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IE Market Share Drops to Lowest Level in Years
Cultural Mosaic writes "Browser market share figures for September were released yesterday, and the numbers showed a big dip for Internet Explorer, as it dropped to just 82.10%, its lowest market share figure in years. Ars Technica notes that 'it's no surprise that Internet Explorer has been losing ground steadily over the past couple of years. There have been no significant innovations in the browser since XP SP2 was released over two years ago, and most of those were security tweaks.' Firefox grew from 10.77% in June to 12.46% while Safari jumped to its highest figure ever, 3.53%. I wonder how the release of Firefox 2.0 and IE 7 later this month will change the game?"
GOOD!
does that mean OSX has at least 3.57%..
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
I find that my site gets about 45% Firefox or Mozilla hits, not counting my own of course. At about 130 unique visitors a day, that's not a big enough sample to mean the numbers of 12% are wrong, but definitely demographics play a large role in browser type. As Taco has pointed out, nearly all Slashdot readers use a Mozilla/Firefox browser. Sorry Mac fans, Safari isn't that big yet.
Oh You POS
"Firefox is 73% on my blog..the one about Firefox"
"92% on my Unbuntu users group blog"
etc
Just the other day you said IE's market share was up, and now it's down? But... but... you both have statistics! I don't know what to believe.
IMHO, the new releases could be very good or very bad for Firefox. It all depends on if they fixed the common complaints about it. If it's not such a memory hog, and doesnt lock up after being open too long, I'd say it could solidify Firefox's user base. However, a lot of people I know are really fed up with that. I think that's it's largely an addiction to tabs that keeps them loyal. Since IE7, at least outwardly, emulates a lot of the positives of Firefox, they might convert back if these glitches arent fixed.
Before you mod me funny, think, perhaps I was insightfully funny?
The vast majority of people who have switched away from IE probably won't switch back if they're already satisfied where they are. Not to mention the fact that the "Internet Explorer" brand has become synonymous with "security risk" to those people, regardless of how much better IE7 will be compared to previous versions.
The thing that _will_ change is the adoption rate of alternate browsers, but this largely depends on how well IE7 deals with the many issues of IE6. Part of this we'll see right away (ie. interface enhancements, rendering engine enhancements, security features, etc), but the part that counts will be how frequently it is exploited in the months following its release, and in particular how quickly Microsoft deals with it.
I feel IE works for vendors, merchants, hackers, etc. against me.
I feel other browsers are my tool.
That's why I use firefox.
Microsoft really has gotten in bed with other merchants so much that I just don't trust them.
Oh.. and there is also the relative lack of virus's and attacks on firefox.
Plus... it will work still when I switch to linux finally.
I have a long term goal of switching all my applications to ones that work anywhere so I won't be tied to windows.
Obviously- Everquest isn't on that list but it's really the only thing keeping me on windows now.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Isn't this data from the same "Net Applications" company that never publishes their source data or even methodologies and was demonstrated to have factual errors and contradictions in the summaries of their reports? I mean I'm happy with a trend towards less IE use, but I'm not about to just take these people's word for it, especially from a marketing firm. Give us real data or shut the hell up guys.
I already have users who want to try IE7. And I am already hearing some negative feadback about Firefox being slower than IE. So I'm beginning to think that the worm has turned and we are going to start seeing an increase in IE again. I'll have a hard time recommending Firefoz again unless they can find a way to decrease their memory footprint. Of course I'll still use it along with Opera, but I won't be recommending it to anyone for awhile.
Used to be there was a clear performance difference, now I don't see it as much.
Security wise I think there's still a benefit to Firefox, but most users don't see security as that big of an issue. They think we're just making shit up when it comes to security differences between the browsers.
He who said 1,000,000 monkeys on 1,000,000 typewriters would eventually type the great novel, never saw an AOL chat room
You'll also find that accurately measuring the use of browsers is not an easy task. I mean, how can you maintain that you have an unbiased sample of users? Well, you need to set up a site that everyone visits. But there's not a lot of sites like that and once you've got content on a page, you're already biased because you're catering to one particular set of internet users. So you can always be suspicious of the accuracy of these reports. Personally, I don't trust them to be accurate within 20%--and that doesn't say much about them!
My work here is dung.
Well, that depends on whether the automatic updates that install IE7 also reset the default browser.
My bet is that they will -- any takers?
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Firefox Losing Marketshare, Internet Explorer Gaining.
There the Dutch company said that Safari only accounts for 1.6% of the market, compared to what this article says.
I'm looking forward to Firefox 3.0. I hear it washes your dishes and matches your socks.
82.10% will think: "ooh, the Internet was upgraded"
What IE7 release will change is that all those people who are watching perplexed a Firefox user when changing between tabs, subscribing to feeds, and _removing_ extensions, well, all those people who sweared to "never use tabbed browsing" and "I hate Firefox because it loads in 2 seconds, as opposed to explorer, in zero", ...
All those people will find Internet Explorer to be their Firefox.
That is, exactly what they claimed to hate or to not understand.
And *if* there's something that remains different from Firefox, in IE7, is that this version is _still_ not compliant to most of the things Firefox/Mozilla is.
