Slashdot Mirror
PCWorld Says Firefox is Strong, Vista is Weak
twitter writes "PC World has released their year in review statistics and 2007 was not kind to Microsoft. IE 6 users are equally likely to move to Firefox as they are to IE7 and no one wants Vista. 'How much of an accomplishment is it for a new version of Windows to get to 14 percent usage in 11 months? The logical benchmark is to compare it to the first eleven months of Windows XP, back in 2001 and 2002. In that period, that operating system went from nothing to 36 percent usage on PCWorld.com--more than 250 percent of the usage that Vista has mustered so far.'"
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Wouldn't the number of people using Macs be lower than average, since they were measuring visitors to a PC-centric website?
Of course a flaming fox is going to be stronger than a view. MS should have thought up a better name than Vista. Something that could beat foxes and fire - how about: Ice weasel?
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
Could the United States being in a state of recession have anything to do with Vista's slow growth? Just kidding, I know Vista is TERRIBLE. My karma is bad and I wish it wasn't. I don't want to have bad karma. I am a good person.
dumber people are doing harder things everyday
People can come up with statistics to prove anything, fourty percent of all people know that.
Assuming the summary is correct...
They're comparing usage based on visits to their website. Not only that, but they're comparing uptake of Vista in 2007 to XP in 2001. As a percentage.
I can't help but feel that a lot has changed over that time to make that method of comparison completely irrelevant, both in terms of MS's operations (like how Vista follows a fairly strong OS that has had years to take root, compared with XP, which followed Windows Me, which sucked in every possible way) and in terms of the overall PC market (like how Macs are much more competitive, and how Linux has matured, but mostly how so many hardware and software has been developed for Windows XP).
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
... from Win2k to XP, a couple of weeks ago, because the child wanted to run something that didn't work on Win2k. (We have no Win9x or NT boxes left at home now, they've all been upgraded to at least Win2k.)
In the end, that'll be why people upgrade to Vista - difficulty in obtaining applications that still work on XP.
The chart occasionally shows Firefox having more hits than IE. Maybe those months had more /. articles pointing to PC World's website?
The same BLOG linked to also states that ie7 is in use more than firefox. However, the tagline for the slashdot story says "firefox is strong". In the time it has come out, more people have adopted that single version of internet explorer than are using all versions of firefox combined.
Only on slashdot folks.
twitter also has another journal entry there, which is hilarious if not for the fact that he spends so much time arguing that Dvorak is an idiot when he says something about Linux twitter doesn't like.
For someone who has already ruined two Slashdot accounts with his misguided "evangelism" and is down to trolling AC, he sure has a lot of fun trolling the site.
twitter, please stop "helping" us. Free software needs people who can make intelligent arguments about why it is superior to closed-source gunk, not trolls who spend all their waking hours making up shit about Microsoft with liberal doses of infantile creative spelling.
According to this web site (http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/software/0,39044164,62034821,00.htm), Vista, in less than one year, has many times the desktop penetration as does Linux (all flavors still constitute less than 1%) after 15 years. The article also mentions that many (most?) businesses are waiting for SP1 before even considering adoption. Given that SP1 is due in a month or so, I strongly suspect there will be a dramatic change in Vista's numbers in its second year of existence.
Also along these lines, I know quite a few people who are getting Vista on their new home machines, and have been, for the most part, favorably impressed. This, over time, will also translate into increased adoption in the business world. Like it or not, Vista will become the pervasive desktop in the next 2 years.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
Those numbers are as made-up as the numbers you find anywhere else. My company, which hosts surveys and therefore sees a very broad cross-section of the market, collects web statistics. I just analyzed our logs and got these numbers, which I trust far more than thecounter, whatever the fuck that is:
:-)
IE6 (all operating systems) 35.22%
FF (all operating systems and versions) 18.35%
IE7 (all OS) 18.15%
Other.. the rest
Should I also remind anyone that IE8 is under progress, including new UI and engine that passes ACID.
You could, if you wanted to hear someone remind you that Firefox 3 is about to come out (far sooner than IE8) and also passes ACID, as if that were relevant.
Note, these are not the opinions of my employer, but they are the data of my employer.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
We'd all be decrying the downfall of Microsoft. Does anyone realize how much 14% is? Its huge!
I feel like a large majority of the people who hate Vista do it because they think they're supposed to. Similar to people who like Titanic because they think they're supposed to, even though it's horribly depressing and all in all not that great of a film, average at best; or MS fanboys who hate Mac because they think they're supposed to--while these feelings might have a legitimate basis somewhere (Vista does have problems, Titanic did receive good reviews, and Mac has only recently started to shine), when multiplied by a few hundred thousand misinformed people they cause mass confusion. I bought a cheap laptop running XP a while back, recently upgraded to a better system that runs Vista. I had heard that I shouldn't like Vista. It was the devil. I've been using it for 6 months now and none of the "huge problems" have surfaced--the "Cancel or Allow?" took some getting used to (and you can disable it), and everything is a trifle different from XP, but all in all I like it. The whole scandal about DRM and Vista is petty at best, the average user really doesn't have to worry about it. And as far as security goes, I was surfing around the internet essentially unprotected by outside sources for quite a while before installing McAfee, and didn't get a single virus, trojan, or piece of malware installed on my system (checked with both McAfee and AVG). I've also used the most recent Mac OS on friends' systems, and I like it, I just wouldn't use it myself. And my old machine still dual-boots Ubuntu--I'm a fan of it as well, but again, I like Vista better. In the end, I think people who hate on Vista need to give it an objective second look and think about whether or not it really is as bad as they've been led to believe. It hasn't been in my case.
The heavens do not fall for such a trifle.
