox, such as inadequate stack space. Those who use a browser to do extensive research, for example, are likely to have more windows and tabs open than the average user. Apparently Firefox developers did not plan for that.
The bug has been reported to Bugzilla, and is very easy to reproduce (see below), but Firefox developers have marked it invalid because there is not enough specific information! The bug has existed in Firefox for more than 2 years, and several people report that it is worse in Firefox 1.5. Firefox's Bugzilla does not allow direct links from Slashdot, so copy and paste Bugzilla URLs into a new tab. Remove the space:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=131 456
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=222 660
See comments #48 and #49 of bug 222660 for an example of the symptoms under Windows XP. A typical Windows Task Manager screen shot attached to comment #49 shows the "I/O Other Bytes" increasing by 20K/second with no program activity. At that point, the bug was not yet showing the worst symptoms.
The huge memory use, and 94% CPU use or more with no activity, normally occur after opening and closing many Firefox windows and tabs, as happens when researching something on the internet over a period of hours or days. The bug symptoms are worse after putting the computer on standby or after hibernating. My experience has been that the memory and CPU hogging always occur together, so they appear to be the same bug. However, the CPU hogging symptom takes longer to appear. If the computer has perhaps 256 Megabytes of memory, the most obvious symptom at the beginning is hard disk thrashing.
You can demonstrate the memory use problem quickly by loading and closing the following large web page into multiple Firefox tabs a few times:
http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_mono/ libc.html. To see the memory and CPU percentage used in Windows, right-click on the Taskbar and choose Task Manager. Choose the Processes tab.This demonstrates one aspect of the bug, but is not representative of big occuring in normal use, since that web page is huge.
Maybe the only solution is for a developer who knows the code to reproduce the problem and see what causes it. It is not clear to me why they are unwilling to do so. This bug seems especially interesting to me. It is likely that fixing this bug will fix other issues. It is likely that fixing this bug will make it easier to work on the Firefox code.
The bug has often been reported on Slashdot. Here are a few examples:
" >http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=169676&cid=14 143632
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=168683&cid=140 62501
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=168683&cid=140 62671
Maybe we could get Sony to include it on some new CD's...
Nobody counts browser "sales.
They monitor hits on various web servers and calculate the percentage of actual users.
Oh yeah, you're an idiot.
Seriously, why do you care about FIREFOX vs IE, when it should be GECKO-BASED-BROWSERS vs. IE
People who have no sig are cool
they base market share on downloads right? now with automatic updates, i know i don't download a new version every time there is a bug fix or a new nightly build. if this is a common trend, downloads for firefox would be less and therefore appear that less people are switching. of course this would also mean that past market share results would be inflated. to be honest, i always thought they were inflated anyway.
Supplies!
Ever heard of Windows?
>It's an ugly fact, but Firefox is the most unstable program in common use.
This poster is absolutely correct. Firefox 1.5 has caused my system to crash more times than I can count. Then I saw this article in Scott's newsletter that confirmed it wasn't just me:
http://www.scotsnewsletter.com/75.htm#ff15
My "solution" was to go back to 1.0.7, and use IE when I have to. But I am concerned about the lack of responsiveness of the Mozilla team that Scott's newsletter and the poster mention. I have seen the problems on two completely different machines, one running Win98SE and one running WinXP professional on completely different hardware. I have not had problems under Linux, but before all the slashdotters pile on saying it's just Windows, let me say that the two Windows systems are otherwise quite stable. This is discouraging for me because I would like to leave IE behind as soon as possible.
Nothing quite like a 'Firefox Gains!' story. 100's of replies about how awesome firefox is.
A 'Firefox slips this month' story and what do you get? 'GOD STOP TELLING ME WHATS UP WITH FIREFOX ALL THE TIME I DONT CARE'
Hmmmm...
"Those who use a browser to do extensive research, for example, are likely to have more windows and tabs open than the average user."
:-)
Not to mention people who look at pron. Note to Mozilla: must fix!!!!!11one
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Phase 2: Right click FF icon --> properties --> change icon --> select IE icon
Phase 3: Delete old IE Icon from desktop
Phase 4: Rename Mozilla Firefox icon to Internet Explorer
Before you mod this funny, I have done this to at least half a dozen people's computers. They arn't smart enough to realize the difference (all they need is an address bar and bookmarks), so FF stays. Their computers get less spyware, they see less popups, I get less "OMG HELP ME" calls. Which brings me to Phase 5, which is profit.
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
The girlfriend was concerned when I used "Internet Explorer" to do windows update. "That's not the internet, I'm with AOL"
Patiently explained that the browser wasn't the internet, just used to view it and browse it. Hence being called a browser.