There I wait, for the day everybody recognizes IE7 as Firefox clone and has their eyes opened on the _real_ differences.
Not to mention the broken sites... that sniff for MSIE 6.0 for 4? years already!!!
So, NO, IE7 release will change the world into a Firefox/Mozilla user, don't worry!;)
gtkaml.org
As the "code bloat" of Firefox approaches that of IE, and IE 7 is released with tabbed browsing, better security, and all the other whiz-bangs "stolen" from Firefox and Opera, we will see a slowing of growth in Firefox's market share. Public acceptance / perception of IE 7 will have a big influence over Firefox's continued market share growth.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
As said time and time again, Firefox's large memory use is caused not only by memory leaks, which are now presumably fixed, but also by generous caching, which is a feature that will stay around and which you can turn off if you want.
If MS's IE7-on-Vista does a good job with security, there goes the #1 reason to switch away.
Most people are lazy won't switch if they don't need to.
IF IE under Vista is reasonably secure and isn't missing any "must-have" features, they will enjoy steady or rising market share in the future.
Such are the advantages of a near-monopoly
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Is that funny? I'm ready to laugh, but I don't understand the joke. I much prefer this guy's sense of humour.
Consciousness is a myth. Trust me.
These "studies" are hardly statistically valid and you can pick and choose studies to support any case you want to make.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Hmm, this is just conjecture, but I would suppose from the information provided that this indicates more people are getting rid of, or more accurately replacing, their aging Windows machines with Macs.
I also suppose part of it has to do with the upcoming licensing scheme of Vista, as more companies attempt to phase out Windows in favor of "something else" - whatever that something is, provided it gets the job done and doesn't have the intrusive licensing schemes of Vista and all future MS products.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I'm looking forward to Firefox 3.0. I hear it washes your dishes and matches your socks.
I do believe it's time to stop looking for a girlfriend.
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
...this number may go back up when Vista is released and/or if/when Microsoft pushes out IE7 as a Windows Update.
Unless firefox drastically decreases it's memory use (or simply more effective management, so it doesn't interfere with user behavior), or at the very least keeps it fairly constant from a current release, I can't imagine Firefox 2.0 being much of an improvement, to be honest. That's got to be the biggest gripe about it (and only then at about 40 or so tabs). I've not compared it to IE, however, and I can't imagine MS would release a product of superior quality in regard to memory use, so...
Other than that, I've not had a single problem with firefox in months, even in Windows. Every couple months I'll encounter a shoddy page with horrid gobs of javascript (myspace profiles, I'm looking at you), which is the only thing which has caused a fuck-up since I-can't-remember-when.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Kent: Mr Simpson, how do you respond to the charges that petty vandalism such as graffiti is down eighty percent, while heavy sack-beatings are up a shocking nine hundred percent?
Homer: Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. Forty percent of all people know that.
http://widgets.opera.com/widget/3903
Accuweather widget plugin on Opera.
Enjoy!!!
Artifical Intelligience is no match for natural stupidity.
IE7 is not a value-add for Vista. As a product bundled with Windows, IE7 only needs to be decent enough to keep ignorant consumers from seeking alternatives. How does Microsoft expect to make money with IE7?
The marketshare for web browsing from a Windows PC is shrinking. I'm not just talking about Mac OS X and Linux. Realize that this is the year 2006. We snipe eBay auctions via mobile phone. We get RSS feeds on our PDAs. The people using the web these days are doing it less and less with desktops running Windows. I can't buy IE7 for Windows Mobile or Symbian. IE7 doesn't just fail to add value, it fails to compete at all.
If somebody were to produce a large-scale statistic of people who use IE because they prefer it over Firefox (or other browsers), I think we'd see much larger numbers in favor of Firefox instead of IE. (Not to sound like flamebait, but this is true.)
It should be noted that IE's share is still as high as it is because it's the default. A large number of PC users aren't even aware that there are alternatives to IE out there, or even what the advantages/disadvantages of different browsers would be, so of course the slice of the pie for IE will be the largest.
/* No Comment */
It refers to the fact that Cory Lidle was piloting a plane in NY today and crashed. He was a pitcher for the NY Yankees.
It was a morbid joke
-Ed
So you see what had happened was....
There is a big difference between market share (number of people using a particular browser) and web usage (how many hits by a particular browser). When someone says that market share of IE is 82%, it should IMHO mean that 82% of users are using IE. But IE users tend to use the web a lot less than Firefox users. Why ? Huge amounts of pop-ups, no tabs (lots of Windows saturating the task-bar, security holes). IE users are, from my point of view, mostly occasional users of the Web. They simply use what is installed as default. Advanced web users will be rapidly pissed off by the pop-ups and other annoyances... and switch to something else...
For those complaining about firefox's memory footprint, I suggest you read this. In general firefox will use more RAM only if you have more RAM available; you WANT more of your memory to be used for caching to speed things up (as long as it doesn't result in swapping). That said, there are a few real bugs in plugins, and probably the main codebase too. They are hopefully being worked on. By the way, here are my referer browser stats for October so far, for anyone interested.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
Try this:
-
Go to Entrust.
-
Click on "Login".
