Slashdot Mirror
Firefox Usage Near 25% In Europe
PARENA writes "French researcher Xiti claims that Mozilla Firefox keeps winning terrain in Europe. 24.1% of Internet users in Europe use Firefox. Slovenia (44.5%), Finland (41.3%), Croatia (36.5%), and Germany (36.2%) lead the way, followed by a group of mostly Eastern European countries. Remarkably, The Netherlands is only at 13.3%, right before Andorra. Oceania maintains a slight lead over Europe, at 24.8%; the rest of the world trails at 11.9% to 15.1%."
.... In 3 - 2 - 1....
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Wasn't the Amiga also popular in Europe at some point? Nothing wrong with the Amiga, just pointing out that you can't always use Europe as a gauge for success. ;-)
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Wouldn't it be more useful to look at the stats for Internet Explorer than those for Firefox? I'm sure many Europeans use Opera or Safari, besides just Firefox?
:)
Got to give props to the Firefox guys though. They're getting there
I feel like I'm forgetting something important today. My co-worker said "does it end with x?" All I can think of is Firefox, but that's not it.
I'm getting around 82% firefox, 16% IE.
OS platforms are 88% windows, 9% Mac, and nearly 3% Linux.
Are other people seeing this?
The first question for me is why is the US lagging behind on this? Only 2% more Firefox usage than Africa.
Anyone any ideas why this is?
George Bush
I'm impressed with Slovenia and Finland at over 40% penetration. Though they're relatively small countries population wise, the Firefox teams have really made a substantial impact there. These successes are what it really takes for people to notice Firefox in the mainstream. 40% probably puts them near the share Internet Explorer has locally which is definitely a great step. The article also shows Australia at 25% which is awesome. Great numbers all around, keep up the great work.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
1. It mentions 96,000+ web sites were monitored for the purpose of determining this. What were they? Were they evenly distributed by raw population? By internet-using population?
2. Does this survey make any attempt to take into account 'individual PC users' vs. 'internet cafe' users? i.e. Is this percentage of COMPUTERS or percentage of USERS? (Or, more likely, percentage of individual web hits?)
I can't find any technical details on how this survey was conducted, other than the slight mention of number of websites involved.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
If you didn't notice...
Whats Oceania? I thought it was a made-up supernation from Orwell's 1984.
Firefox is fast becoming newspeak for "web browser".
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Stats in general can be misleading, but I would agree that IE stats would be more useful. I'd love to see a time comparison chart between the popularity of Firefox vs IE though. I'm betting that firefox is doing very well because of all the advertisement google is helping them with. Have you seen all those "Get Firefox with Google Toolbar" adds! Google will give you a whole dollar each time someone clicks on it and downloads firefox, with the toolbar, from your site. Its sweet, but with Apple having a bit of the market share out there, and all those Opera users, along with netscape and links/lynx (Love for text browsers!), and even Konqueror for those weird KDE fans, I bet that we've got 50% open source web browsing SOMEWHERE...
Support the source, Open Source! An entire site developed with OSS
Remarkably, The Netherlands is only at 13.3%
I don't find that remarkable at all. I lived in the Netherlands for a few years, and one of the things that struck me was how Microsoft-centric the universities were. A huge percentage of the Computer Science students had never even tried an OS other than Windows! (I come from one of those sunny countries in the south of Europe, and that's where I attended university. There, the various flavours of Unix — mainly Linux of course — ruled and continue to rule inside the Computer Science department). Therefore it doesn't surprise me at all that the Dutch are still stuck in the yesteryear of Internet Explorer.
As time passed, I realised that part of the reason for the Dutch situation has to do with a certain spirit of conformity and of "trying not to distinguish yourself too much from your peers". Granted, it has its positive sides — like a fairly equalitarian society — but also downsides like this one.
Who cares about browser usage in the third world? If the question were "why is the US becoming a third world nation" you would get a more informed answer.
... just saying
First IE slowly being replaced by superior FF.
Then Open Office (or less bloated equivalents like Abiword) will come and kick out Word and al from grandma computers. Then average Joe will not be able to watch his movies on Vista and noone will have a copy of XP handy. So his 12-year old will install Ubuntu.
