Firefox Browser On An Upward Trend 670
carbolic writes "The Firefox browser is ramping up as fast as Internet Explorer is ramping down. According to these stats posted from the Engadget logfiles, IE has dropped to 57% of all browsers used to visit the site, while Firefox is up to an amazing 18%! The Engadget stats reflect an early-adopter consumer crowd and backing those up, this chart from w3schools shows the same trend. I guess CERT's recommendation and a mature product are finally paying off for the Mozilla project. Less than 2 years ago, IE had a 95% lock on the market. Anyone else see a trend here?"
Firefox desserves this... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Hmmmm (Score:2, Informative)
Re:annoyances (Score:1, Informative)
Workaround (Score:5, Informative)
-- CD
None techie site - more representative (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I don't know about you (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, it's not even really a "fox"
Re:Botched statistic if I've ever seen it. (Score:5, Informative)
The Engadget stats reflect an early-adopter consumer crowd and backing those up, this chart from w3schools shows the same trend
He never claimed that the stats were for the entire net or anything. -1 Redundant.
nothing like what I see (Score:2, Informative)
89.17% IE
8.02% Mozilla
2.67% Opera
(the rest is Safari, Web TV etc.)
This time last year the figures were:
94.66% IE
1.58% Mozilla
3.68% Opera
So Mozilla is certainly on the up, but the trend is not that dramatic. I suspect the reason for this is that almost every company is running IE (in other words I suspect a lot of home users have made the switch at home).
Re:Botched statistic if I've ever seen it. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Hmmmm (Score:5, Informative)
MSIE 6.0: 86%
MSIE 5.5: 3%
MSIE 5.23: 1.2%
MSIE 5.01: 0.9%
MSIE 5.0: 1.8%
Netscape 7.2: 0.7%
Netscape 7.1: 0.7%
Mozilla: 2.5%
Opera: 2%
Unknown: 0.3%
Konqueror: 0.1%
(Missing: 0.8%)
I'm waiting for Mozilla to grow. Then again, my site still uses frames, so why am I complaining?
Sum of IE Dropped ~2% since previous months where it hovered around 94.7%+-0.3. Mozilla numbers remain unchanged from previous months; Opera took the space it seems. Oh well.
Re:annoyances (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I don't know about you (Score:4, Informative)
"What's a Firefox?"
A "Firefox" is another name for the red panda [bbc.co.uk].
Re:Firefox desserves this... (Score:4, Informative)
Ok.. try the following, get the JRE direct from Sun, and install it cleanly.
Go to www.java.com
Select "Get Java"
And choose the "xpi" based installation.
It usually works!
Re:Firefox desserves this... (Score:4, Informative)
Sure, its been a while since the mozilla browser has been in development, but note that a good part of that time was spent perfecting the Gecko rendering engine, and making the Mozilla Suite (browser, mail client, html editor etc).
Firefox (initially Pheonix, then Firebird) has been in development only since last year (around May or June?). They basically started with the browser component of the Mozilla suite, and rewrote significant bits of the UI, and added plenty of new UI features (customizable toolbars, better bookmarks, better extension and theme management, etc.).
So Firefox-the-browser (minus Gecko) is still a bit of a baby, and has only just reached 1.0PR. You cannot seriosly expect extensions to work across pre-release versions when they are still adding features (new RSS/Atom feature in bookmarks, new find toolbar etc, all in this release) and refining the browser!
The browser is still in development and gaining new features, and I don't mind waiting a few days for extension authors to make (mostly minor, if any) changes to their extensions before upgrading.
Re:Hmmmm (Score:5, Informative)
Another site may have 90% Explorer and 4% firefox.
If last year the figures were 92% vs 2%, then the trend is the same as w3schools (where firefox usage jumped from 8% -> 18 %)
Like the poster said (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Hmmmm (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Firefox desserves this... (Score:1, Informative)
The latest Firefox releases check the compatibility meta information in the extension. Even if an extension is technically suitable to be used with Firefox 1.0PR1, the extension manager will reject it until the author has bumped the compatibility information to the correct max-version (after testing that it is in fact compatible, hopefully). Developers are urged not to certify compatibility with future browser versions. If an extension does not need an update, the version information can be updated from a webpage without downloading the extension again.
You can't have it both ways: Either you wait until we test the extensions and themes for you or you work with untested combinations. Most extensions should be ready for 1.0PR1 in a few days. Remember, many extension authors do this in their spare time and don't get paid for providing this level of quality control.
Re:Hmmmm (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What about browser spoofing? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:As much as I'd like this to be true... (Score:5, Informative)
IE: 84% and falling
Mozilla: 7% and rising
Safari: 1-2% and rising
Opera: 1-2% and holding steady
Netscape 4: below 1% and falling
Re:One teensey advantage of IE (Score:1, Informative)
then just drag what you want up to to top toolbar - navigation buttons, address, search, etc.. Everything fits nicely on one row on my 1280 x 1024 display.
