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.
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
From the largest site i have access to - a medical online shop
:P
Ah, it's you! Stop sending me email.
And AT LAST, Internet Explorer is back to where it belongs: A nice tool to download Firefox. ;-)
Write boring code, not shiny code!
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.
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.
That's doable for Firefox as well:
_ Deployment
t m
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox:2.0_Institutional
and inparticular:
http://homepages.ed.ac.uk/mcs/FirefoxADM/Readme.h
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.