And wmv and other non-open formats will die, too. People are getting burned by DRM tricks and lock-ins.
Well... I like to dream.
I know there are some different opinions about how many continents there are and what they're called. But most Americans consider Australia to be its own continent, and count all of the other islands as part of Asia. In fact, in American questionnaires about race, you will see the category "Asian/Pacific Islander".
More technically educated users are more likely to choose Firefox, as less technically educated users can only use what they are spoon fed.
If you look at the map in TFA, it is almost more-or-less a map of how much countries spend on equipping their schools properly and providing decent technical skills to their population. These countries will run ahead within the IT industry of Europe. Sadly my nation (UK) will probably not be one of them.
My little Linux and tech blog
TBH, I hadn't noticed until yesterday that I was using Konqueror. It really had not occurred to me to check.
0xB315AA8D852DCD3F3DCA578FD2E0BF88
http://www.google.com/trends?q=firefox,internet+ex plorer,+safari,+opera&date=all&geo=all&ctab=0&sa=N /
It's not a trolling post just because you don't like it or because you don't understand it.
Complacency and apathy is exactly the sort of reason why Microsoft still commands the desktop and why people aren't switching over to superior products like Firefox. It's also the reason why alternative fuels are struggling to take off (fossil fuels are still profitable for producers and cheap for consumers) and why it takes near-catastrophe for the United States to enact appropriate social and environmental policy.
Since I am an American, you can take your indignation at my criticism and shove it.
You're forgetting Linux, OS X, and Tux.
Fornication ends in N.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Don't look at the title bar much? :)
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
Could it have anything to do with how easy it is to get Firefox in your local language?
Correct my North-American egocentrism, but aren't most of the countries listed predominantly non-English speaking?
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
If you look at the number of teams to population size for Software Freedom Day (which often involves people handing out CDs with Firefox and other free software) you'll see some correlation to these usage stats.
For example, compare the USA (24 teams) with Australia (19 teams). When you consider that the US population is over ten times bigger than Australia's population (298,444,215 vs 20,264,082), is it any wonder that Software Freedom Day is more effective in "Oceania" than it is in the US?
Not to mention the cultural differences in accepting software from random people on the street in the US, Europe and Australia.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Why do the more rabid users of Firefox/Linux/etc always look down upon the people who use IE/Windows/etc? Who cares what people use there is not a CLEAR choice that is superior in every way. So it is opinion not fact.
+1 Wishful thinking
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
With any luck, future generations will have no memory of that horrible, horrible abmoniation called Internet Explorer.
In 2101, war was not beginning...
Clerk: (looks at sheet, decides on changes)
Clerk: Internet 2.8.01 reporting bb explorenet doubleplusungood refs unperson rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling
morning. Now I have
W(here)TF is Turkey? They might have problems with censorship and stuff, but they're part of Eastern Europe... And these guys already got many comments about Turkey being part of Europe.
I know Seible is owned by Oracle now, but not for that long.
Where I work, we use a web-based Seible product called crmondemand. It will only work correctly with MSIE. The Firefox MSIE plug-in doesn't help.
Ok, absolutely shameless of me to post this here, but this site I maintain has Firefox at 64% (and IE at 31%). Nothing to do with Europe whatsoever. Sorry.p
http://virtuawin.sourceforge.net/website_stats.ph
Note: it's a total Windows power user app too. That partially explains it.
Eric
We're sick of msft funding bogus lawsuits, lying to the US-DOJ, openly defying the EU, filing bogus patents, faking TCO studies, and faking benchmarks. We're sick of msft creating fake "think tanks" like AdTI, and using fake journalists like Enderle. We're sick of the astroturfing, and letters from dead people campaigns. We are not happy about msft stacking the deck with msft employees in the OOXML approval process.
Need I go on?
and Micha3l Smitah
There was a time when the very real fear that if Microsoft achieve total dominance on the client that they could (and would) leverage that influence to the server by coupling new extension that only work with IE/IIS combination. The WWW would become the WMW :(
So this increasing market share of Firefox is good news. The threat of a single client achieving complete dominance is past now, I believe - a bullet dodged.