Firefox goes to 100% CPU utilization, hangs, then crashes if you close the window. That's with the latest Firefox and the previous one. (Some really wierd stuff happened with the previous version of Firefox, including typing going into right-to-left mode for English.)I used to think that FF had memory leaks (and I also have a Toshiba Portege Tablet PC!), but it all turned out to be due to plugins.
Google's plugin for FireFox is the worst offender, but others do it as well.
This add-on detects a lot of leaks, but only of one particular type. It can give you a good idea if you have a plugin that is leaking emmensly though (as the Google plugin does...)
I *love* the Google plugin's features, but it leaks memory so fast... It does a damn good job of giving FF a bad name though!
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
All of these people posting "My site gets XX percentage of browser A" need to take into consideration what their site is about. Now, I would guess that the majority of /. users are not running anything that remotely may interest IE users specifically. Many are Linux web sites or Firefox web sites. OF COURSE these are going to be skewed toward a non-MS web browser. If I was running IE4U.com or something that attracted windows users explicity I would bet that my server logs would show a majority of IE browsers and windows operating systems...ya think?
So unless the web site stats being posted here are completely neutral, like MSNBC.COM, I don't see a point in posting those stats.
the release of safari 3 with leopard (whenver that ends up coming out...)
Who measured this and how did they do it? Are these figures for Ars readers?
On my site, I get, depending on the day, between 60 and 100 percent of my visits from Gecko-based browsers, and usually no MSIE users. But I know these figures aren't very representative.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I'll be using firefox as IE7 won't be released for windows 2000.
So wait, we're trusting a guy named "Mosaic" to give us unbiased browser statistics?
These numbers match what we are seeing at hotels.com. Needless to say we get a bit of traffic:
(For 9/1 - 10/11)
Safari and FF usage goes up every month, and has been for at least the past two years.
A lot of people have issues with Firefox's resource use being too high. What's IE7's like? With all the new stuff MS have added to catch up with Firefox, isn't there a possibility that IE has also lost some of it's advantage in this area? Anyone have any figures from beta testing IE7?
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
I have to say that I stick with firefox simply because of adblock. There is no other reason. IE7 is a very refined browser but don't count on a good adblocking addon for it in the near future.
Firefox is a memory hog, both on my mac and my windows laptop. IE7 does suffer from some UI glitches and clutter, plus with IE7 I feel like the UI works against me. But the IE7 UI as I said is refined, once i've messed with it more and gotten used to it I may very well like it better.
Oh one more thing about IE7, the way it handles bookmarks is, to me anyway, stupid. It's a real pain importing, managing, it seems to place bookmarks where "it" wants too.
Generally speaking the state of browsers today seems poor from a user perspective. Even the paid for browsers are lacking, bug ridden and annoying.
I really wish developers, especialy open source developers, would do a better job listening to user feedback. Classic example of this is the new and annoying bar that pops up in Camino notifying you a popup was blocked. The entire point of blocking the popup is for seemless and transparent web browsing, yet now I have this bar informing me that a popup which I didnt want to see in the first place has been blocked. Why did I block it if I'm going to be notified so blatantly after the fact and with no options to disable it?
Annoying bugs, menus, UI's etc are killing web browsing for me. I don't do nearly as much as I used to (web browsing). Just my own perspective here, I'm sure others will disagree.
I use Opera on my laptop and ff on my desktop and I would have to agree with you - Opera definitely does the job more elegantly than ff, but, it doesn't have the plugin support which firefox does - which in my eyes makes it inferior...
OK - so Opera uses less resources and has a more polished feel to it, but I can make firefox do exactly what I want it to do.
Ok, I've seen so many posts on this article about firefox using an inordinant amount of RAM... I've been using firefox exclusively since like .9 or something...
I have a browser open on my laptop 24x7.... I've never had firefox crash, and I've never seen it use more than 100MB of ram... just now for kicks I did a small test, I've only got 3 tabs open, my email, slashdot, and msnbc... firefox is using 52MB of ram, so I opened IE opened up the same 3 sites, and wow look at that 47MB of ram...
MS can probably get away with 5MB of savings because they are using already loaded system libraries for a bunch of stuff, that's the advantage they get by integrating the browser into the OS... Now, if people are really going to switch browsers for 5MB of RAM then Firefox is doomed.
Can't just figure out somehow that my (secondary) computer has 92MB of ram, so it probably shouldn't cache 105MB in memory? Or that I only have 1GB of memory on this computer, so it probably shouldn't cche 1.5GB (it happened on a rather image-heavy site)?
Ewige Blumenkraft.
Broswers:
- Internet Explorer 427,504 89.03%
- Firefox 39,253 8.17%
- Safari 6,876 1.43%
- Netscape 4,892 1.02%
- Mozilla 716 0.15%
- Opera 538 0.11%
- gzip 182 0.04%
- Mozilla Compatible Agent 114 0.02%
- Camino 55 0.01%
- Konqueror 37 0.01%
Browser/Platform Combos:With the first link, the chain is forged.
OK, From a Far Away Land, I certainly appreciate the traffic, but you gave me a high blood pressure rush trying to figure out why my URL was in your post! Thanks, hugs asnd kisses.
