Firefox Usage Climbing

kbox writes "According to the Amsterdam analytics firm onestat The Firefox browser has jumped from a global market share of 8.7% to a whopping 13% since April 2005. The national usage of Firefox make some interesting reading, too, with Firefox making up 16% in the USA, 24% in Australia and a huge 39% in Germany." Unsurprisingly, on Slashdot we skew the averages somewhat, with Firefox weighing in at 65% of our traffic... but sadly 18% of our Firefox users need to upgrade to the latest version ;) Go do that now.

Comments

Firefox

[mrak and swepe]

It's 'Firefox'. Not 'FireFox'.

Thanks for reading.

Re:Work

[The MAZZTer]

And most probably don't know about USB thumb drives. Put those two together and hey! You got Portable Firefox! :)

Mythbusters, Firefox Edition!

[The MAZZTer]

• Dragging bookmarks works fine for me in 1.5
• The interface is only as sloppy as you make it, thanks to the right click | customize menu option.
• Extensions can be used to tweak the interface further if you wish. Stylish can be used to apply styles to the interface (although I ran into problems when trying to limit the height of the toolbars, but I probably wasn't doing it right).
• I don't see a "move up" button anywhere anyways. But then again I'm using 2.0 at the moment.
• If Firefox seems screwy, disable all extensions using Safe-Mode and see if the problem goes away. If it does, you have a bad extension somewhere. Not Firefox's fault. This also applies to memory usage (although a large part is still due to Firefox's memory cache... which people like to refer to as a leak, despite the fact they take no steps to limit the memory cache size using about:config) and overall load time and stability.

Portable Firefox

[bunratty]

we aren't allowed to install any additional programs

No problem. Just run Firefox directly from a USB drive.

Firefox Slashdotter Extension

[cyclocommuter]

Another tip for Slashdot readers using Firefox... get the Firefox Slashdotter Extension. It expands hidden comments inline using AJAX, allows you to change skins, informs you via an icon on the status bar if you got mod points, displays links to Coral Cache, plus more.

Stagnating

[Otis2222222]

Well, they stagnated. And IE came and IMNSHO, ruined the web experience in the late 90s to early 00s. And during that time Netscape released their code into the Mozilla project. It then got worse. AOL bought Netscape, and Netscape is just a memory.

Yeah, Netscape definitely stagnated back around version 4 or 5 - when the browser was a bloated mess and was in danger of collapsing under its own weight. When IE 4 came out it was quite simply a better browser. It rendered pages faster and had a much better user interface. I think it's a bit of an exaggeration to say that IE "ruined the web experience in the late 90s". They were the best game in town back then.

I made the move to Firefox a few years ago when pop-ups were a huge problem, and discovered that Firefox was about a LOT more than just blocking popups. IE had started to stagnate bigtime. IE5 and IE6 offered no meaningful improvements (although a pop up blocker appeared way late in the game). People knew that IE sucked but the word hadn't spread about Firefox yet. The momentum is clearly shifting towards Firefox now.

I just hope that they don't start to stagnate or bloat up with unneeded features too much. Fortunately they let extensions take care of any "bloat" that a user may want, which I think is good. Just keep a small core set of features and let people add enhancements on as they see fit. So far the history of web browsing has shown that through many generations of innovation come long periods of stagnation. From Mosaic to Netscape to IE to Firefox to ???