As an aside. I have a customer that was concerned about this several years ago and she wanted to do her part so she requested a special mod to her shopping cart that recognizes the browser and gives a "Mozilla Users Discount" for the kindred users.
Interesting to see that it still works Sam McGees Hot Sauce"
In the graph, they use , for the decimal place, and . for the decimal place in the text...MAKE UP YOUR MIND, OR I'LL CRY!
Iceweasel kicks its ass any day of the week, and twice on Sunday.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I find it remarkable that 13.3% is considered "low."
nt
Take firefox/opera/ie/netscape and put one on a computer, create a start point to it and label it "internet" and tell the owner that there is a new version of "program they used before" and i would imagine a large percentage would still be able to surf the web.
New Zealand is Australia's Canada.
It's used so much there because of all the p2p and torrent plugins available...makes it easier for them to pirate all their shit.
No, this being Slashdot, it normally ends in a Kleenex.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
I don't find that remarkable at all. I lived in the Netherlands for a few years, and one of the things that struck me was how Microsoft-centric the universities were.
Isn't marijuana legal, or at least decriminalized in The Netherlands? That would be a plausible explanation of that statement.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
As groovy as it is for anything to compete successfully with Microsoft, have to say I've been most disappointed with how Firefox performs on my Mac. Just eats the hell out my CPU. I'm finding Omniweb to be the next great thing. Safari continues to be pretty decent, too. I wonder when Google will release a browser? [Remember Mosaic? Remember Netscape? Remember 2400 baud modems and local dialup BBSes?. . .]
We are not whales--and this constitutes one great theme underscoring our sex life. --h. murakami
At a site I maintain--not huge traffic by any means, largely university students+faculty from across the US--the stats for the past 2 months are roughly:
Firefox: 20%
IE: 70%
Safari: 5%
others: ~5% (we still get Netscape 4 users in decent numbers......)
Of the IE numbers, about 35% over the past two months are using IE7, and that's going up a lot every day.
Also, FWIW, 5% of our visitors are dialup (as reported by Google Analytics)
That must break poor PPK's heart.
> How do you figure the US is lagging behind?
Exactly! The US never lags behind! It is leading!
Leading in upholding American values and fighting communism by not defecting away from Internet Explorer.
Are you with us or against us?
I'll probably be modded down for this...
You mean like IE7's total interface redesign? Heck, even I have trouble navigating it when I have to help somebody else figure something out...
Waterloo University is also Microsoft-centric. But in a twist of irony, it seems the IT staff aren't, and so IE is completely broken on the lab machines (at least the engineering ones) to the point where most websites don't load and it's pretty much impossible to download anything. Firefox is the only browser that can really be used.
FWIW, when I browsed Microsoft's site to see what
was up with their new Silverfish
(or is it Silver Lite?), they gave me a choice of
downloading the IE plugin or the Firefox plugin...
.
- aqk
F U
It's nice but it's not _the_ measure I'd like to see grow. What I'd like to see is the sum of all standards-compatible browsers to grow. I'd include at least all Geckos, Operas, and KHTML/WebKit/WebCore browsers.
36%
Lies, damn lies, statistics...
I am running Firefox on Debian, but let me assure you, I am the only one as far as I can see.
And heck, I use opera. Ffox is too slow for what I expect from "internet expirience".
... I have no idea where did this survey dig those numbers.
Also I maintain three of the top 10 visited sites in Slovenia (mostly by teenagers) and the stats there are:
ie 70%, ffox 27%, opera 1.6%.
ie 6 50%, mozilla 37%, ie 7 9%, opera 1.5%
ie 6 60%, mozilla 29%, ie 7 7%, opera 1.6%
So there
> I come from one of those sunny countries in the south of Europe, and that's where I attended university. There, the various
> flavours of Unix -- mainly Linux of course -- ruled and continue to rule inside the Computer Science department.
Let me add a data point to the contrary: Salamanca, Spain. Pretty much all windoze. The Linux installs in the CS department were crappy and insecure, and 80% of the physics students had never heard of LaTeX.
