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Firefox Appears Ready to Crack 20% Share Next Month
CWmike writes "Mozilla's Firefox browser is on pace to hit the 20% market-share mark next month. Net Applications marketing VP Vince Vizzaccaro didn't pin all of Firefox's increase on a change last month to its update dialog; he did note the new approach. 'Mozilla has implemented a change in Firefox 3.0 [Release Candidate 1] where the installation now has a checkbox that defaults to making Firefox your default browser,' he explained. He refused to ding Mozilla for the practice. 'The option is clearly displayed and labeled, unlike Safari, which misleadingly labeled the Safari install as an "update" [but has] since correctly changed to an 'install.' However, this practice is a break from the traditional practice browsers employed of defaulting this option to off.'"
When you click on an html file or a link in some other program, the default browser is opened.
Depends which segment of internet users you're looking at.
Certainly the w3schools is probably wildly off for the majority of internet users, since the people visiting the site are probably involved in web design or development, and are far more likely to be using a different web browser.
"the installation now has a checkbox that defaults to making Firefox your default browser"
It's an installation of a browser. Why would you -not-
1. Offer the option to make it the default browser
and
2. Have that option pre-selected.
I would expect a browser to do this. I would expect an image viewer to present me with the option to change image file associations and have those checked by default, a music player to associate MP3s, etc. -On installation-.
I don't want this happening when you simply start the application (I'm looking at you, Outlook).
"unlike Safari, which misleadingly labeled the Safari install as an "update"(1) [but has] since correctly changed to an 'install.'".
Great, so the Apple update checking thingy now has two sections(2). One for actual updates, and one below that for -completely unrelated applications- to be peddled onto your machine. Still selected by default.
No longer labeling it as an 'update' is a good step, but it's not the major gripe with this practice in the first place.
1) http://i231.photobucket.com/albums/ee248/msanto/One-Offs%202008/AppleUpdateSafari.jpg
2) http://i231.photobucket.com/albums/ee248/msanto/One-Offs%202008/AppleUpdateSafari2.jpg
Please, please, please Mozilla... don't start peddling Thunderbird to Firefox users in the update checks; or if you do, make sure it's -not selected- by default.
I think that is so that when you hit one of those "internet" buttons on your keyboard (you know, right next to the big red PANIC button, it will bring up Firefox, or when you click a link in an email or something (if you would be inclined to do such a thing).
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It's impossible to pick one right number... because it depends on many things. For one thing, the demographics for different sites are different, and there is undoubtedly a correlation between personal interests and selection of web-browser.
Wikipedia does a good job of summarizing the numbers. An overall share of 15% to 30% seems reasonable.
All that to say: I wouldn't worry too much about the exact numbers. What's more significant is the trends that can be seen across data-sets. Firefox had a rapid rise in popularity early on, but that leveled off. Rather than focus on an arbitrary threshold, like "breaks 20%!", I think the real story here is that Firefox usage continues to grow. Slowly but steadily the browser market is becoming more balanced.
This is significant, because a few years back, there was a real browser monopoly. I remember using the Firefox pre-1.0 betas, and many sites didn't work (they were tailor-made for IE). Nowadays, the vast majority of sites render perfectly in Firefox.
This is one of those cases where I think we won. Websites are more compliant than they once were. Alternate browsers are taken seriously. This is what we clamored for a few years ago... and we've largely achieved it!
I don't really see the big deal. Most programs make themselves the "handler" for whatever file type they support by default upon install. Quicktime, MS Media Player, and Real all do this with media files. Every photo viewer I've ever installed does this with image files.
It's especially innocuous here, because if you accidentally make Firefox your default, IE will simply ask you if you would like to make IT the default browser upon the next run (with the default again checked "yes").
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
And on XP and Vista, the default browser is also registered in the start menu as the 'internet' application. Which means it gets the top icon in the left row of the default setup.
And any program which follows the guidelines will launch it, and not a hardcoded internet explorer.
Mozilla Firefox already has much bigger market share on many countries. Ex. on Finland is over 40% and most ITC sites report Mozilla is over 50% market share owning browser. Many other EU country has over 30-40% market share and looks like only few big country has lower than those and where IE still dominates.
Because IE's a bitch to develop with. On a javascript error, it tells you the correct line number but it can't tell you which file it's in. It doesn't allow anywhere near the quality of plugins that firefox does, so it doesn't get firebug, greasemonkey, etc. Finally, IE doesn't comply with the standards very well, so it's a lot harder to get the site looking how you want it to. With firefox, when you make a change you can know fairly well what that change is going to do. When you're developing a site and making a lot of changes and tweaks, it's important to have a browser that you can work with. Converting the final product to something IE can render is a lot easier to working with IE the entire way.
Firebug.
Also, it's much easier to develop for firefox and then tweak for IE than vice versa.
