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."

Comments

Statistics....

[garrett714]

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?

Re:Statistics....

[hoborocks]

I'd be sick of statistics too, if all of mine ended up adding to 100.04%... =P

But seriously, yeah, statistics don't mean much.

FP

[42Penguins]

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?

And thus shall it always be

[TFGeditor]

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.

School's in, SUCKA

[Brunellus]

...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.

Not real gain

[imoou]

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.

Skewed data?

[lostboy2]

Hmmm... OneStat is a company that provides website analysis for a fee. According to the blurb about their enterprise service,

To track visitors you have to implement a small piece of javascript in your HTML pages. This browser-based tagging method is proven to be the most reliable and effective way of tracking your visitors. Measurements are based on IP number, cookie and browser string.

Each day thousands of new IP addresses are added to OneStat's growing database which is based on 2,3 million IP ranges. Nowhere else you can achieve such an accurate picture of where your business visitors are coming from.

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].

1.5 wasn't so good.

[Eric Coleman]

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.

Re:Blame where it belongs.

[Anonymous Coward]

Windoze

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 is the most unstable program in common use

[Futurepower(R)]

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

Easy solution

[thepotoo]

Phase 1: Install Firefox
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.

Actually

[halcyon1234]

Actually, this is just a dupe of an article posted five months ago.

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.