Not long ago spiegel.de, Germany's largest print magazine's website (also one of the most visited), reported that after work hours Firefox users are the overwhelming majority, and only during work hours, when most visitors visit the site from their corporate computers over which the IT depmt. has control, does MS IE have the lead.
Konqueror and Safari both use KHTML (although Apple has forked it and added some things KHTML still hasn't)
Safari only gives you a taste of what KDE has for Konqueror users. Missing items include split panes, sftp and other common features. Konqueror is the network transparency people have dreamed about for more than a decade.
Mozilla makes a good browser but it's not a great file manager.
IE is a bad joke.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Could it have anything to do with how easy it is to get Firefox in your local language? Correct my North-American egocentrism
A proper bigot believes there is no "internet" outside the English language. You get a cookie for realizing that free software is easier to localize and that local translators do a better job than McDon^H^H^H^H Microsoft.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Since there is no data in the article, this is from march Awstats of the most popular Macedonian website
blog.com.mk (339445 Unique visitors)
Sounds way to high for me, I'm running 2 Sites with about 6000 to 7500 Visits per day and another with about 2500-3500 Visits per day.
FireFox/Mozilla has 17.35 %
IE 6 has 30.82 %
IE 7 has 17.59 %
Google bot has 14.41 %
The rest is under 0.75 % with over 600 different user strings.
The pages are a Booking System for my state in Italy. So we get about 75 % traffic from Germany/Austria and 20% from Italy, the rest is from all over the world.
Nope. I don't see that.
Denmark and Netherlands are two of the most high IT countries in Europe, and they are both in the bottom. It seems more random really.
Most Dutch 'it-education' is really a course in Windows+MS-Office. 90% of teachers (from elementry to university level institutions) have never even heard of any alternatives or have any clue as to what an open standard is. Even a college-level CS education will most often does not include any teaching of the the basic concepts of open standards, free software or opensource development methodologies. We actually have academics praising Microsoft for innovation ... in market approach and marketing. There are some activities in the Netherlands trying to change all this but is is slow going.
Greetings from Amsterdam,
Arjen
I was wondering why exactly this happened in our country.This is the country closely tied to Microsoft for many years.Average people don't even know there is alternative to Windows OS. We are probably the most "Windows Desktop conservative" country in the world. Most of the people don't know there is alternative to Windows! I'm sure this wide adoption has lot to do with good support from Mozilla team in our country http://mozilla.lugos.si/ and Firefox supporters trying to explain benefits of Firefox from early beginnings.
:)) Perhaps ODF? Maybe OS war ? I was wondering if this has anything to do with R.Stallman visiting Slovenia and Croatia http://www.lugos.si/lugos/rms2000/pic/RMS-2000-10- 14/ looks very suspicious :))) Maybe we need Linus Torvalds now to help us win OS war or maybe Mark Suttleworth he seems more like a desktop guy :))) Anyway thanks to Mozilla team and to all Firefox and OSS fans in our country.
So in a way we won but war is not over YET. There is still 58% of computers without Firefox around.The good thing is this percentage can't be ignored from web developers any more. There is almost no Firefox incompatible web pages. Next "war" please ??...
We use web-based Siebel 7 at work and it works fine with FF+ietab.
Probably Windows-centered, because some Dutch CS professor said "Linux is obsolete."
Just kidding.
What the heck? Equalitarian? No distinguishing from peers? In what part of Holland have you been living??
I would explain the 13.3% with the wide-spread use of Internet. Every noob I know surfs the Internet regularly, and hardly any of them care about technology. They just see computers and the Internet as a means to something else and are happy with what works (and the difference FF : IE is not that big). Also note that MSN is by far the superior IM here Short article on MSN usage in The Netherlands [smartmobs.com]. There is no anti-Microsoft feeling here, including universities, which indeed are highly Microsoft dependent. A lot of IT-students have never even heard of OpenOffice. Nothing will change with Vista even though MS screwed it up. Personally, I'm praying for ReactOS.
Although Thomas Siebel [sic] might well have German ancestry (I myself, being German, have relatives bearing the name, though not the wealth...), he and his company are American.
Even if IE is crumbling, it's still big enough to hurt. Even 25% is still enough that a website would be stupid to block IE users at the door.