Haven't tried explaining why Firefox should be used instead. Something along the lines of "well, whenever you use IE, likely as not a load of hackers can look at what you're doing"
"So why do you use IE for windowsupdate"
erm...
it's just a slow down in growth, it's still growing. I'm going to do that right now. In fact I'm going to redownload and install firefox individually on all the machines on the network...
Maybe they aren't counting downloads from mirrors?
Today, only "teh 1337" can do it. Schools are probably to blame, as is email. Most colleges/universities require students to get a computer. And, if they don't, peer pressure will just about force you to get one. What school's don't teach you, however, is how to use a computer.
My other point is email. Lots of "tech savvy" people got it, and encouraged their friends to get a computer/internet. Again, it's peer pressure forcing users to get computers, but not teaching them how to use them.
OTOH, it could simple be that increasing user bases lead to more idiots in general using the product.
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
Good luck on that one.
I've been using Firefox since it was Phoenix and really pretty crappy. Switched from Opera, because I got sick of Opera rendering bad HTML badly.
I'm CCed on many bugs, one WONTFIX and some open, but all have been filed for over 2 years, some 4 or 5 years.
The WONTFIX is that Firefox stores all your credit card numbers on your hard disk unencrypted *by default*. Just wait until some worm writer finds that one out.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
You raise a good point. I hate to say it (no, really, I do), but Firefox - and Mozilla in general - is a piece of crap. I'm using the monolithic Mozilla suite (tried Firefox, but didn't like it), and it crashes or locks up on my pretty much daily; and when it doesn't, it typically eats about 200 to 300 MB of RAM, unless I close it every day (which is possible, of course, but inconvenient).
I have filed bugs in the past for crashes, too - those few cases where I could actually work out a consistent trigger condition. Nothing ever happened, though; the bugs were auto-closed in the end since no developer had ever done even so much as acknowledge them. I do understand that the developers are swamped, of course, but don't CRASHES deserve a bit more attention?
I'm seriously considering switching to Opera. About the only things that still holds me back are AdBlock, and the fact that I'm used to Mozilla and generally find Opera a bit unwieldy.
Maybe I should give Sleipnir a try...
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Edit: Upon further inspection, that article seems to refer to a completely different market slide by Firefox.
Edit to the edit: Upon even further inspection, it seems that there were about six articles between that one and this one saying that Firefox has gained marketshare. Now I'm confused.
Edit to the edit of the edit: Yet another further inspection reveals that there is no consistant definition of "gain", "loss", "market" or "marketshare" amongst all the articles, making them appear to be completely unrelated, unreliable, and possible questionable, if not outright self serving. But this is Slashdot, so that can't be.
Final edit: Upon yet another even further again inspection, I've come to a conclusion. Fuck it.
PS To The Final Edit: I just reread my own posting, and realized that I did explicitly point out that this is Slashdot. I had almost forgot that! So, I'm editing the post to that fact.
All Your Base Are Belong To Firefox! After all, oonly old people use IE! In soviet russia, my new beowolf cluster of Web Browser overlords welcome me.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
It's an ugly fact, but Firefox is the most unstable program in common use.
Ever heard of Windows?
The old Windows versions were bad, but when using WHQL drivers, the only time I had stability problems with Windows NT, 2000 or XP was with failing or faulty hardware. I suppose in all fairness, there are probably more copies of 98 or ME in use than there are of the entire Firefox installed base.
And I can assure him that my build (from source) on FreeBSD is the dodgiest Firefox ever (and I've been using since Phoenix 0.6). It simply refuses to render some pages and on others it requires multiple attempts.
Fanboys are retarded.
I'm seeing problems similar to what he described on Fedora Core 3 (and others). 0.9x was (IMHO) much more stable.
And yes, it may be an extension issue, but my attempts to prove or disprove that theory haven't been encouraging. Unless the problem is adblock, TalkBack, the DOM inspector, or the Mozilla Spelling libraries, I don't think it's an extension problem. For that matter, why should an extension be able to crash the browser in the first place?
--MarkusQ
P.S. Firefox is still my primary browser.
browser marketshare statistics have been obselete for ages now.
it mattered when netscape vs. IE meant that if you chose one browser, half the internet wouldn't render properly.
but now it really really doesn't matter the slightest bit.
While I don't doubt that you are having a problem, are you sure this is Firefox and not an extension?
The uptime on the machine I'm on now is 15 days, and I have 21 tabs open. I also have 5 other Firefox windows open, and I haven't counted those tabs.
Granted, I have 1.5 gigs of memory here, but I haven't seen a memory-related problem in Firefox for quite a while.
after going through yet another marathon spyware cleaning yesterday and today.
Goddam Spystrike and a dozen or two other trojans...
The Spystrike bitch is just that - people everywhere, according to various spyware Web sites, are having one hell of a time getting rid of that one. New variants every other day and almost no antispyware or antivirus vendor is up to speed on it yet; estimates are it's infecting 2,500 PCs an hour. Rides in on various conventional trojans, then is extremely hard to get rid of without specific knowledge of how - and even then.