I work at a municipality in FL and manage the web server for the main public website. Some months we are as low as 65% IE visits (that month had 23% firefox). I like looking at our stats because I think it's a pretty good mix. It's geared toward the general public and isn't a tech site, building site, music site, but a site for everyone. Mind you this is up to a million visits a month (somewhat large city).
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
Will Microsoft make it install itself as the default browser?
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
After these results were reported..
Microsoft's Stock tumbles 50%, panic in Redmond, protests in the street, millions of users alarmed
Oh wait.. nevermind that's all untrue.
In related news...
Who cares? Do I need to see an update everytime someone uses IE, Firefox, or Opera? Maybe we can get this tally added to census.gov!!
Even with Fasterfox, IE is faster than Firefox on my AMD 64. Right now, I'm using Firefox because I'm at home and I love dem tabs.
But if I'm in a big hurry to find something, I still use that IE icon. I know most of the reasons that Firefox isn't as fast, but it still doesn't bode well for seeing IE getting knocked off its number 1 position in this lifetime.
I wish it would happen. I've tried just about every new browser that comes along because I really do want to break up MS hegemony over my desktop. It's not fair, but there it is.
You are welcome on my lawn.
If it's measured in users, it makes sense.
If it's measured in units, then every person using a Windows box to run Firefox or Opera is also counted as an IE user. And, if you update for bug fixes on a Windows box, that counts as "using IE" (just did that today, even though I never use IE for anything else).
If it's measured in dollars, the figures are wrong, as IE is "free" so Opera has the largest "paid" marketshare.
And if it's measured in lupins per square inch, well then tickle me twice and call me a pumpkin internet generator!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
It's a different cache setting you have to set in about:config, not in the usual GUI Preferences.
And as said time and time again, the browser will be used at its defaults by most users and should function at peak performance in that configuration if you want the user base to grow anywhere near the size of IE's.
I'm sure I'm not the only one here who thinks Mac's Safari is great and all but runs OS X alongside Firefox. I just prefer it's interface and features over Safari (especially the blatantly lacking tabbed browsing), so even though Mac's market share may go higher and higher, Safari's doesn't necessarily go higher along with it.
Swapping to/from disk is still faster than downloading over the Internet.
What is peak performance? You can't have both low memory usage and fast retrieval of previously-visited pages. The devs had to pick one and they did.
I work for a small computer company which mainly deals with people who simply use whatever the default happens to be. In today's computers that means Internet Explorer. So I thought I'd look at the stats from our company website for the month of September and I was somewhat surprised to find the following:
MS Internet Explorer - 2714 hits - 74 %
Firefox - 822 hits - 22.4 %
Netscape - 37 hits - 1 %
Unknown - 33 hits - 0.9 %
Mozilla - 25 hits - 0.6 %
Konqueror - 17 hits - 0.4 %
Opera - 16 hits - 0.4 %
Lynx - 2 hits - 0 %
Over 22% of visits to our company website were using FireFox. This from customers who typically just accept the defaults. Quite surprising to me.
- James
...and analyze this data in a coherent manner. Sure, lots of folks hate Microsoft, but what does this trend really mean? Is it a long term change or- DIE, IE, DIE! TAKE A TRIP TO THE HOT PLACE, DAMN YOU! FOURTH CIRCLE, SEVENTH FIRE PIT ON THE LEFT, YOU CSS MANGLING PILE OF CRAP. DIIIIIE!!!!
Its a sign that the market, such that there exists one for a product which has essentially always been free-as-in-beer, is working. Firefox was the critique of IE, in software form. IE7 is the reply. Everybody gets better software out of the deal for there having been a bit of competition there. (Even the Firefox guys -- you think they had a fire lit under their hindquarters to improve when they were pretty clearly superior feature-wise to IE?)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
True, but attempting to keep it in memory and swapping it to disk doesn't seem nearly as sensible as just keeping it on the disk. For one thing, I don't believe that firefox keeps things compressed in cache (don't quote me on that). Also, it causes things that I'm probably more likely to look at or use to swap out.
Ewige Blumenkraft.
Well that's easy to say, but how do you compete in the browser market? It seems like every new feature we see in Opera or Firefox is quickly copied by Microsoft in their IE betas, and also copied in the newest Opera and Firefox releases. How do you compete with that?
Since competition is often equated with innovation, I might as well bring this up: On a somewhat related note, are new features even what people want in a browser? I mean, Opera's mantra was once "faster, smaller" and even their products are starting to bloat in favor of added features. Aside from being an open source product and enjoying the benefits of that, the only thing that Firefox really has going for it these days is its modular design and extensibility (and even then some argue that "This should be included, it shouldn't be an extension!")
I suppose Mozilla could continue to rely on word-of-mouth advertising in addition to their promotional campaigns, but ultimately how do you overcome the fact that it's just easier for non-internet savvy people to use that big blue 'E' on their desktop that came with Windows?
Well, that is why I'm running Linux on it. My laptop has over 10 times the memory of that computer (which I got for free).
Ewige Blumenkraft.
The statistics this article references are from Net Applications. OneStat also came out with a report recently, and theirs actually shows IE usage up slightly to 85.85%.
