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Firefox Now Serious Threat to IE in Europe
Tookis writes "Mozilla's Firefox web browser has made dramatic gains on Microsoft's Internet Explorer throughout Europe in the past year with a marked upturn in FF use compared to IE over the past four months, according to French web monitoring service XiTiMonitor. A study of nearly 96,000 websites carried out during the week of July 2 to July 8 found that FF had 27.8% market share across Eastern and Western Europe, IE had 66.5%, with other browsers including Safari and Opera making up the remaining 5.7%. In some key European markets FF has already reached parity and is threatening to overtake IE as the market leading browser."
At least it isn't proprietary junk that doesn't follow standards and tries to shut out the competition. It's a step forward.
There should be a "-1:Groupthink"
To me, this is evidence of a better educated society in Europe. I think a larger portion of the population over there understands the politics behind software (and anything else, for that matter).
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
Well, I wish that were the case in the US. There are still *FAR* too many sites that have IE-only components. So, although the vast majority (90%+) of sites we use (at work) work for us (we use only FireFox), there are still a few important sites that cause a nightmare for us. Since we use Linux only, running IE is not an option. (And yes, I know about emulators and IES4Linux, which are nice, but don't work everywhere, don't work well for thin clients, and/or are difficult to maintain).
What is more irritating is that those few IE-only sites are about 95% working with Firefox. There are usually only a few parts of the site that don't work (but that is all it takes). With minimal correction/effort, those sites would work on any platform. But even after repeated begging (on one, for YEARS), a few such sites have still had no interest in "fixing" things. I do wish there was a version of Firefox/Mozilla that had an IE-compatibility mode... "FireIE Fox" or something, for use in such cases.
Fortunately, another few broken sites finally "saw the light", probably due to complaints from people like us, and fixed things.
Mod parent up, but can we also have a breakdown on weekday Vs weekend figures. During the week, a lot of people are accessing Slashdot from work, where they are not allowed to install non-IE browsers. At the weekend (hopefully) the percentage of Slashdot users at work will be lower. Just don't forget about time zones...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
How relevant would the Slashdot figure would be, anyway? Of course a bunch of geeks worth their salt wouldn't use IE unless somehow forced (work computer, office policy and such).
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
Please give it a rest. If this old argument carried some water when used with Opera, it's silly to use it with Firefox. Common sense dictates that there's far too little to gain by simply changing the UA string, and even so there are far too few people knowledgeable enough to attempt it to make a sizable difference.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
...and pretty much most of US office workers. The Internet Explorer is corporate choice. Although I have local admin account, the "remove firefox" script runs daily. There's not much workaround it, most of corporate intranets do not work with anything but Internet Explorer - mostly because authentication issues.
So this should be taken into consideration, IE share at home might be lower than statistics show.
So you're saying that your sample is indicative of the trend, while a much larger sample consisting of 90k websites - isn't?
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Lynx might not have known threats at the moment, but Lynx has had it's share of them also. At least two (highly critical) of them listed here:
http://secunia.com/product/5883/?task=advisories
>It's better to complain and get the issue fixed than it is to waste time on the endless task of chasing M$'s tail. Well, I agree with that, which is why I *do* complain, and give lots of info and why. I also tell my staff the same thing, and also my LUG. But if they don't fix it, it is still me that suffers. This is a case where I can't choose to just "use another vendor", unfortunately.
...like Opera and Safari.
:-)
That makes Steve Jobs' recent presentation using a diagram with just I.E. (ca. 75%) and Safari (supposedly ca. 25%) shares shown for some time in the future an even more ridiculous event...
I, too, dislike popularity contests and "Linux ready for the desktop" hypes. Some see it as necessary to beat those "We don't support Linux because everybody uses Windows" ogres (computer sellers, Adobe products, web sites). The fact is, even if Linux was the only software in the world with a 100% monopoly, these same ogres would rather gouge their eyeballs out with dirty sticks than admit it anyway.
The war to simply compute in liberty rages on.
You might be modded funny, but it's TRUE! I don't know what MS was thinking but IE7 is butt-ugly! It's turning in one of those christmas tree decoration interfaces like those media player skins. Out the window with consistent design etc, let's make it actually more difficult to use our products, maybe then the people will understand the added value of windows! No, really , I have NO idea why they're doing it, it just seems illogical.
Firefox's goal is to make the web use standards, so that you could select what browser you want to use. How many websites you have seen that work only with Firefox? And how many that work only with IE? That is they key difference.
So once Firefox has majority of the global market share, the web has already been converted to work with any browser and we (users, companies, developers, anyone except Microsoft) have won.
Or maybe you should open up a dialogue with the IT staff about why FF can't even be loaded. Going around company policy would not be my first choice. At my company, FF is the only way to use the intranet, go figure. However, I don't think there are any restrictions for others. I am a developer so I get to load anything I want.
Personally, I don't see how anyone is forced to do anything, however the original poster could be in China, North Korea, Russia, South Eastern Europe, the Middle East, South America or Africa, where there is known slavery, in which case the possiblity that the poster is shackled to a windows box is somewhat there, in a hazy, ghost like shimmer along with ID, nessie and Xenu.
Somewhere in the world actual people are forced to dig for diamonds every day, forced to produce crap electronics, forced to sew garments, forced to make sneakers, forced to do sex acts, forced to commit murder. For many of these people, they are forced at an age when they are helpless to resist. I know most of the slashdot crowd has lost all perspective, but please try to think about the world you inhabit and the other people that are in it before posting your sob story about the man keeping you down. You have no idea.
I'm willing to bet that you could afford an I-phone, so there's a second option for you. Third option, go work some where else. Cheer up, things aren't all bad.