And as long as we can't just block IE users at the door, it makes it very hard to show you any of the cool stuff we might have done, had the Internet not been so crippled.
However, I will point to AJAX -- if Microsoft had its way, this would not have worked, or would have been IE-only. If you understand what's going on under the hood (CSS, the DOM, etc), you will understand that AJAX works in spite of the IE monopoly. It's not that MS didn't try to kill things like AJAX, it's that they tried and failed, largely due to the existence of things like Firefox.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
At least one major Dutch bank outsource's its IT support and all desktops are locked down with the supported configuration only. Even different versions of IE are a major issue. On the other hand, a major German bank had no issues with Firefox and/or Opera. I believe they even had a deployable build of Firefox (also used for Internet banking support). That German bank also seems more generally friendly towards open source at the back end too.
My (Dutch) university was entirely SunOS back in the day, but after the introduction of Solaris, Windows started gaining ground, and by the time I left, many younger students only used the Windows machines and didn't know anything about unix. It was really sad to see that shift happen.
Netherland is high on the use of IT and broadband connectivity, but not nearly so much on education. The last 25 years have seen nothing but budget cut after bad reorganisation. We really should and could have a much better education system, and I was fortunate to go to a university that was literally loaded with money (each CS student almost had a sparc station of their own during mid '90s), but on some other universities, CS students had to make do with pretty old PCs.
For several years, one of the major banks in NL caused all kinds of grief to people using Anything But Internet Explorer (tm) to try and access their on-line banking website. Some months it would work only in konqueror, some months only in firefox, sometimes only when we flushed the cache, and sometimes the only recourse was to change the identification string to act as if we're using Internet Explorer. Then everything works fine :-) despite it's still gecko and not really IE rendering the html...
:-)
See this for example: (in dutch, and from 2003) http://www.girotel4all.nl/nieuws.php, and http://www.xs4all.nl/~koospol/nl/gto/index.html.
BTW, at this moment their (new) product works fine in firefox (well, iceweasel) on Debian.
So, maybe the low uptake of firefox means people have once set their identification string to "IE" in 2002-2003 and never changed it back. Well, it's AN explanation at least, I didn't say it was a good explanation
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
I maintain a site oriented at the UK design industry and have the unsuprising figures:
IE 65%
FireFox 16%
Safari 10%
The rest is bots with various RSS agents & aggregators being well represented. (The site has an active RSS feed plus some less active feeds)
On the other hand a site for UK hotels gets:
IE 76%
FF 12%
AOL 2%
Safari 2%
Opera 2%
People in Finland aren't activists or shills.
;-)
(...)
People in the US on the whole simply don't care as much.
Given what's silently happening in future DVD formats, I'm wondering what Chinese users are going to prefer
Herve S.
Ehh, what?!
Compared to the rest of Europe unproportionally few significant computer programs are authored in Denmark and the Netherlands.
Also not many significant research papers in CS comes from those two countries.
My personal blog, with average of about 1k unique visits per day, currently gets around 32% firefox users. Mind you, it is actually more of a lifestyle and food blog, nothing techy.
Most of my readers are from Malaysia though. You can check the broswer share here
geek page at KY speaks
This is a relatively new phenomenon. I have been working here in the Netherlands at a university for a decade now, and the pressure from the central office to get rid of non-Microsoft products has been steadily increasing. When I was a student, CS and science faculties still exclusively used sparcstations, and later added some linux pc's for students, and the social sciences mostly used Apple II machines. No Microsoft at all. In those days there was no central system administration, and the central office had relatively little power. Nowadays we still, more or less secretly, use some linux machines, because they are a necessity for research purposes, but central system administration only allows Dell pc's running Windows XP and logging on onto an NT domain, and we are not allowed to purchase computers ourselves with our own budgets. The causes are increased financial centralization following recent changes in education legislation (the universities are semi-public bodies), and nationwide cooperation of the universities in acquisition of computers and software licenses.
I have visited Italian colleagues at their university a number of times, and my impression is that these universities are as chaotic from a management point of view as ours used to be a decade ago, so I wouldn't think of them as being ahead of the curve and us being "stuck in yesteryear". International research university rankings also seem to confirm that the Netherlands beats the south of Europe in research. I wouldn't dare to claim that forcing everybody to use Dell machines running XP is progress, though.