So it depends on who you believe...
R.Mo
I wonder how the release of Firefox 2.0 and IE 7 later this month will change the game?
I think FF2 won't make much of a difference to the "average" user, with a lot FF 2's new features being pulled it is not so different from 1.5. IE 7 is quite different from IE6 but I don't think it will help market share. When IE7 is released it will spur at least some users to try different options. IE7 will not likely pull many(any) users from FireFox but if they don't immediately like IE7's new layout they may look for other alternatives. I personally don't like the way the tabs are set up in IE7 and don't like the limited ability to rearrange the toolbar.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
I have yet to find something I can't make Opera do.
Since you now can write your own widgets and it has UserJS, I refuse to spend all that time downloading and keeping plugins up to date when a FF update breaks something.
Artifical Intelligience is no match for natural stupidity.
Not that I know of. Would be a good feature to request from them. Docking/Anchoring of Widgets.
Good Luck
Artifical Intelligience is no match for natural stupidity.
What about its constant excessive CPU usage? Right now Firefox is using about 60% of my CPU, and it's minimized. (Before you ask, I also have Flashblock, so there shouldn't be any Flash apps running.)
Oh, and 570MB of RAM. Yeesh.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
Maybe if you are autoattacking orc pawns in Kaladim, but try raiding or kiting ... it is far from the stability of the client under Windows and you will sock up more than a few deaths per week (Evening, even) to wine.
IMO... I love it, it's more than just a web browser. I accept that it's not as good at browsing the web as Firefox but it works with virtually all the sites I'm interested in, the full gmail interface being the most notable exception. For me the ability to browse more than just the web in a single app is a real blessing, and the integration with the rest of the KDE desktop is wonderful.
I hate to sound like a hater, but I couldn't find their survey methodology anywhere. The site I know and whose methodology I know (I didn't say trust) doesn't paint quite as rosy of a picture.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Any idea which one? Is it:
browser.cache.memory.enable?
Sometimes my arms bend back.
My site doesn't get a great amount of hits, but it IS representative of my industry.
OK so /. doesn't have many business types. That kind of percentage in any market is just plain great. And since a previous story suggested that market share had increased, it's probably safe to say not much has actually changed. IE still dominates the market and anything else has a darn long way to go to catch up.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
OK so 80% is a giant share of the market, but 20% of the market is also far too much to ignore and that means websites are gonna have to cater for the non-IE browser. That means conforming to web standards which means anyone with the skills and desire can write a standards conforming browser and fight for their share of the market on even ground with IE, Firefox, and the rest.
IE may still be the dominant browser but the days of "this browser requires Internet Explorer" are long gone. And thank God for that.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
This is the only good news I've heard in the entire computer industry in the last year.
Sun releasing Solaris 10 (and dtrace, ZFS, zones, services) and IE losing market share are the only good things that have happened in the industry that I'm aware of.
Sad, ain't it?
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
I can assure you, I'm female, for real. http://photos-254.ak.facebook.com/ip005/v27/192/38 /5319221/n5319221_30678254_7083.jpg See?
look! it's a bird, it's a plane, it's....a girl? yes, a girl browsing Slashdot on Linux
This is one of those damned lies. Since there are apps to get the REAL amount of system memory in use, total, and what the system is using - FF should be able to tell how much RAM to use for swap. These functions are not all that complex, and documented all over the place. Expecially by those guys that make IRC scripts to show your computer stats.
-]Phreak Out[-
Why should Microsoft care about this occurrence, it doesn't at all shake Microsoft's market dominance, in fact it inforces it at best. Microsoft spends tons of money on IE yet don't make anything out of it. If I were Microsoft I would be celebrating that someone is taking the browser market out of my hands.
by generous caching, which is a feature
What I don't understand is why this "feature" is still kept around, or at least so aggressively used, if its such a big complaint. It seems to me that whether or not something is done intentionally, if it is disliked by the users it is not really a feature. Perhaps many people do want to have firefox aggressively cache, but the number one complaint I hear from other people who use firefox is how much memory it consumes. I'd like to see an easy and obvious way to disable this feature in firefox, or even have it disabled by default. (and yes, I do realize you can change it under about:config, but your average user doesn't)
Although I'm a Safari and Firefox user I would gladly use IE 7 over 6 and certainly over the lame non-choice of 5.2.3 on Mac OS X.
Presumably, they're not [only] caching files, they're caching already processed data structures (parsed documentss). You disk cache only knows files. If you want to be fast when going to the previous page for instance, that is what you have to do.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
If I wasn't already married... damnit, I admitted it, online, damnit, damnit, damnit...
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
...and some would say that it's 18% full...
Which Google plugin -- the official Google Toolbar? Do David Baron and Google know about the problem?
I do see something about the Google Toolbar listed on the problematic extensions page but not on Hendikins' Firefox memory usage FQA. Hmm.
The shareholder is always right.
All the experts have agreed for years now.
... Oops, 6% ... Oops, 8%, Oops ... 10% ...
Firefox will never reach 4%
Looks like an expert trend.