I had to use a special removal tool, plus a-squared, Ewido, SpybotS&D, spywareblaster, Windows antispyware, a repair install, SFC, and one hell of a lot of reboots to get rid of this fucker.
Somebody find the fuckwads who put this one out - I got something for their asses - and Bill's.
OTOH, I made some money out of it, so maybe I love those guys...
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
More or less comprehensive Firefox marketshare metadata
Matthew Brundage
Silver Spring, MD
Software tends to be winner-take-all: whoever has the most market share ultimately wins. That's why people care so much about these statistics.
For proprietary software, this tends to be because whoever has the most users has the most profit, since development costs are fixed (economists call this "sunk costs"). Therefore, the market share leader can invest in more marketing and product development, getting more users (virtuous circle) and eventually edge out the competition, winning the market.
Sometimes network effects play a role, too: it makes sense to use what everyone else is using, because then your software will be compatible with theirs. The more people that use it, the more value it has to you--which, incidently, is why people often advocate the software that they use. Advocating your favorite piece of software may be a completely rational thing to do!
I'm not entirely sure how this works for Free software that is distributed gratis, like Firefox. But I can guess. Assume some percentage of the total number of users will be contributers to the project: bug writers, documentation contributers, software developers, artists, philanthropists, corportate sponsors, etc. Then, it follows that having more users will lead to more contributors, and ultimately a higher quality product. Thus, Free software is also winner-take-all.
I have decided to become a reliable source of statistical information and post the results from the webserver logs on my internal webserver. I have decided that this audience is an appropriate representation of the world's population and will thus announce that 50% of the world uses IE 5.0 Mac on OS 9, 30% uses Firefox (PC or Mac) and 10% uses Safari for Mac, and 10% use IE for PC.
There, you have it. The world predominantly uses IE. From the results of my INTRANET server, I have decided that Africa holds 12% of the users on the world, China a good 132.452324%, Canada is at -.4123%, and the USA takes the head with 4005.2342% of the users. You do the math.
Now that I have trolled, I'm going to get to my point. Who cares what X company says the current statistic is. If I cared enough, I'd ask for the results from Slashdot, Digg, CNN, MSNBC, NBC, CBS, ABC, and a few other companies and throw it together. Otherwise, I'd assume that the stat is BOGUS!
"What platform are you running on? If your answer is Windoze, well, you have your problem identified."
... I see these problems on a much larger scale than mentioned in the parent post across every platform I have run FFox - OS X, Windows, Linux ...
Bull pucky
... Internet Explorer BETA 2 is released to the public.
d irect.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/IE/ie7/ie7betare
Y
Plug-ins: DOM Inspector, Talkback, Adblock, and Image Resizer, all the latest versions.
However, I don't think those are the issue. I've identified two major problems:
1) Somehow Firefox has more problems with virtual memory in Windows. I'm guessing that Firefox overruns some stack space, and that doesn't matter as much until the operating system begins using virtual memory. When I upgraded from 500 MB to 1,000 MB, the problems became much less.
2) People who do a lot of research, such as buyers for computer companies, often have very large bookmark files and history files. That causes problems. Firefox becomes very unstable when bookmark and history files are large.
The evidence is that someone who programmed Firefox made an assumption about intensity of use that is incorrect. Often programmers are not heavy users of their browsers. Everything I've seen indicates that not enough resources have been allocated inside Firefox.
Adblock is a known memory hog. Wladimir's rewrite (the new Adblock Plus, not to be confused with the old Adblock Plus) is supposed to improve memory management.
In fact, strip Firefox of all extensions and run your tests again.
I think the comment you just made could probably be considered slander unless you can back it up with facts. M$ have used some pretty questionable practices in the past but I somehow doubt even they would be as stupid as to intentionally cripple FF. They might make it intentionally difficult to install / use but actually causing it to fail - that would be like giving the FF community a blank cheque.
FYI, I use FF on Debian and I have found it to be generally good but it does suck up memory like it's going out of fashion and occasionally crashes (particularly when it tries to open a movie or sound clip).
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
By Xiti
Regards.
I am not Remy Mouton, unfortunately: http://remy.mouton.free.fr/art/
On another machine I'm using only DOM Inspector, that can't be deleted from the menu. Same problem.
However, the real issue is that the excuse "Oh, it's probably an extension" is just a diversion. Firefox needs to run reliably, period. Not, "The reasons for the problems are probably...", but reliably.
Microsoft will always pride itself in having IE as the most used browser. And technically that is correct. But Billy is not making the point that IE is forced on consumers when they run their systems. The numbers are will never be accurate. Lets see the numbers between the people that willfully use IE and willfully use FF... only then is an oportunity to talk.
