Slashdot Mirror
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."
CmdrTaco reports from the our-logs-show-nobody-using-ie-anyway dept. but this has got me interested: what are the percentages of usage of browsers for accessing Slashdot?
I think the success Firefox is having at the moment will drive its development further. Because it's not a commercial product we're not going to get the IE experience where the lazy bastards never fix anything and just add features that are broken. There is a genuine drive to innovate and make something that withstands the scrutiny of the community.
Maybe it will pave the way for some proper competition like Opera and others, which are bound to win more market share as the firefox using public start to hear about other alternatives.
Personally though, I've found Firefox to have gotten better and better with time. It's gotten very stable and has plug ins which run well and reliably. It's definitely ready for prime time.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
From the largest site i have access to - a medical online shop, in fact: last 30 days: IE: 78,26% of visitors Firefos: 16,33% of visitors Gets funnier if you look at the revenue: IE: 85,9% of revenue Firefox: 9,46% of revenue. I can not really see "great advances". Firefox is a respectable and solid nr 2, but that basically is it.
This is not at all what we're seeing with a UK based employment site with ~40,000 hits per month. What we see is 55% IE 6, 25% IE 7, 12% FireFox, 4% safari, and all other browsers below 1% (every browser from opera to lynx (!!)).
I wonder if this has anything to do with Microsoft refusing IE7 upgrades to non-genuine Windows installations. Everyone I know who has a pirated copy of Windows (mostly self-made boxes) uses Firefox, while nearly everyone I know who has a genuine copy of Windows (mostly laptops) uses IE7.
I'm not sure why they refuse it to non-genuine users anyway. I can understand security patches, but this? No one is going to go out and buy Windows just to use IE7.
It seems everything Microsoft does to curb piracy these days hurts its monopoly.
I was reading a few weeks ago that, in Europe, the impetus to change web sites that only supported IE was significantly increased by showing how large a market share they were missing out by tying their site to proprietary software 'standards'. I am trying to find the professional journal in which I read the article and, when I find it, I will try to find if there is an electronic link that I can post here for others to read. The usage of Firefox, Opera et al in Europe is much higher than in the States and so our businesses have much more to lose but the principle is the same wherever you are, particularly in these days of globalisation.
There is no need for a IE-Compatibility mode in Firefox/Mozilla, simply get MSIE to use the accepted standards and the problem is solved.
Have a look at soylentnews.org for a different view
FOSS should not be obsessed with the popularity contest of userbase size. It will only come back to haunt you in the end. Like the man said, "The majority are always wrong"
There are many Firefox users who select MSIE as their User Agent string in order to get sites to even allow them access, banks being one particular group that springs to mind, but I am sure that there are others. I cannot imagine that any MSIE users would need to select Firefox as the User Agent. In which case the figures will be conservative for Firefox usage and optimistic for MSIE usage. What we don't know, or at least I don't know, is how much this skews the figures.
Have a look at soylentnews.org for a different view
What's its problem? Does it not browse the web? Is it insecure? Is it unstable? Is it unpleasant to use? Does it lack features? Isn't it expandable or flexible enough? Is it poorly programmed?
For those of you who answered yes on the last count, ask yourselves this: Is it worth dismissing the entire software as junk?
For those of you who answered yes again, ask yourselves this: Why are you so f*****g picky?
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
What the % of IE developers use FF.
Can I just first I'm a huge FireFox fan, and am indeed writing this very message from it.
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? It's as easy as doing it in "Internet Options" in Windows. Want to switch off JavaScript internet-wide for specific departments/offices in your enterprise? Same again - just set the group policy option.
Basically, ALL of the IE options are over-ridable at a Group Policy level, built into every AD system since Windows 2000 Server. IE is the only browser that makes this possible. That, folks is quite often why IE is the corporate browser of choice - it's the only one that can be centrally managed like that.
throw new NoSignatureException();
Precisely, and this is what I pointed out: what, inherently, makes Hitler's killing worse than Stalin's? Why do you believe that killing a particular ethnic group is more heinous than killing political prisoners? Stalin created his own institutionalized machine, he was just remarkably less adept at keeping records than Hitler. Why does Hitler's professionalism somehow make his acts worse? Why are we conditioned to believe that some types of slaughter are worse than others? It's an absurd and insulting statement.