I use Safari for day-to-day browsing, but tend to use Firefox for web development because of Firebug (I know Safari has something similar, but I haven't quite got round to using it). So I'm more likely to be using Firefox when I visit w3schools.
The state you are in while your HEAD is detached... - wait, what?
The difference here seems to be making it the default browser during the install rather than bugging you with an extra pop-up at the first run.
The top icon in the start menu on Windows XP (most people) is (usually) whatever the default browser is.
http://www.unfocus.com/
Firefox has Firebug. It's easier to develop in Firefox than anything else because of that one extension.
Also, if it works in Firefox, it generally works in Safari and Opera, with minor changes.
Also, it's easier to add the hacks into a page for IE that displays according to the standards, than it is to make changes to a page developed for IE, to work in all the various other browsers (quirks modes vary more widely across the browser spectrum than standards mode does, and generally, pages built in IE are built in quirks mode, since IE page devs don't tend to care about standards).
Also, there are a lot of articles online about how to make IE behave in more standards compliant ways, and almost no articles about how to make all of the other browsers behave like IE (since it's largely impossible to get them all to behave the same way when you go at it from that direction).
http://www.unfocus.com/
I have long distrusted these shady stats companies that provide these figures with absolutely no way to check their validity. I poked around a bit on netapplications.com, and although they don't actually tell you outright, I gather that their Firefox statistics come from corporate websites that they host(?). Needless to say, there might be a huge bias here (e.g. the types of companies in bed with NetApplications might be biased towards having a large influx of corporate users on IE, or something like that).
So what to do about this lack of statistics? A couple months ago I wrote a bot that crawled webalizer statistics pages, harvested the results, loaded them into MySQL, and produced aggregate browser statistics by month. To make a long story short, I had difficulty getting enough Webalizer pages to make for a really good study (my bot was just scraping Google), but I showed around ~20% Firefox usage. Results here. If there's interest in this project, it could easily be revived.
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I have my default browser as Opera. Clicking on a link in a Messenger window opens it in Opera.
Mod parent up!
IMHO Web Dev Toolbar and Firebug are the two biggest reasons for Firefox's adoption. Being able to poke about in the DOM and inspect individual elements, and to put breakpoints into JavaScript, are HUGE wins for developers. Even if your final site will never be looked at by any browser except IE, it's still faster to make it work in FF and then tweak it as necessary.
To do decent debugging in IE, you have to install Visual Studio... ick.
Because web designers and developers are inherently lazy. you DO NOT DESIGN your pages for a SPECIFIC BROWSER. you design them to the standard and DO NOT USE functions that break the site across browsers.
It's easy to do if you start off doing it right away when you start the design. Only very recently did I start using png files in websites based on the browser stats from my servers.
IE6 is horribly broken and kept me from using png files. now that IE6 has dropped below FF on my server stats I now use PNG files because the top 75% of my visitors use a browser that actually displays them right.
Just like how I still avoid majorly nested DIV tags because IE7 has some problems with advanced stuff when opera and FF did not. so I simply drop back to a table in those divs and it fixes the issue.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
If you're switching away from IE, you might as well switch away from its annoying pet chihuahua WL Messenger. There are SO many alternatives out there...GAIM, Miranda, Pidgin, and Trillian (free edition) come to mind...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Because there are many many plugins to assist with debugging JavaScript, XHTML compliance, AJaX, Accessibility Issues and many other problems that occour.
Anyway, you should be writing to standards, not browsers. Write to the standards first (FF much more compliant) then test in other less compliant browsers.
America, Home of the Brave.
If the question is good and is worth other people attention, it should be modded "interesting".
Perhaps, but you'd have to weight the figures for reliability/bias etc...
America, Home of the Brave.
The issue you describe in IE has probably nothing to do with the nesting and everything to do with hasLayout. Also, if you've got more than 2 or 3 <div> inside each-other, you should re-evaluate what you're doing and probably use a more appropriate element (ul, ol, dl, p, h1-h6, etc).
[insert witty comment here]
Actually, I use a little utility called Launchy and whenever I want to start an app (not using the Start menu), I hit Alt-Space and type the first few letters and hit Return...
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
By having both OO.o and Firefox on a stick I can show customers without installing anything to their computers how nice the free tools are and if they like them(which they usually do) I can whip out my "handy dandy freebie cd" and install OO.o,Inkscape,Gimp,etc while I use Firefox on my flash to grab the latest Firefox. I have found my "all the basics" pack is the most popular-OO.o,Firefox or Seamonkey with Adblock and Noscript(depending on whether they still download mail or not),Gimp and Klite codec pack. I have found this setup gives my customers a good 85-90% of what they need for everything they want their PC to do. I can't wait until both Firefox and OO.o hit V.3.0 as I've found the new layout to both(as well as better memory management) are really nice and will make a welcome addition to my "Handy dandy freebie cd". But that is my 02c,YMMV
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.