The fact is, Mozilla.org heavily advertises the existence of extensions. Then, when you have problems with them, blames the problems on the user or the extensions author. Not even the author thinks that recent versions of Adblock Plus actually have worked well. Here are the recent bugs:
Detailed changelog for Adblock Plus 0.6.0.4, released on January 21, 2006:
It's the old Mozilla baloney: "Oh yes, it didn't work before, but NOW it works."
When the grandparent poster asked you about extensions, maybe you should have told him that you were able to reproduce a bug using a clean installation. I'm not a member of the Mozilla development team. Your implication that I'm trying to "divert" you - with standard debugging practice, no less - is unwarranted. But then this is Slashdot, so what should I expect.
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You want bad bug handling? Check out this one that I submitted to OpenOffice.org. The bug triager WORKSFORME'd it three times on me before he realized he was out of his depth. It's a DATALOSS bug, it's probably trivial to fix, and it's still in the latest version.
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=5
Check out the Firefox Myths - http://www.firefoxmyths.com./ People may stop switching to Firefox after reading this
Cheers!! Abdul Aziz
Older versions of the mozilla-mplayer plugin used to crash FF on my Debian boxes. Since a few months ago, all problems have disappeared. I don't recall a single crash in that time -- even on sites laden with Flash and wmv or qt streams embedded. Of course, it could also be because I shut down my machines at night to save electricity and so no FF session lasts more than a day.
From a security point it doesnt matter if the info is stored in an encrypted or a non-encrypted fashion.
Its trivial to decrypt the info if its encrypted.
Just saying it like it are.
FF uptake in the Netherlands wasn't very big in the first place, so this doesn't mean anything to me. I though about making the 'lies, damn' lies and statistics' comments here, but decided against it.
Was it Heinrich Boll or Heinrich Heine who said: "When the world ends, be sure to be in the Netherlands, where everything happens fifty years later..." I'm sure FF uptake in the Netherlands will reach 10% in or around the year 2056.
I did not want to imply anything negative about you. I was just mentioning the normal excuses provided by Mozilla developers. I'm sympathetic to them, however. I think there are some issues that no one inside Mozilla development feels that they have the authority to address.
That OO bug report is a CLASSIC. That's the same problem I'm having with Mozilla developers. Not one of them has bothered to read everything and clearly understand what I'm saying.
Not if it's protected with a password locally.
Most don't want it to be encrypted anyway, they just don't want firefox to store credit numbers locally *by default*.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Is this proof enough? This in particular sounds like what to expect from a M$ "update": [user installs IE7] Okay, quick check to see if IE6 is still on here...aaaannddd...of course not. Fuckers. Okay, let's check in Firefox, yep, what I thought. IE7 is messing up some of the menu's CSS effects - sometimes putting an underline under some of the items when it shouldn't.
Is this intentional? We won't know till the next anti-trust trial, when they pull up another pile of email with phrases like, "knife the baby" and "cut off their oxygen supply" are published. Their behavior in the DrDOS case was bad enough to never trust them again.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I don't know... are you referring to the fact that IE7 overwrites IE6? Well that has been the case since IE4. Or did you read something into the Firefox part of the comment? Certainly IE7 didn't do anything to Firefox. He was checking a site that he knows works OK in Firefox and comparing it to how IE7 renders it.
Are you really that desperate?
Certainly IE7 didn't do anything to Firefox.
That's not so certain. Look again:
Is this proof enough [slashdot.org]? This in particular sounds like what to expect from a M$ "update": [user installs IE7] Okay, quick check to see if IE6 is still on here...aaaannddd...of course not. Fuckers. Okay, let's check in Firefox, yep, what I thought. IE7 is messing up some of the menu's CSS effects - sometimes putting an underline under some of the items when it shouldn't.
You could read that both ways. IE7 could have caused Firefox to render incorrectly or it could be that IE7 still does not get css. Even a moron who spends all their free time harassing Slashdotters can see that.
Like I said, it's all a mater of trust and M$ blew that a long time ago. Even with blatant errors, you won't know who's at till the court order establishes Microsoft's fault again.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Or you can read it the way you like it, which is of course the way that makes you feel better. Reality has no bearing here.
Even a moron who spends all their free time
Hardly. Some, but one has to also play games and work, you know. And write email.
Like I said
Yes, indeed.
I still code to Firefox when I build web pages, but I tend to use Safari these days. Works with every site I visit, looks better than Firefox (no Windows 2000-style square buttons), and it's just faster than Firefox. I don't know what happened, but it seems like Firefox is just really slow these days, both in boot time (which I'd be o.k. with) and rendering (which I'm not).
I did this, I'm running 1.5.0.1 with a new profile, and it is the worst yet. No extensions, except DOM Inspector, which is a menu choice on installation.
Nice sig! I thought I was the only SoM fan!
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -- "Step Right Up", Tom Waits