Slashdot Mirror
After 100M IE7 Downloads, Firefox Still Gaining
Kelson writes "Internet Explorer 7 hit the 100 million download mark last week. Yet in the three months it's been available, Firefox's market share has continued to grow. InformationWeek reports that nearly all of IE7's growth has been upgrades from IE6. People don't seem to be switching back to IE in significant numbers, prompting analysts to wonder: has Microsoft finally met its match?"
You upgrade IE6 with the assumption that MS will require it for one thing or another. We don't actually use it but we install it just in case.
Based on my experience with corporate networks and home machines, about 85% of those were pushed via Automatic Updates. I expect a maximum of about 20% of those downloads to be intentional or wanted.
Is it fair to compare these stats? Most IE users don't choose to upgrade, it's simply foisted on them by Windows' Auto Update. When I returned home this Christmas both my mum and sister asked me to "fix the internet" because IE7 had been installed and its new layout confused them. They certainly didn't choose in the way that someone chooses to download and install Firefox does, so the victory is even more in FF's favour.
Please note that this isn't a Firefox fanboy post (despite my love for it), merely pointing out the facts.
Internet Explorer 7 hit the 100 million download mark last week.
Gee, perhaps that has something to do with Microsoft marking it a high-priority update, so everyone with automatic updates turned on will unwittingly get it?
Not much of a claim to success to say that 100 million people, running an OS that has automatic updates turned on by default, have wasted bandwidth on a program they didn't even choose to download.
I installed IE7 on my Windows box. I use Firefox exclusively. The only reason that I installed it was because the automatic update manager wanted to, and since IE is a deeply embedded component of Windows, a security update for IE is a security update for Windows. Otherwise, I wouldn't have bothered.
I switched (mostly) to Linux to get away from IE. But I still installed IE7. So no, I don't consider this news to be surprising in the slightest.
Or, if you're any type of web designer you use both to check your sites work. Simply quoting download numbers is a completly bogus way of proving popularity. You'd think something like InformationWeek would know better than to report this pointless bit dick waving.
Now I'm not usually one to get all up in arms about the appearance of a program, but IE7 looks well and truly ugly to my eyes, and for the 5 minutes or so that I bothered buggering around with it I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to move the toolbar icons and the addressbar in any useful way. Contrast that with Firefox, which handles the toolbar UI configuration very well and MS looks immediately to be onto a loser.
While people might argue about all manner of things like standards support, security, and rendering speed; the initial ugliness and apparent difficulty/impossibility to configure the UI to my liking is probably going to put more people off IE7 within 5 minutes than anything else.
I presume there is a way to change the UI (hell, even IE6 could do that) and maybe it's actually quite obvious if you take the time to look, but quite frankly why should I when Firefox can do it right off the bat in an intuitive manner? I think that's the way a lot of casual users see it too.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
Considering these circumstances, it is amazing to see how well Firefox is doing considering the odds.
Just because I downloaded IE7 doesn't mean I use it any more than I have to.
This is not the right time for comparing IE7 effect on Firefox. The time will be when Vista comes out and new PCs come preloaded with Vista and IE7. At that time, people will get rid of the old PCs and we'll see whether they're sufficiently satisfied with IE7 that they won't bother with downloading Firefox. At the same time we'll also see if people used to IE6, when presented with IE7's new interface, might switch to Firefox. Whichever way the pendulum swings, that's when we should watch it.
"has Microsoft finally met its match?"
Um, no. There will always be some microsoft tool that requires their browser causing some form of lock-in. Heck, using microsoft's action pack subscription web page to purchase software requires IE. What the numbers mean is that web designers are finally paying attention and making their sites support firefox and a few other standards based browsers or risk loosing a good chunk of their customers. And now that everyone's favorite web pages work in firefox, they can start making a piecemeal migration away from vendor lock-in. However, just because they can use firefox for most things, you can be sure that microsoft will ensure there is lock-in someone and default to their browser giving them a 75% chunk of the market for life. The next chunk of the monopoly to fragment will be office with various online tools and openoffice making advances. But, I expect that will be another 2-4 years before we see anything like firefox's progress.
The same can be said for many people that downloaded Firefox. They tried it out, didn't like it, and switched back to IE.
Let's consider the following facts:
- IE7's requirements say it will only run on XP or Windows Server 2003. Hence you'd expect that (most) people who downloaded IE7 are indeed on XP or Win 2003 machines.
- all XP and Windows Server 2003 computers came with IE6
I'm sure you can fill in the blanks there, because it's a simple case of "X => Y, Y => Z". If X="you upgraded to IE7", Y="you're on XP or Win 2003", Z="you had IE6". Did anyone really need a statistic or study to tell them that, surprisingly, unexpectedly, those who upgraded to IE7 had IE6 on their machine before?
