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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."
mozilla.org
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.
Huh? This means absolutely nothing. If you want to give us data that's meaningful, tell us how many converts to IE7 there were in the first week, or wait 1.5 years and see how many people are using FF3 versus old versions. Then we'd have some comparable data. A rapid expansion right off the bat, for example, does not necessarily indicate that the final tally will be in FF's favor.
Furthermore, a decent chunk of IE users are the "computer = magic black box" type, who use IE because it's what came on the computer. If those people aren't doing Windows Updates (likely enough, imo), they won't get IE7. By contrast, the vast majority of Firefox users use it by choice, not because it was there. Those people are far more likely to manually upgrade.
This whole "data point" is utterly worthless for determining what's actually going on.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
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.
Booga-booga!
"No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here." - TaleSpinner
In our business environment, we will not upgrade to IE7 because it breaks business applications. No such limitations on FF3 (of course the apps don't work in FF2/3).
Maybe if MS didn't break the non-standardized technologies that they release and companies build apps on, the community might upgrade faster.
You're mad at Mozilla because a bunch of third-party extensions don't work correctly? Maybe you should complain to the right people next time.
So in two more weeks, 165% of firefox users will be at version 3. Let's see the numbers after 18 months.
Anyway, my work machine still has IE6, because they're not bothering to upgrade it on the corporate servers and I use nothing but Firefox on it anyway.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Microsoft still has three out of ten people running an old version of its browser more than 18 months after Internet Explorer 7 launched
IE 7 was never backported to anything before Windows XP Service Pack 2. How many Windows users are stuck on operating systems prior to Windows XP, such as Windows 2000 or Windows 9x? Like IE 7, Firefox 3 doesn't work on Windows 9x, but unlike IE 7, Firefox works on Windows 2000.
IE survives on inertia, not quality. If anything, this is exactly what you should expect to see. The people willing to change browsers are the same people who want the latest upgrade with the best support for the latest standards.
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.
Or, maybe Firefox 2 sucked that much. I was running the Firefox 3 alphas long ago, only because the RAM situation in 2.x was so atrocious. I had to upgrade my wife as well, because I got sick of hearing from the living room, "I thought you said Firefox was better?" as her system ground to a halt.
- oZ
// i am here.
"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."
Whatever is the choice of most businesses is always going to lag behind in adoption.
Case in point, my current client is a Fortune 100 company that mandates IE6 as the browser of choice and is planning to move to IE7 sometime next year. There's thousands and thousands of people right there still using IE6 essentially through no choice of their own.
Big, non-software business is always about the last to adopt any technology.
Firefox users, on the other hand, tend to be more computer savvy. They are the kind who pay attention to tech news, and most likely they've known about Firefox 3 since before it came out.
Boycott shampoo! Demand the REAL poo!
I just ran the Firefox 3 installer, then loaded the Slashdot front page for its test-drive. This article was in the #1 slot. How did mozilla.org arrange for that to happen?
While I am a happy FF3 user myself, comparing the adoption rates of Firefox and IE is misleading. IE is installed when the computer arrives, and the people still using it either:
1. Don't care what they use
2. Have no choice since it is locked down by work
3. Prefer it over the alternatives.
People in buckets 1 and 2 (which I would argue is the vast majority of IE users) are unlikely to upgrade IE beyond whatever version is on their machine now. People in group 3 are the only voluntary upgraders to IE7.
In contrast, Firefox has the same three buckets, but since it is not preinstalled very few are going to fall into buckets 1 and 2. Almost everyone using it is using it because they want it, and that means that they are far more likely to upgrade to the latest and greatest.
So, Mozilla didn't upset their most loyal customer, the add-on developers did...
"Nobody owns the fucking words man." - James Dean
PS Sorry for the small sizes of the graphs. Gnumeric was having a bad day :(
My web domain.
Why don't you use something like this http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE ?
Just another statistic: if I have my dates right, it took IE7 2.5 months to reach 100 million users. Firefox is currently at 23 million and given the current rate (1080/min), FF3 on pace to beat that - even without being distributed as part of an OS (granted, IE7 was only part of volume licensing at that date, and not retail sales).
Seems like you're not alone. I'm holding off upgrading until it's sorted out a bit more. FF2 works just fine for me, thankyouverymuch.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
There is the ever-present threat of Operating Systems being marginalized to a role of providing a portal to a web-based OS. Whomever controls the browser will get a good chunk of ad revenue.
"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."
"Microsoft still has over seven out of ten people satisfied with running a previous version of its browser more than 18 months after Internet Explorer 7 launched, while users have abandoned Firefox 2 in droves with over half converting to the bleeding edge version in just over a week. That should set a few alarm bells ringing at Mozilla.org."
Personally, when I see a very fast migration I tend to think the last version must really have sucked. If it did what people wanted already, they'd not be in any big hurry to upgrade. Sure, there's been some exceptions where the new version is the best thing since sliced bread, but they're few and far between by comparison.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I'm not sure I see the problem. You want something that extremely stable and well-supported, then it's usually not a good idea to jump to the newest version of software directly after its release. That just seems to me to be a standard rule, across the board, no matter which developer you're talking about. When you're using the cutting-edge stuff, it tends to have a couple hiccups and break 3rd-party interactions.
So sure, go back and use FF2 for another 6 months. And then give FF3 another shot, see if it's up to speed for the things you need.
They won the first browser war. But failed to meet their victory objectives.