Terrible, to be sure, but how is it worse than, say, the Mongol invasion of Iran? I think it's telling that you believe Stalin sought to create "a better society," when really all I see is his desire to wield as much power as possible. And you still have not shown what makes Hitler "most insane and evil." What is it, in particular, that makes the systematic slaughter of an ethnic group more heinous than the systematic slaughter of a political group? And why, in particular, is the slaughter of the Jews so heinous in particular, when compared to the Roma? (I should point out that Hitler was at least partially successful in wiping them out; the Bohemian-Romani language was completely lost.)
Because it challenges the assumptions of the west. Tyrant comes into office and kills his enemies is of the dog-bites-man variety. Every tyrant did it. Stalin happened to grab a large country so he killed a lot of people. On a moral plane, it's just as bad at Hitler, killing people is bad. However, it's the same reason people get on Israel's case for shelling Palestinian terrorist holed up in civilian areas and causing collateral damage, but nobody said anything when Lebanon did it a few weeks ago. Enlightened civilizations are NOT SUPPOSED to kill civilians, petty third world tyrants are EXPECTED to act like tyrants.
In Germany, the Jews were largely assimilated. In their modern western society, Jews were treated as Germans whose religion was Judaism, no different than Germans whose religion was Catholicism of Lutheranism. What stuns the west TO THIS DAY is how an enlightened country of "one of them" could pull out a segment of their society, call them "other" and get everyone to persecute them. When Saddam Hussein gassed the Kurds, it wasn't unusual, dictators DO THAT ALL THE TIME. If France went and gassed a Muslim suburb, the world would be outraged. It wouldn't make France's behavior morally worse on an absolute scale, but it would be more newsworthy and attention grabbing.
Further, my great-grandfather's service to the Kaiser during "The Great War" and his member of the social elite as a business owner didn't change the fact that to the Nazis, he was a Jew. That is what stuns the world, the someone would go through their own culture, pull out a segment that nobody recognized, and designate them. Further, the Nazis further justified their attempt to capture the world as a way of wiping out the Jews. Plenty of would-be dictators tried to take over the world, that's pretty normal. Plenty of people tried to wipe out the Jews in their midsts. It's the fact that he tried to take over the world TO KILL THE JEWS that stuns people. The fact that when his army needed trains to move troops around to try to capture the world, and his SS needed trains to wipe out the Jews in an area, he would favor the later. He would give up territory solely to kill more Jews.
The US sent Indians to Oklahoma because it wanted their land. Many died. The US wasn't TRYING to kill Indians, it was trying to steal land, we understand that. What people don't understand is how he rounded up the Jews and put them in work camps as slaves, and still wanted to kill them. The systematic destruction stuns people. In most cases, people have been killed as people pursue rational goals (albeit immorally), this was unique in that nobody understood it. The Spanish Inquisition was launched to steal Jewish property, they were happy to let the Jews leave and take their stuff. The Germans wanted to kill them MORE than wanted to take their stuff, that's what is SO disturbing.
Look again - closely. The effect is fairly subtle under the XP look but much more noticeable under Vista with the full Aero Glass effects enabled.
When you position the mouse cursor over a scrollbar, it's supposed to light up. Under Vista, this means going from a gray color to a blue color, making it fairly noticeable. Under XP's look, this means going from a light blue to an even lighter blue. If you're using the Classic look, there's nothing to see, since there is no mouse-over effect.
Vista's full Aero Glass additional has a fade-in effect where the button background on the arrows is supposed to appear. (Firefox fails to do this, just like IE7.) Likewise, there's a fade-out effect when the mouse leaves the scrollbar that both IE7 and Firefox fail to do. Of course, IE7 can't do it since it never did the original mouse-over effect.
Under IE7, this effect never happens. Mousing-over the scrollbar does nothing.
I've got a movie of it happening under Vista using FRAPS. Unfortunately I'll have to go hunting for something to change it into a useful format, since I doubt a lot of people have the FRAPS codec installed.
Keep in mind this only happens in the MSHTML control. All form controls inside of MSHTML are emulated. You can easily verify this by looking at a form button with a very large caption - IE6/IE7 stretch out the button background to the point it looks strange. Not to mention that all form controls in IE7 are missing Vista's Aero Glass fade-in/fade-out effects.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.