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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."
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?
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"
Now I'm going to have to find something more obscure to avoid the attentions of the malware makres... what was the name of that other one... Icemeasles?
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
Once you've seen IE 7, you too will want to switch to any other browser.
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]
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.
While the article doesn't mention how, a previous study on XiTiMonitor's site shows that they're using share of visits by each browser type to the sites in question.
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.
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
...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.
And AT LAST, Internet Explorer is back to where it belongs: A nice tool to download Firefox. ;-)
Write boring code, not shiny code!
>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...
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.
He is talking about Firefox :P
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
Where I work, one of the systems has us completely locked in to using Netscape 4.0. I can't see any reason for it in terms of what the system does, but it refuses to even give you access with any other browser. Netscape is installed on every PC so they can access this system, and because management hope to "eventually" get rid of the system entirely, they refuse to update it to work on any other browser.
:)
So, when you are cracking up because of idiot webmasters locking you in to using IE7 to view their sites, just know you don't have the absolute worst of it
I'm with you on tool, nice on the other hand... :-)
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.
What the % of IE developers use FF.
It has nothing to do with communism, and everything to do with the politics of WWII. The reason Nazi Germany is covered more thoroughly and often thought of as worse than Stalin's USSR is because:
1.) Stalin was our ally at the time, and pointing out the systematic slaughter he carried out against his own people would not have been good for domestic support of the war.
2.) The Nazis committed the Holocaust, and we in the West have convinced ourselves that killing based on political ideology is more palatable than killing based on ethnic/cultural/religious identity.
If you bother to pick up a history book, though, or even just look at the total dead under Stalin's regime, you'll quickly begin to see that Hitler had nothing on Stalin. Hitler killed roughly 9-11 million in the Holocaust. The general consensus, according to Wikipedia, is that Stalin killed at least that many, and likely killed nearly twice that amount. Stalin just chose the right group of people with whom to ally. And, he didn't specifically target the Jews. If history has taught us anything, it's that killing the Jews never works out as intended.
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();
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.
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.)
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
Isn't that what ftp.exe is for?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Bloody hell, it's people like you who spread a false abbreviation. FX is Firefox. FF is Final Fantasy. Check the spreadfirefox website for FX. They ask people to stop calling them FF. DO IT.
you must mod this parent up, it has much lulz
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.
You do know the Acid2 test is meaningless right? No browser fully supports CSS2, so even out of the best browsers it's still a lucky dip depending on exactly where your weak-points in support are and exactly what the minor issues are. So the Acid2 test is pretty useless if you're a user that wants any realistic information on how good any of the current browsers are. I would have thought it was well known to be useless by now.
Opera and Firefox CSS2 support are pretty much equal, with Opera being miles ahead in print support and Firefox having better support (read less niggles) in other areas more important to screen media. Which pretty much balances out to me. Of course the print support etc. trade off balancing out is only my personal opinion.
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.
At work the number of times a user has phoned up for administration help or regular support and they are using Firefox has doubled over the past few months and it's still growing especially when browsing is far more easier in Firefox. People are also tagging onto the idea of extensions like IEtab where some sites only work in IE so people use IEtab in Firefox. It's awesome.
//robbiekhan.co.uk
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.
I am forced to use IE6 all day because McAfee deletes firefox as a security threat (fair enough) and my corporate lan won't let me Windows Update.
www.purevolume.com/martyd
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.
It won't. Full fledged Ubuntu needs a decent system spec. Gnome has got its own framework overheads, and Ubuntu adds a lot more newbie friendly stuff that ups the system reqs to about the same as XP. Ubuntu is a lovely distro in a great many ways, but svelte it ain't.
You could try XUbuntu. Uses XFCE rather than Gnome, and uses a lot less in the way of resources. You can install it from Ubuntu using synaptic. Did it in about 10 mins on my wife's old desktop machine. I'm still not sure it would cope with a PII, but it runs just fine on a Windows ME era AMD Duron system. Which is more than can be said of vanilla Ubuntu.
Failing that, look at some of the lightweight distros. The slackware derivatives seem to be good at this, so Vector Linux might be a good place to start. Or else Damn Small Linux, if you can persuade it to install on the HD and not run from a ramdisk.
Well, if you don't need it, don't do it. Personally, I'd sooner my resources were doing what I tell them to, rather than monitoring the system to see if I needed a help bubble popping up, or a usb drive mounted - but I admit I'm not the typical user. Then again, if you have old hardware, and you can't upgrade for whatever reason, it's not a bad angle to explore. It certainly beats using out-of-support Windows 98 because you can't cope with XP.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Firefox gathers revenue from the default search engine setting (google). If I remember correctly, MSIE has the exact same search interface, default set to MSN. It does generate revenue, even if it is not accounted for by Microsoft.
There are other internal revenue streams. It's just that this one is in your face; perfectly identical to FF's.
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you