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Please, do not take my post as flamebait. I introduce general points. Many of you are geeks. Admit that, it's okay. Many of you are developers, too. Many of you are enthusiasts and like to tweak and customize out the wazoo. For all of you folk, browsers like FF are great. They're secure, customizable, not Microsoft, everything you could want in a browser. Now consider everyone else in the world. And actually, this even includes myself, even though I AM an enthusiast and a slight geek. You have IE7, given to you automatically via Windows Updates. No hassles required. It is already on your system, offers tabs and good security, and works without a hitch. It is integrated into the OS so it opens faster and does not introduce any problems. I have used IE6 for years and never once got a virus or spyware because of it. So please, tell me, why should I switch to Firefox? Answer: I shouldn't. IE7 may not pass some Acid2 test or whatever, but I am a user, not a developer. IE7 is secure and does what I need and there is really no reason for me to use any other browser.
Double edged sword. The reason we had great browsers like Firefox (and others) is to make up for the poor IE flaws and their dominance. If things slip then we end up with a new "leader" who takes the oppurtunity to rest on their laurels rather than fighting as the underdog to outdo "the man". In other words firefox could go to shit eventually. Now, I use firefox as my main browser but it's not perfect. If MS fix up IE7 and add in those FF enhancements (Tabbed browsing being the main one for me) then maybe people will start reverting. Especially because you don't have problems on bank websites or certain rendering with IE. Of course IE doesn't always cope that well with standard web pages either and it's rendering mistakes have become almost standard now to web developers.
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And how would I turn that off? I've already set browser.cache.memory.capacity in about:config to 16384 (months ago in FF 1.5, and it carried over to 2.0.) That helped a little, but didn't solve the problem.
BTW, FF 2 is currently using 181MB, and it keeps going up.
I wouldn't call your post "informative" because you don't actually explain how to fix the problem!
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I really wonder how valid these reports are, as in the last couple of weeks I also read a lot of reports where it states that Firefox is rapidly loosing ground... So I guess these kinds of reports are just otherly useless...
Let's say there are 10 web users. 1 is FF user and views 100 pages per day. 9 are IE users, with average 10 page views per day. Then there are 100 FF page views and 90 IE page views. Does it mean FF is over 50%? No.
This means should also take into account also how active are different web users.
As long as you have to use about:config rather than the preferences applet, the average user can't configure it. I'm pretty techy and I can't be bothered to spend time searching the web to work out how to use about:config properly, there's almost no chance the average user will (or will even know about it)
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Does it matter? Anyone who has changed their default to Firefox will know how to change it back - and besides, doesn't FF check at startup by default anyway?
My issue is with applications that ignore your preferences and launch IE instead; that's far more annoying, IMHO. MS are guilty of this too - if you click an ad in Live Messenger (not that I do, but I digress...) it launches IE. I've not been using it long enough to have received a link in a message; if that opens IE, I'll really be pissed.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
It's not firefox that's crashing. It's some windows Java JVM problem, looks like. Works fine on firefox 1.5 on a Mac.
-- -- The Dragon De Monsyne
I'd like that for plugins like flash, which can be annoying at times.
Firefox already has checkboxes to activate/deactivate Java and Javascript under Tools => Options => Content. Can we please have a list of checkboxes for the various plugins?
Hmm, maybe I should head over to mozilla.org and propose that...
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I've done a number of Windows installs for friends/colleagues, and for well over a year I've been supplying Firefox + Thunderbird as a matter of course, with access to IE discouraged (no link on start menu/desktop, set program access & defaults set to use Mozilla only, etc).
However we know, or at least suspect, that IE will be pushed out as a high priority / critical update. This isn't a bad thing, as at least it will permit unlicensed machines to receive the update - which is good from a Internet health perspective. However one thing I wonder about is: will IE7 comply with pre-existing Program Access settings on a WinXP box, or will there be a big flashy announcement that quietly resets IE as the default web browser on a machine?
One way or another, I suspect their will be a big swing from Firefox to IE once IE7 is deployed - and that this will come from less technical users who have their settings changed without fully understanding what's going on.
26.22% of quoted statistics are made up on the spot.
Why are page developers STILL making their websites non browser indifferent. C'mon how many of you are finding websites that just don't work with Mozilla forcing you to use things like IE Tab extension? Hell we have to write extensions to Mozilla at work just to make it work with our OWN website applications.
You don't need Firefox to do your dishes or impress women, you just need to stop using emacs. Vim can do your dishes, and make your woman smile for a week (among other wondrous things).
54% of that are masked IE
Sent from my desktop computer
Going from 95% to 82% justifies a 'just' in there. I dare say 'business types' would be more then a bit dismayed to see thier market share drop from 95% to 82%.
Maybe that's just me though.
How many people switch *TO* IE from something else, really?