An important factor that retards the adoption of open source in the general population is that advocating open source is often confused with anti-americanism. The socialist party's advocacy of open source is very counterproductive, and drives the majority of the population, and higher management in particular, towards Microsoft. Lobbying for open source is bad for your career.
Here is the link to the original Spiegel article:, 00.html
g econtent?lp=de_en&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.spiegel.de% 2Fnetzwelt%2Ftech%2F0%2C1518%2C452899%2C00.html
http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/tech/0,1518,452899
Here is a link to read the *babelfish-translated* version of the above link:
http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/trurl_pa
I would explain the 13.3% with the wide-spread use of Internet. Every noob I know surfs the Internet regularly, and hardly any of them care about technology.
I think this is a pretty plausible explanation. Broadband penetration in the Netherlands is very high, so a dispropotionally large part of the internet population is prone to have little IT experience.
I don't share your experiences regarding the microsoft-centered education. I was a Computer Science major at Twente Technical University and we were educated on microsoft and linux. The non-technical departemens are predominantly Microsoft though.
Also not many significant research papers in CS comes from those two countries.
LOL.. Please try an article search on Computer Science articles. I study CS in Denmark and might be biased on danish articles, but I know more major Dutch CS research than french and german.. combined!
Did you miss the Slashdot article where Denmark was number one IT country in the world? You are talking about the single most productive IT country in the world per capita..
Firefox usage varies a bit from country to country, but it varies much more among different demographics within each country.
In March I launched a new website, which got Dugg. Sixty-nine percent of my visitors had Firefox.
Then, as visitors started to arrive from other places, the percentage of Firefox users dropped and has kept dropping. It's now down to 29%.
Paid Q&A/Research
Having a monopoly can be very damaging, especially when it is used to create more monopolies.
A desktop dominance became a browser dominance with a single new bundled application. This nearly
extended into the server market as well, a lock in between IE and IIS was quite probable before
some competition was introduced saving both markets.
But despite the IE monopoly crumbling the browser is still being used and holding back innovation.
If I develop a site that doesn't work for 98% of its visitors that would be pretty bad, but
just to exclude 50% of visitors is bad enough, so I am still compelled to make my site work with IE.
Most modern browsers have support for the canvas tag, which allows dynamic drawing using primitives
such as lines and rectangles, and also provides input event handling. This is great for developing
interactive applications, and can in many instances replace Java and Flash applets. The best part is
that no plugins are required so canvas support is as ubiquitous as the browser being used - people
aren't left hoping that some controlling company will one day bless them with a plugin for their
platform.
IE 6 doesn't support the canvas tag, which is hardly surprising as it predates it by many years, but IE 7
doesn't support canvases either despite being released when all of the others did have support. So instead
of being content that my canvas applets are usable by pretty much anyone and getting on with creating more
of them I am spending a significant amount of time making Java versions so that IE users can use my site too.
I am not bitter, this is often the way things go with web development and just one example of how any
significant player in the browser market can cause problems for developers.
In many ways massive innovation will only come when competition is so fierce (and users so quick to
change browsers) that any browser not supporting every standard out there will soon be forgotten. I
hope this never happens because I don't want to run one of the bloated browsers that would ensue,
but I also hope that some steady progress is made with well thought out standards that are then
accurately implemented across the board in a timely manner.
One thing is for certain, IE 6 was not helping with innovation in the five (or was it more) years that
it stayed exactly the same. Now that a new release has been forced, others will hopefully follow, and
if they do a decent job of conforming to web standards then developers will finally get an opportunity
to make the most of these new technologies without alienating significant portions of their target
audience.
Well it's true, check my friends list :P
~= scwizard =~
Let me guess: UvA (University of Amsterdam)? I heard from people who work there in physics research that they had to beg the IT support for permission to install data acquisition boards with accompanying software (non-approved hardware, non-approved software)...
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
Some numbers for ANP, the national press agency in The Netherlands:
IE: 67,1%
FF: 13,5%
Safari: 16,7%
Then again, this is for ANP Photo, so Mac/Safari is probably higher than you'd expect.