Pretty much the only mildly interesting word in there is: "most". Did some people actually go through the trouble of making IE7 install on a system that doesn't run it? E.g., on Win 2000? I can only hope there weren't too many.
So basically this is such a useless revelation, that I can only hope that it was some attempt at manipulation. Because the depressing to think that someone was genuinely stupid enough to think they're onto some brilliant discovery and market trend.
So the one-word wisdom there is: duh.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Ofcourse. Tabbed browsing is the innovation the world has been waiting for so long. You claim IE has not done anything new in a decade. Well, what new can be done in a web browser? Oh yes, if your talking about some mindless widgets or something similar which only 14 year olds have time to play around with, then yes, firefox takes the lead. Don't waste your time giving a lecture on the security aspects of both browsers. Firefox had its share of security issues and even though IE might have had more, its not much to jump around about. Firefox 2 was a pretty crappy upgrade. Heavier on the machine, stupid color themes, etc. Seems like someone is trying to compete with IE. Also remember there are people like me (probably few, although in ratio) who install firefox just to see what the hype is about but obviously use IE (on windows, Opera on FreeBSD)
Open Source is always superior to proprietary (long term), for the simple fact that Open Source gets fixed faster, and by a bigger pool of coding talent.
That has to be ignoring half a kazillion markeds where the leading product is a commercial product which is vastly superior to any OSS equivalent (but usually with a price tag to match). If I wanted to point out where OSS has usually succeeded, I would say that OSS thrives in markets that have stagnated and have little or no competition. Linux, Firefox and OpenOffice are all good examples of that. It seems that in these markets OSS products can improve and live where commercial products would fail to sell and die.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Reduce, reuse, cycle
Of course! Let's not count Opera because it doesn't match with our precious open source theory! Ignore tabs! Mouse gestures! All these 'innovations' that Firefox pushed! Yay puppies and kittens!
What have you been smoking? What exactly has Firefox introduced that can be considered innovative? Tabbed windows and plugins? Those features were already available for other browsers, including IE.
Want an example of a real innovation? Try XmlHttpRequest. You know, that API that underpins practically all of the AJAX, web 2.0 innovation that is happening. Microsoft introduced that with Outlook Web Access 2000. Name one thing that Firefox has introduced that has had the same impact on the way that we use the internet.
I really like Firefox. I started using it when it was still in beta. But I switched to it because it had a simple, clean interface that did just what I needed it to do, not because it was innovative.
Now that's a bit of a stretch, don't you think? I use and love Firefox. It's what I'm typing this in right now. But I use both browsers on a daily basis. There are some sites that only look right in IE7 (due to web developers optimizing for IE at the expense of standards), and there are some sites that don't like IE7 yet (and thus work better in IE6 or -- since that isn't available if you have IE7 -- in FF). And then there's sites using ActiveX (such as Microsoft's Outlook Web Access) which only work at full capacity in IE.
Sure, FF is making inroads. It's my browser of choice (almost exclusively because of extensions, though, and not due to any other groundbreaking feature in FF). But to construe that "abandoning" IE is ridiculous. Both are useful.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Why doesn't anybody complain about Safari, or Voyager or Konqueror being bundled with thier respective OS distributions? (Yes, I know Konqueror belongs to KDE, but think Knoppix and the like)
Because those OS distributions are not occupying 90% of the market, and are not essentially shoved down the throat of everyone who wants to buy a PC.
When you have a product that is a monopoly, you have additional rules to follow. It includes not taking advantage of this monopoly (the OS one) to force an unrelated product (IE) on your customers. What is so hard to understand?
Your SAP comment is good.
The bigger issue, though, is that most businesses still haven't moved off Win2k. No XP/2003, no IE7.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
I don't surf for porn or cracked software; the only two kinds of web sites were my A/V software ever went off.
So it only alerts when visiting websites you don't visit?
The original poster was discounting the innovations that Opera brought for the mere fact that it isn't open source. He kept on touting the horn of open source software, how it is always vastly superior (in terms of code, efficiency, fixes, features), ignoring the fact that Opera is still a faster, more optimized browser than Firefox, has introduced many of the 'innovations' that Firefox claims as its own, and ignores the fact that Firefox has had a memory leak bug for ages that has yet to be fixed (while claiming that Firefox gets fixed faster because it's open source).
1:
Because there is not necessarily a 1:1 relationship between persons and user accounts, even though a lot of people seem to think this. One person can have a limited account for everyday purposes and an administrator account for administrative purposes.
2:
Because the user will then be able to call someone who has the necessary rights.