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 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
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();
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.