Either:
- you are a member of the drooling masses, accepting without question whatever came on your computer, and may not even be aware of the concept of being able to *choose* software - you have and will continue to use IE exclusively until its no longer the default
-OR-
- you are an MS apoligist, and despite being aware of software other than MS, you stick with it becuase you want to be intentionally ignorant - you will continue to use IE even if its no longer the default
-OR-
- you dont see anything wrong with MS, and you briefly tried something else, but didnt really give it a fair shake, and decided you 'didnt like it' becuase it was different. You *might* try something else if someday the default changes
-OR-
- you are one of the people who have switched from IE to something else - you will probably stick with what you've changed to, although you might consider other options, but unlikely you will ever go back to IE
-OR-
- you are one of the VERY few who don't use MS software for anything, ever
(Note Im only counting what people use on their primary machine for their own use - not developers who have sixteen different browsers installed in 6 different machines [virtual or otherwise] for testing their own sites)
"Many of you are geeks .. For all of you folk, browsers like FF are great"
.. You have IE7 .. offers tabs and good security, and works without a hitch."
.. This vulnerability could potentially allow remote code execution if a user visited a specially crafted Web site", Oct 10 2006
Fud injection: only dyed in the wool geeks can use Firefox.
- What exactly can the non-geek not do using Firefox to browse the Web. Give us some specifics.
"Now consider everyone else in the world
"six of today's updates apply to fully patched Windows XP systems, and two of the flaws are actually present in Windows Vista."
"It is integrated into the OS so it opens faster and does not introduce any problems"
It is precicely because it is integrated into the OS that it is so insecure. It start faster because all its bits are loaded at boot time. The same effect can be achieved by using the Firefox Preloader.
"I have used IE6 for years and never once got a virus or spyware because of it"
"Secunia is reporting on three vulnerabilities in IE6 running on XP SP2.", Nov 2005
"remote code execution vulnerability exists in Windows Shell
was Still using IE and don't intend to change
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It's crazy, it seems the more ground msie loses, the more web-sites refuse to work with anything except msie.
Funny, on my computer, it only goes above 50% for a moment while actually rendering a loaded page, and is only using 34MB of ram (though I'd like to think it could be smaller than that).
In fairness, I do have literally a hundred tabs open. But I still don't understand the constant CPU usage. (60%, 480MB RAM. The RAM usage goes up and down moderately unpredictably, the CPU sometimes does but it's rarer.)
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It would be good enough it it reaches critical mass (30 to 40 % of the market).
Then it would no longer be an option for MS to ignore standards and they would try to be much more compliant with them.
Which would reopen competition in the browser market once the playing field is leveled.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Yes, the official Google toolbar. It has not been updated for almost a year (well maybe it was updated 3 months ago? About when I gave up checking on it for updates...), and if anybody at Google bothered to USE it.... well I guess Google does the same thing MS does and gives all devs tricked out machines so they don't notice when us poor regular users have issues with 2 GB of RAM being used up.
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Right now Firefox is using about 60% of my CPU, and it's minimized. (Before you ask, I also have Flashblock, so there shouldn't be any Flash apps running.)
Try turning off java and javascript. And set images to loop only once.
These steps won't get everything that uses cpu when "idle", but they all help. Advertisers like to use all these things to make their ads distractive. There are some other cpu-eating features that probably can't be turned off, such as the auto-refresh in a page's tags.
What would really help is a thorough study of all the ways that a page can continue to use cpu. We need a list of them, and an on/off flag for each one. If FF (or seamonkey) would give us something like this, it would be another good advertising point.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I have a Firefox Window with 20 tabs opened (mostly /. postings I want to check today). That has a foot print of 146MB
I have 2 sessions of IE, that has a foot print of 46MB
Let me open 2 more of each one, pointing lets say, to Google and the BBC.
FF is now, 147MB
IE is now 75MB
So
FF is 147MB/22 sessions ~ 6MB/session
IE is 75MB/4 sessions ~ 18 MB/session
Now, feel free to throw your anecdotal evidence, but do not tell us that there is a generalized problem unless you can quote serious sources on this regard.
In this little nonsense example it seems that firewall manages far more efficently memory once it is running.
I am pretty sure that launching one session of each would be favourable to IE (well of course, all the MS's kitchen sink is already loaded), but that is not all what memory management is all about.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I don't think Java's even installed on this computer :D but Javascript is.
I think it's the image looping, honestly, because a lot of pages are on a forum with avatars, and some people have animated avatars. But I kind of like the animations - many of them are clever and amusing. So I want to leave those on. But there's no reason they should be eating CPU when the window is minimized or when I'm looking at a different tab.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
This was answered: The reason why FF consumes that much memory is because it is available and favors "allocation" for increased speed to avoid any cache. Letting it go to cache isn't "free" since it has an overhead as well. Asking it again in an effort to make it look dubious is a falacy.
The feature itself isn't bad: Using a memory when memory is available isn't automatically bad since there is a gain (speedup). But if it really bothers the user they should be allowed to turn it off or switch to another allocation scheme. The best would be to offer the user a choice of settings. Especially with a large free memory pool, the bonus of a "small memory footprint" becomes a distant secondary concern where the benefits of the tradeoff are easy to justify.
The Firefox numbers are probably a little inflated, since scripts using curl and wget are probably using agent strings saying Mozilla 6.0.
But there's no reason [active images] should be eating CPU when the window is minimized or when I'm looking at a different tab.
Actually, there's a very good reason: Some programmer implemented it that way.
That's the reason that most software does what it does. If there are several ways that something could be done, you can expect that all of them will be implemented in some software somewhere. It's basically at the programmer's whim.
