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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"
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
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
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
...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...
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.
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.
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.