I'm just wondering how much of a backlash Vista will have on the open source operating environments.
.NET. This means that most of the operating system, and in short time - the applications - will be managed software. This will mean that, in general, software will indeed be safer to run - e.g. no more buffer overruns. I don't see any movements within the Linux environment towards this direction. Somehow, just playing the NX-bit game doesn't really cut it.
The most different thing about Vista and XP is the off-take of
On the other hand we have the more fine-grained security model. Yes, this means more popup boxes. But if I'm running Ubuntu, it's much worse. I'll have to type my passport so many times that it isn't even funny anymore. Just clicking a popup box seems more user friendly to me.
Not to nag, but even though Vista is a bit of a pain to work with, are we sure we (yes, we, I'm not a Microsoft fan boy, far from it) should keep discrediting Windows? Lets play the technological game and innovate instead. We can do better than MS, both at security, speed, and UI design. Now let's show what we're made off instead of screaming foul.
It's not reasonable to compare how many people are upgrading to Vista from XP. XP is a far better OS than say ME was, so not as many people would want or need to upgrade to Vista. It kinda funny listening to all the yahoos whining about Vista (same as when XP first came out, same as when ME first came out, etc, etc). It's also interesting to hear Apple nuts carrying on about Vista security, when it's been proven that Vista is more secure than Apple. It's especially interesting now that Apple is actually managing to get 10% of the market and the morons who write virus/malware are starting to target Apple. If people would start to understand that a more secure, more sophisticated OS needs better hardware to run as fast as an older less secure system, then it makes sense that Vista will run slower. Yes, Vista will bug you to OK changes (just like most add-on firewall programs do if they are really any good), so what do you want, less security or more speed? You aren't going to get everything and speed, unless of couse you use a more powerful computer to run it. I've seen many, many customers runnung Vista with no problems (so long as they didn't buy an underpowered system), and yes, Microsoft needs to have a few years to tweak Vista (read fix stuff), but what system doesn't need fixes in the first year. I've heard about Leopard having problems losing files, security flaws showing up, etc. Firefox said they didn't have any bugs and techies were running around telling everybody they should use it, now they have fixed 300 hundred memory leaks with the new beta. Get real people, nothing is perfect! But I'll bet that in a couple years Microsoft will still be the top selling Desktop operating system and it'll be Vista.
Vista is preinstalled on 99.999% of the world's new machinss so... {blah blah you know the rest}.
Close. Vista is preinstalled on less new machines now than when it was first introduced. First there was the big shiny "Vista for All" unveiling, then vendors started trying to get business by offering "Downgrade to WinXP available here!" and being successful at it.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
To Vista or From Vista?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
No, it can't be that Microsoft released a turd sandwich - it must be Slashdot group think! Come on, lets get real here - all the promising features of Longhorn were stripped out of XP's successor and we end up with an OS that adds little in new features but a lot of bloat, DRM, an obtuse UAC and a large performance downgrade.
Microsoft could improve the performance issues with Vista with service packs, but seriously - what does Vista offer over XP, aside from artificial obsolescence like DX 10 being Vista only when it was almost certainly developed on XP?
You know, I really wouldn't have much of a problem with Vista if it weren't such a bloated resource hog. For the most part, I like the new features, the new APIs I can use as a developer (WPF, WF, WCF), the new look, and believe it or not, I don't even mind UAC. I've actually been a fairly ardent defender of Vista on Slashdot until about a week ago, and now I'm finally starting to come back over to the pro-XP side, mainly due to performance.
My issue is this: I do not understand why Vista is so dramatically slower. It chews through resources like no ones business. Putting it on my PC was a giant performance hit, and my games run worse now than they did before just because of Vista using all my RAM. I'm having to add another couple gigabytes to my machine (taking my total to 3) to get about the same level of performance I got on XP with 1 gigabyte. Now, I know Vista has more eye candy, and if all that eye candy had to be created by the CPU as in past versions of Windows, then I would understand. But Vista requires and uses graphics cards and their hardware acceleration. Much of these animations that used to be done on the CPU are being offloaded to the graphics card (at least supposedly), and I've got a relatively new PCI-Express graphics card with 256 MB of memory. Considering the kind of 3rd games I was able to play with that card, I can't understand how Vista's menu opening animations can slam my performance so hard, unless they did no optimization at all. And if it isn't the new UI that is slowing my system to a crawl, what in the world is responsible for the massive performance degredation? XP probably had 95% of the features in Vista, so why is that extra 5% causing approximately 50% worth of additional bloat?! I just don't get it...
My other issue with the OS is the change in the networking menus... it takes many more clicks to get to the network interfaces screen from the desktop, and the "Repair..." option (which on XP was a disable and then re-enable shortcut that fixed my connection 95% of the time) which has been replaced with a thoroughly useless "Repair and Diagnosee" feature. Has anyone here ever had an issue that was successfully diagnosed by that mindless wizard? And if so, did it EVER successfully repair any problem it found? Still though, despite that massive networking step backwards, that still wasn't enough to turn me off from the new OS. It is the pervasive performance problems that do that. Maybe MinWin will save us when they create the next iteration of Windows...
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Of course IE7 is going to be the most used browser out there. It's preinstalled on Vista, probably preinstalled on a lot of newer XP systems too, and comes heavily hyped by MS as part of Windows Update. I suspect most home PC users with broadband have got it already. The vast majority of computer users have probably never even heard of Firefox or other alternative browsers, much less know how to get and install one. Popularity has never been a good metric for anything.
That said, it's encouraging that Firefox is as popular as it is. Not all of those Firefox users are coming from Linux/BSD people, and most Mac people I know are happy with Safari, so it must be making good inroads in the corporate desktop world or through word of mouth.