It does neither.
That the bundling of IE with Windows practically destroyed the competition at one point is a historical fact; however, the competition's picking up again has got to do with something completely different, though related: having annihilated the competition, MS stopped innovating - actually, MS stopped doing anything about it. The war was won, there was nothing left to do, and any further innovation in a market you monopolize would be redundant.
Netscape failed because Microsoft managed to build a good enough product, bundled it with Windows and then improved at least to the point people wouldn't bother downloading Netscape. It was a hard blow, and Netscape never recovered, though they might have.
Now, history is repeating itself; this time Microsoft sat on their collective heels and Mozilla hit them.
Ignore this signature. By order.
That said, IE is the only browser where you can easily configure it enterprise wide, extremely easily. Want to lock down specific websites to text & images only for thousands of machines remotely?
I would argue that this isn't the sort of thing that a browser should be doing. If you want to strip Javascript out of particular sites or something similar, you should set up a transparent proxy at your router to do that to all outbound traffic. Why modify software on hundreds of computers when you could just do it on one instead? Not to mention that in that case, you don't have to worry about anybody installing an alternative browser or plugging an unauthorized computer into the network. They'll still get filtered, too.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
There's a reason why the Holocaust garners more attention than Stalin's purges or the vast number of deaths attributed to Mao's Great Leap Forward, and that is because the Holocaust wasn't merely a mass-murder, but an institutionalized bureaucratic machine. This wasn't some mad man forcing his subservient lieutenants to shoot Polish officers, but rather an entire government apparatus, with civil servants, budgets and records, all dedicated towards the murder of every Jew within the Nazi's grasp. No one is defending Stalin, whose own attrocities have come to light in very great clarity since the end of the Cold War. But Stalin was your typical monomaniacal paranoid tyrant (or you might say the very pinnacle of monomaniacal paranoid tyrants), the sort of prototypical Idi Amin, Robert Mugabe and Saddam Hussein. Hitler and his cohorts were not ordering the murdering millions of Jews to force subservience out of conquered populations, or to destroy political rivalries.
There is also the historical aspect of the Holocaust; of over a thousand years of abuse of Jews, of countless demagogues calling for violence and even murder against Jews, against the entire culture of Christendom having in its foundation a hatred of the Jews. Stalin's madness is more an outgrowth of the French Revolution, of men who believed that sacrifices of this horrific nature were needed to create a better society. The Holocaust, on the other hand, is the most infamous and deadly chapter in a long sordid story of the hatred against the Jews. The Holocaust is the ultimate example of how racism can poison a civilization right down to its core, and convince people to commit the most insane and evil acts.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
You don't think Stalin's gulags and deportation camps were just that?
Show me a Soviet gas chamber. Plus, regarding the singularity of the Holocaust, you are arguing against probably >> 90% of (as least European) historians, and your arguments are not new.
You are arguing what I pointed out as absurd, earlier
No I don't. I am arguing that Nazi Germany was the point where enlightenment horribly turned on itself. Prior to 1933, Germany was what was regarded as a modern nation, albeit with its problems. In the 20ies, prior to the world economic crisis, it was _very modern and liberal. _This is what is worse about it. The fact that atrocities occurred in some nation that had been stuck in that 17th century for too long (czarist Russia) and that was full of illiterate peasants, lead by a brutal peasant (Stalin), is not all that surprising. Plus (see my gas chamber remark) they had no industrial extermination.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
That's more likely to go the other way around: With few exceptions, a properly designed site should render just fine in Firefox. On the other hand, IE 7 is still quite buggy, therefore any quirkiness you happen across is likely to be for the benefit of IE and not other browsers.
Seriously? Still on this?
It might have been conceivable that a noticeable proportion of Firefox users did this when the market share was %0.005 or thereabouts, but do you seriously think anyone from the "general public" does this?
And what are these impenetrable banking sites that people keep harping on? I haven't seen one that doesn't work with Firefox (at least in the last 3 years or so).
sic transit gloria mundi
FX is an abbreviation for effects... or fed ex...or an instrumental song from Black Sabbath's 1972 album Black Sabbath, Vol. 4
:)
FireFox F...F..
See how that works?
I dare you to find a 2 letter abbreviation that is unused.
Browser market share matters. As long as IE had all the market share, Web developers tended to ignore Web standards and build sites that only worked in IE --- it's a simple economic decision on their part. Wherever Firefox has major market share, they can't do that anymore. They are forced to build sites that at least work in Firefox too. That has the nice side effect that those sites are now usable by Linux and Mac users, and they're also much more likely to work in other browsers. Everybody wins --- except Microsoft.
This is why it's not enough for us to just believe in freedom and build free software. We have to make sure it succeeds in the market, or we'll lose the ability to communicate with the non-free world and ultimately our free software will be useless.
Opera is closed source, and proprietary. They may have many happy users, but that's it.
Firefox is open source, and free software. This creates a strong and active following, if only for the fact that it's open source.
So for me it's no wonder that Firefox steels the attention from Opera. Opera may be a great browser, I never tried it, but it misses that one important thing Firefox has: the open source cult. The free advertising just because it's open source.
Anyway, good luck to Opera and all the others: competition is always a good thing. The more browsers in the 5-15% market share range and the less browsers in the >40% market share range the better.
This article is featured in the "Internet Explorer" category, and has a big blue IE logo next to it.
It's an odd way to celebrate Firefox and Mozilla's success.
--
Toro
The day we don't have to fight with IE to get it to render correctly, is the day we've won. Either because we don't have to support it, or because Microsoft have finally fixed it.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.