In the case of active images, there's no sensible reason for keeping them running when they're not visible on the screen. But stopping them and restarting them takes explicit actions on the part of the software. This requires that the programmer(s) be aware of the issue and write the code to do it right. You'd expect that initial releases of image-displaying software wouldn't do this.
It's quite difficult for a user to verify that it's actually an active image that's eating the cpu. But it can be done. Use the context menu to load the image into a separate tab. Wait for cpu usage to stabilize, and note the browser's cpu usage. Close that tab, wait a bit, and note the browser's cpu usage. If it has decreased, you have some partial evidence. Re-create the tab with the active image, and see if the cpu usage goes back up. If so, you have better evidence. Close the tab, and see if the cpu usage declines. If so, it's really good evidence.
I've done this, and concluded that FF does indeed keep images "running" when they're not visible on the screen. This happens if I switch to another tab, and also if I minimize the window.
Even worse, it happens with all "active" elements. Javascript keeps running, as do any video plugins. The only way to stop them is to disable the feature globally (or per site with Opera).
There's lots of room for future improvements here.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Well duh, of course it's caused by a programmer. Doesn't mean there's a good reason for it, it just means that someone was lazy or not particularly thoughtful.
Good to know that that's what's actually occuring, though. Even if there isn't an obvious way to fix it. Sigh.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
- What exactly can the non-geek not do using Firefox to browse the Web. Give us some specifics.
Nothing at all, the general aim of my post was not saying that FF lacks features or usability, it was saying that there is no good reason for a regular user to desire to switch, unless they don't how to maintain their system or don't have someone maintaining it for them, then in that case yes I absolutely agree with others who posted who said FF helps keep them safe and they should use it.
It is precicely because it is integrated into the OS that it is so insecure. It start faster because all its bits are loaded at boot time. The same effect can be achieved by using the Firefox Preloader.
As I said, sure it being integrated leads to it being more insecure, but I an educated user that keeps his system clean and only visits trusted sites, so why should this bother me? I don't need to be locked down like a fort here because I click anything that pops up in my face.
Also, by menntioning the thing about the preloader, you just proved my point even further. With FF, I would have to do EXTRA work and take extra steps to achieve the same speed and convenience that I get with IE7 right out of the box.
"Secunia is reporting on three vulnerabilities in IE6 running on XP SP2.", Nov 2005
Again, I am not visiting websites that are trying to exploit such a vulnerability.
Also, one other thing to add about the Secunia report, I am using IE7 RC1 now, not IE6. So let's compare IE7 security throughout this discussion and not IE6's.
I've not made many polls, but there is a good number of adults playing. In fact, I have examples of teachers playing alongside some of their students. I'm fairly sure the average age of BattleMaster is considerably above that of whatever FPS is currently "in".
In fact, I'm quite proud that the game appeals to people in an age bracket at least from 9 to the 50s (the youngest and oldest players, respectively, that I know of).
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Unless you only read the same few sites, you don't really know if any given site you're reading is malicious or not. And you never know if it's been compromised and is now hosting the malicious code. There are many, many ways that even careful users can accidentally be compromised if they're using insecure software (on the other hand, careful users generally don't choose to use insecure software).
Web consulting +
True, I never know what sites may have been compromised, I'm just speaking from experience. Not only did I never have a problem using IE6, I'm using IE7 now, and do we really know for sure if IE7 is any less secure than Firefox?
Well duh, of course it's caused by a programmer. Doesn't mean there's a good reason for it, ...
...
I was replying to the original comment:
But there's no reason
Note the lack of the word "good" in the original. I agree that there's no good reason; I was just pointing out that there's a reason. And yes, it's a fairly obvious reason, if perhaps not a good one.
Actually, if you look at the origin of the mozilla suite in the Mosaic browser, I'd claim that it was reasonable to implement it this way at first. Building Mosaic for the first time was a bit of a task, and it's no surprise that little issues like background threads eating up cpu time might have been ignored. Mosaic was, to a great extent, a "proof of concept", and it was spectacularly successful for its time.
But that was then. Now, the marketers are taking advantage of this to saturate our cpus for the purpose of distracting us with active images. This is growing into a serious problem. There would be a real advantage to a browser with the ability to block this waste of cpu.
Firefox has some tools for controling cpu use. But the tools are scattered, ad hoc, incomplete, and difficult to use. There's a gimmick to stop active images. There's a gimmick to turn javascript on and off. There's an extension to block flash. There's no way I know to block a tag. There's no consistency to any of this. Opera has some good ideas, but it's also incomplete. I wonder if there's a way to unify the problem into a single, consistent tool?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
#1 - Why not?
#2 - If they were forced to choose, perhaps they chose wrong.
#3 - If a typical home PC owner is expected to switch to open source software, what are they supposed to do when they have a problem? They can't go to the community that created it because that community has excuses for nearly everything (the devs had to pick one and they did.) and for those things they don't have an excuse for, they say "Create a patch and submit it." If they use something commercial, at least there is someone they can go to for help and can hold responsible, even legally if it comes down to it.
Yes, Grandma, I know you are having trouble with this software. You should write a patch for it and donate it.
Come on.