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?
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.
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 (!!)).
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 AT LAST, Internet Explorer is back to where it belongs: A nice tool to download Firefox. ;-)
Write boring code, not shiny code!
...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.
Just as a tip - try PortableFirefox (http://portableapps.com/), it should bypass the "remove firefox" script.
hackerkey://v4sw5/7BCHJMPRUY$hw3ln3pr6/7FOP$ck6ma8+9u6L$w4/7CGUXm0l6DLRi82NCe3+9t5Sb7HMOPRen5a17s0DSr1/2p-3.62/-5.23g3/5
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... :-)
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.
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.
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.
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.