So are Europeans more geeky oder just better informed than US peeps?
On se Internetz nobody noes your German.
I don't. We're only used to the idea of thinking that 5% is enormous against MS because we're used to looking at OS market share, which as we all know has long been one of the most extreme monopoly situations in any industry on the planet.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Have you seen all those "Get Firefox with Google Toolbar" adds!
Interesting. Search for 'browser' on Google and the top paid ad offers an upgrade to *IE7 with Google toolbar*, not Firefox.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Remarkably, The Netherlands is only at 13.3%
And Denmark is also suspiciously low. Could it be that XiTi made the very French mistake of determining browser use by country based on the ccTLD of the websites monitored instead of IP address of visitors? Firefox use in countries where the IT savvy part of the population is found on the Internet Anglophone most of the time would be seriously underestimated in that case.
Some of the most popular Dutch language websites - like tweakers.net - are also outside of the Dutch ccTLD, and many internet users have personal domains outside the Dutch language ccTLD because Dutch ccTLD domain name registration was limited to companies for a long time. The nu and tv ccTLD's are for instance used a lot. All possible factors that would lead to misclassification of IT savvy Dutchmen.
You wouldn't, by any chance, be talking about the Haagse Hogeschool? I know it's not a university by dutch terms, but perhaps you were actually referring to it.
Perfect is the enemy of done.
I use Lynx, you insolent clod!
MSN is also the default IM app over here (Uruguay, South America) - to the extent that I'd say 99% of the local Internet users don't even know another one exists, we certainly never hear of AOL here (the few AOL users are ports from ICQ users), and Yahoo is seldom used.
On the other hand, CyberCafés are installing Firefox left and right - less sidebars and popups: more happy users and less maintenance. They still use software to wipe clean machines at night, but at least they last an entire day spyware-free now.
Universities too, though IE is still the default where I study, but Firefox is also installed at least.
Open Office hasn't gotten there yet, and while I haven't tried it in a while, a few friends are forced to use it at work and want MS Office back.
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
The point of the authors claiming that Linux and the WWW are finish and swiss, wasn't that Europe is the single point were all cool stuff come from.
Their point was that we, euopeans, seem to like freedom and academic collaboration and apparently are more attracted to tools enabling collaboration (WWW) or project made with collaboration in mind (OSS) ; specially compared to the USA, where one may also find that cool stuff has originated, but apparently, the culture tends to put more emphasis on achievement, building big enterprise, and making good income : thus the typical american dream would be Microsoft, IBM, etc.
Whereas it's not a surprise that we appreciate more open source software on the other side of the big pond.
Linux in terms of distribution (instead of kernel) is also interesting :
- Eastern european translations are produced by volonteer at an incredible speed. One may infere that this part of europe is interested in OSS, and the Xiti study confirms it.
- Several distros where started in europe : Mandrake/Mandriva, openSuSE (that last one seem peculiar because things seem to have started going downward only after the acquisition by novell : MS-Novell deal and such)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
No, I'm refering to the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam.
Another thought, I don't see web browsing and file managing overlapping in features that much (maybe in the visual presentation a bit), why do you assume that it makes sense for them to be integrated? To have one less app?
It's nice to be able to mix http, ftp, sftp and smb in an application that has good viewing capability. Typically http will me to some kind of file that I want to download. In the case of code, it's nice to be able to right click open it in a new tab and check it out before dragging and dropping the files I want to the place I want to keep them. Programs like Kget automate downloading links, and it's nice to be able to manipulate the place I'm going to put them before I download.
There are lots of other places where mixed behavior is nice and once you get used to it, it's hard to do without. I notice that it's missing when I use an XP system and the silly thing insists on opening separate windows. It takes time, obscures what I'm looking at and is hard to drag and drop between. Between that and clumsy virtual desktops, the system drives me nuts.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
when I browse, I use Iceweasel or Konqueror. Firefox is sooooooo "yesteryear" What's quite strange is that both the Netherlands, and Denmark have low firefox usage, and even Sweden doesn't go that high. These three countries (especially the first two) have the best internet connection in Europe by far.
