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Firefox 3 Already Rules the Roost
Barence writes in with a data point on Firefox 3 adoption: it's been available for 10 days, and already one site is seeing 55% of its Firefox-using visitors on version 3. "Microsoft still has three out of ten people running an old version of its browser more than 18 months after Internet Explorer 7 launched, while Firefox has converted more than half of its users to the latest version in just over a week. That should set a few alarm bells ringing in Redmond."
Look, my father-in-law knows NOTHING about computing, but a LOT about using the Internet. We bought him a computer several years ago. His browser?
IE5, of course. Why? Because that's what was installed on the machine when we bought it.
The majority of people who THINK about what browser they use, use something other than IE. Firefox 3 is obviously a great leap forward for the Mozilla brand, and...well, there you go.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
I can't upgrade IE.
Since large bits of my job involve web interfaces to various systems, I have to make sure things still render right on IE 6. Since you can't run 6 and 7 on the same machine, I stay on 6. When I need to check 7 I ask a coworker who has upgraded to check it out.
Of course, I use FF for everything because IE 6 was so far behind. Seven has improvements, but I still find annoyances, and I'm happily used to FF.
Then again, I can't go to FF3 quite yet either. Needs to be a little bigger than 50% (at a tech heavy site). I'd like to see the numbers for Yahoo or Google.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
PS Sorry for the small sizes of the graphs. Gnumeric was having a bad day :(
My web domain.
I manage a blog where most of the users are authors and they are not technical folks that might visit a site like pcpro on a regular basis. You might say they are average folk.
In the last few months, I have been seeing an increase in firefox from maybe 10% in January to close to 45% today. Of that 45% of FF users, 23% are already using FF3. I think that is pretty impressive. By comparison, 52% use IE and the majority of them, 67% use IE7.
So you like ads? Honestly, vanilla feature sets aside, yeah, FF and IE are similar. I think IE took one more major release to get tabbed browsing though. That's a big one. But AdBlock is the real reason I use FF. AdBlock is like the DVR of the Internet for me in that it saves me from commercials and makes its respective medium bearable. But then, I abhor ads too.
Come to think of it, that'll be a good comeback to the snarky "Oh, TFA has ads? I didn't notice, cause I use adblock" comments... "Oh, you use adblock? How quaint, I trained my mind to do that ages ago."
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
IE7 and Firefox are basically equal in terms of features, unless you care about add-ons (and personally, I have yet to see one FF addon.......
There is no way this is not a troll. If not, I am thoroughly dumbfounded how anyone can fail to find value in the pure nuggets of gold that are ff extensions.
bite my glorious golden ass.
Adblock and NoScript aside (and with them shorter loading times) the spell checker is still a killer feature for me.
The creator of this post (Jacob Smith) hereby releases it, and all of his other posts, into the public domain.
IE7 and Firefox are basically equal in terms of features, unless you care about add-ons
...or that when IE7 crashes I lose all my tabs.
...or I close a tab accidentally in IE7 and want it back...no undo.
...or how IE7 uses totally intuitive shortcuts like when I right-click on a link and expect to his 't' for opening a new tab, but IE7 uses the totally intuitive 'w' for new tab which should actually be for new window.
...or how I can't change those keys in IE7 to suit my preference.
Do I need to continue?
There's no place like
All you've really said is FF offers nothing for you. You are clearly an exception to the rule. The only people I know who still run IE do so out of ignorance of the option. Most people still just use "the browser" that came with the OS. You would be surprised how many people don't even realize they have an option. To that point, everyone I've introduced to FF still runs it.
He didn't say people don't respond to ads, or even that *he* doesn't respond to ads. He said the subliminal thing is hogwash.
Coke ads try to associate Coke with a good time, with youth, and with friendship. What, exactly, would they stick in there "subliminally" that they aren't trying to create an association with...liminally?
Not to mention that every study of "subliminal" advertising has debunked it as BS. I'll take my psuedo-science on astrology.com; I'd rather not have to deal with it on /.
This doesn't really seem like it should be a mystery.
Tom is a computer guy. Some of his top visited sites are sourceforge, slashdot and his own LEGO Mindstorms blog. His home machine runs the latest nightly build of Linux and he can speak fluent hexadecimal. He uses Firefox because he detests the business practices of Microsoft, he appreciates the interface design and standards-compliance of FF, and understands the importance of supporting open source programming.
Harry is a guy who uses a computer. Some of his top visited sites are the Microsoft Start Page and Yahoo! Games. His home machine is a color television. He uses IE because, to him, the little "e" icon is what his trainer told him to click on to get on the internet.
Which if these folks, do you think, is going to have upgraded to the latest version of his web browser?
Sam! If you will let me be,
I will try them.
You will see.
...it could require a fairly heavy overhaul for modern browsers.
That's absolutely correct. I'm currently working on a web application at the corporation I work for. It's been so badly coded (long before I arrived) that making it compatible with IE7 (not to mention Firefox or any other browsers) would be a nightmare that would probably take our development team a year to complete. And I'm not certain I entirely agree with you on the interface point. I think major interface changes between versions of a program are huge deterrents to upgrading for many people.
-- Justin Bennett http://jmbennett.org