What they were hoping if the won the broser war they were able to push their Technologies such as ActiveX, VB Script forcing people to say on windows to browse the web aka MSN v.2.0, having Web Servers use IIS as it would be the only server that will have the IE particular features Slowly replace HTML MS Office formats having all development need to be in done in Front Page for simple stuff or Visual Studios for more complex stuff.
Why did they fail to meet these objectives. A couple of unforeen side effect.
Linux and Apache. While Linux has a small marketshare for the Desktop, for servers it is much larger and far more common. And Apache is still the #1 web server. Being the programmers for these systems tend to have Unix/Linux experience with Apache for the most part for more popular sites they made sure that their code was as much platform independent as possible, by making the justification if we don't pay an extra $5,000 for these features then we won't isolate 10% of the market, an easy sell.
There was DOJ case which put Microsoft in the bad eye of the public. No longer was it considered an exciting company inovating the future. But a big corporation out for itself, squashing others. Making them less likly to use IE only features.
Next was right after the browser wars and Microsoft won, the Bad people who make spyware, malware started targeting IE the victor using easy holes such as ActiveX and the such making many browsers weary of using them, causing the rest of the people who use such features in their site to take them off. As well viruses and hacks against IIS.
Microsoft then needed to shift gears and make thier system reasonably secure now. Causing a huge delay in IE 6 production time until IE 7 leaving both IE 6 and 7 years behind its competitor and causing developers to stick with the tride and true universally compatible methods.
Adobe/Macromedia Flash (Love it or hate it) Killed Java Applets as it was faster and looked better and Active X (for over the internet (Active X survied a lot longer for intranet and extranet apps)) because it was more secure and didn't even think about writting to your disk. Being used by advertisers insured flash was installed widely.
And on and on. IE won it Browser War but it didn't get the riches.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Internet Explorer is more of a utility and is generally presented as such. If you think Microsoft, with its coffers of gold, is unable to create a wild buzzed-up marketing campaign for IE that competes with Firefox's you're wrong. Firefox is a marketing behemoth while IE's footprint is rather subdued. For this reason, IE will generally get more Automatic Update customers than technology enthusiasts or web enthusiasts who will be using Firefox. To think that many web and blog sites' viewers are not web enthusiasts would be simply naive. Imagine what the web stats would like on samsclub.com, walmart.com, or maybe even amazon.com.
Microsoft needs to have IE because it underlines the Microsoft platform as an Internet platform- if they were to concede the browser market, little would separate the usage scenario between Microsoft Windows and Ubuntu Linux for most modern (especially younger) users. I think Microsoft seeks to deliver a platform rather than just an operating system and the web is an integral part of that.
Otherwise, as long as most open source projects like OpenOffice and Firefox still run in Windows (and they run well in Windows), it will continue to be a thorn in Microsoft's side but not fatal. I think Sun invests very heavily in these cross-platform open source projects because they realize that if enough Windows users start using something cross-platform... well... they might just not see why they're needing to buy Windows anymore.
And that's the real game as I see it.
Isn't upgrading your wife a little expensive?
Yeah, but many people feel it's worth it since the upgraded version supports plug-ins.
Bow-ties are cool.
So, Mozilla didn't upset their most loyal customer, the add-on developers did...
Actually, Mozilla did a fine job upsetting their loyal customers -- just look at the "AwesomeBar" which is anything but.
Protip for Developers: When I type in a place for URIs, I want the AutoComplete to auto complete URIs. Not try to do some hairbrained plaintext search of bookmarks/history/uris. When I type in "Youtube.com" I should be finding the most common Youtube videos I have opened, not bookmarks from 3 years ago talking about YouTube.
They get downright rabid on the Mozilla forums if you mention you don't like the "AwesomeBar". And yes, there's a plugin to undo the GRAPHICAL CHANGES of the AwesomeBar -- but it still searches the history/bookmarks files paintext.
Another BIG annoyance: 4chan has a browse button. Upon hitting browse, you can select a lolcat image, and hit OK. This populates a filename field right next to browse.
Now, say you hit back, and want to post a reply WITHOUT an image. Well, guess what, you can't -- there's no way to click on that field and empty it out by hand, clicking on it opens up the Browse field "for you" and there's no "Select No File" or other such option.
There's also an annoying bug about restoring previous sessions, in FF2 you could force quit the process and the next time you opened it, FF2 would ask you to reopen all your tabs. In FF3, it asks, but then reopens the tabs from the FIRST session you ever opened. It does not properly save the tabs you have open as it goes.
55 % on 1 site != 55 % of all firefox users
don't get me wrong, i like and use firefox, but come on!
If by "Open Source zealot" you're implying that I won't or never pay for software, then I'm afraid I'll need to put my hand down again. Nope, I don't buy much commercial application software because I can do must stuff I need to in OSS software but, on Windows XP, I am a registered user of a number of applications that don't have an equivalent in OSS - plus I can 100% GUARANTEE YOU that you will never find an unlicensed or cracked piece of software (okay, maybe a no CD crack or two for games I've bought) on any of the computers I own.
So you don't like OSS software? Fine, don't use it then. What's the problem? It's not as though it cost you anything apart from a bit of your time to try it and not like it.
But I'm sorry to tell you that by keeping my options open, doing some stuff with Linux and some with XP so that I use an appropriate tool just to get a computing job done as quickly as possible, I'm pretty happy with my overall computing experience. So I'm afraid the only "losers" I can think of are those that have lost their noses, after cutting them off "to spite their faces" by refusing to use what can be some great, free tools.
Erm, who's the "zealot" again?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.