You guessed right.
IE 7 made if quite hard to turn off activescripting. As a result it just doesn't seem safe surfing nefarious web sites. With Firefox you can still turn off JavaScript and all the other fancy stuff, and just surf HTML. Sounds old fashioned, but if you are just interested in text content and pictures, this is the best. It feels much safer, you don't think the web sites will take over your computer and they can't be tricky at getting around popup blockers and poping up windows everywhere. Plus you can browse around quicker as you don't have to wait for chained active content to download everywhere. The big benefit I find to running this way, is that most of the adds don't work, so they don't waste your time and bandwidth. They can't jump out at you, they can't play music, etc., etc. I have IE, Firefox and Opera all installed. But I find myself using Firefox the most because it does what I need the easiest and allows me to turn off all the annoying things I don't like that have been showing up on the web these days.
I am quite sure that if FF was a Microsoft product its performance who have been ridiculed to no end on /.
I was also under the impression that the Netherlands was doing OK in the WoS database, and IEEE, LNCS, and ACM:
The citation impact of the Netherlands academic Computer Science groups is significantly above world average. An overall normalised citation impact of 1.30 was found (a level of 1.0 represents the world average), and increasing: 1.4 and 1.6 for papers published in the last two years (2000 and 2001). [..] It was also found that among the top 10 per cent most frequently cited articles published world-wide in Computer Science, the number of papers by Netherlands academic computer scientists is 50 per cent higher than expected on the basis of the total volume of Netherlands publication output in the field.
I wonder what kinds of sources of CS papers this guy considers relevant.
I'm seeing 68% the past few months for the latest specific version (2.0.x.x) when there are not updates available during the course of that month. It's a bit over 70% if you factor in all versions of Firefox and around 75% of all visitors use a Gecko browser at my site. IE's shares are all single digits.
- John
http://www.jabcreations.com/
Actually, I remember 110 baud modems. And hand coding the connect strings.
But my son has no problems with running Firefox on his Mac Mini.
Maybe you need to stop running 12 apps at a time - which is what he frequently does - iChat multiple windows, Firefox, WoW, various music programs, and so on.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The key difference is in the A/E. If you cant remember it, just remember LOVE. We're all about LOVE. Btw: we're in Europe P.S. This was a satire.
No more I say.
Ehm.. Slovenia!=Slovakia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovakia
44% of Internet users in SLOVAKIA uses Firefox
I am Dutch and I think the conformity mindset is indeed a significant reason. Secondly we have always been more of a trade nation instead of a technological leader, and very US oriented. Trade favours those that speak the most widely spoken language, wich in this case happens to be MS.
sidenote: The CS department of the University of Groningen happens to run HP-UX/Linux, maybe move there?
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
Being a Ph.D. student working in Italy, I surely agree our university are a lot chaotic, but the "chaos" in our IT management is actually quite good for us. Basically the IT manages the network connection and controls if infections, bots etc. are running on the network. Other than this, you can pretty much do anything you want with your machines. This allows us to have in lab a couple of Apple boxes, a really old SGI Indigo, a bunch of various Windows and my Kubuntu box. I think that's good -we know how to run our machines, we don't need an IT department to nanny us.
-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
As in IE has been The Standard for the last few years on the Internet. It's what the majority of users used and your site should be developed for it.
When FireFox get's enough share (which could be happening now if the numbers are accurate) then it will become The Standard -- with any flaws it may have included in that standard.
The key point is that The Standard is really what the users expect to see -- your user base is your customers.
As to the statistics shared here -- there are three kinds of lies -- lies, damn lies and statistics. It would be refreshing if the stats shown are good or accurate. I'm not holding my breath yet.
51% Mozilla http://www.nzdsl.co.nz/Stats.phtml
Back before XP SP2, then IE 7.0, and now IE 7.0 on Vista I found Firefox a much better browser to use (more secure and user friendly). After the above improvments to IE I found myself using it again, basically IE has everything I need and firefox doesnt really offer anything it doesnt for regular web browsing. I still keep an old copy of firefox on my usb pen, I still find uses for the version of firefox that didnt need to be installed on the host machine.