If you don't have lots of space, you can turn the "Use Small Icons" checkbox on so that the icons take up less space.
The only thing I wish I could do was remove menu items like Help and Go because I never use them. I COULD by hacking it, but it'd be nice to do from the interface.
-Andrew
Re:Google (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Firefox desserves this... (Score:2, Informative)
You are the Marketing Department. (Score:3, Informative)
Help spread some Firefox love by visiting the official "Spread Firefox [spreadfirefox.com]" portal.
They aim to achieve 1 million downloads during the next 10 days. The countdown doesn't reflect that actually it has already been in progress for a couple of days now, but still, quite cool.
I'm helping their promotion by telling my friends and family, and my website visitors about it. I recommend the same.
Go slashdotters!
Re:Hmmmm (Score:4, Informative)
As you can see, about 25% of people viewing Fark use Firefox/Mozilla, and 33% use a non-IE browser. I can tell you that just 3 months ago the total number of non-IE browers was around 20%. The numbers might actually be low, because Fark has a high number of people who read from work, where they're often forced to use IE.
In my opinion, FireFox has a "killer" feature in that it (so far) isn't really vulnerable to many exploits or malware. I call it a "killer" feature because users, regardless of skill level, will use FireFox over IE simply because of security, and you already see it happening.
Re:Firefox ignores window manager setttings (Score:3, Informative)
Re:One teensey advantage of IE (Score:3, Informative)
Right click on the toolbar and choose customize. Drag all the elements from the navigation toolbar up next to the field menu. Click close from the customization box. Right click on the now-empty navigation bar and uncheck it from the list.
Voile! Buttons, address bar, and menus all in one toolbar.
Oh good grief... (Score:5, Informative)
Okay, I realize it's considered Geek Chic to rip the methodology (or, more usually, the lack thereof) used by the "reporters" of these stories. But c'mon! My daughter, who's in 9th grade and not a particular fan of math, could see the holes in this one.
The link used in the sentence quoted above, showing 95% market share for IE, goes to onestat.com. If the reporter had taken the time to check their latest report, IE still has a 93.9% share of the market [onestat.com]. It's right there in their press releases! How hard would it have been to look?
I love Firefox, and would love to see IE go away. But I'm getting real tired of having to apply my own personal lameness filter when it comes to determining what Slashdot stories actually have "stuff that matters".
Re:Hmmmm (Score:4, Informative)
And why would web developers use Mozilla instead of Firefox? I want something as bloat free as possible. Compared to Mozilla, IE is bloat free. Look at the feature list:
advanced e-mail and newsgroup client, IRC chat client, and HTML editing
That's why Firefox is nice. It's just a browser, thankfully.
Re:Workaround (Score:2, Informative)
Singlehandedly? Nah. [squarefree.com]
Re:Hmmmm (Score:2, Informative)
Firefox has a DOM inspector & JavaScript console... the main reasons I used to use Mozilla when doing web development.
I only use Mozilla (and a 1.4RC at that) on the one machine I check my email on; every other computer I use, I run Firefox (or Phoenix (or Firebird)).
Missing Option. (Score:3, Informative)
more stats (Score:1, Informative)
This months stats so far:
1 - 58.21% MSIE 6
2 - 19.42% Mozilla/5
3 - 10.85% MSIE 5
June's stats were:
1 - 62.87% MSIE 6
2 - 13.28% MSIE 5
3 - 10.75% Mozilla/5
The site does not favor any browser. So, to answer the original question: yes, I definitely do see a trend here.
IE vs Firefox (Score:5, Informative)
Last week We had 12,156,966 hits to our sites, which is only the search related pages, not photos etc.. 11,689,635 (96.15%) were from Internet Explorer.
I'd wager to say we would see a much more diverse range of users than a site specifically designed for web designers. I hate to say it, but IE is still as much of a force in the market as it ever was.
Re:Not more people (Score:4, Informative)
The new Firefox v1.0PR has a green arrow under the minimise button that does it. Also, it pops up a message once in a while telling you about new updates.
Hardly a trend (Score:4, Informative)
Trends require more than one anomalous reading.
What it actually shows (Score:2, Informative)
Microsoft, SCO, the RIAA, and other enemies wouldn't be able to pull this kind of shit with their statistics. Slashdot has done it twice with Firefox. My company's site logs don't reflect any change at all in IE's or Firefox's usage statistics, and I already see other people corraborating that with their site logs.
Re:Google's browser stats (Score:2, Informative)
Stats screwed up in IE's favor... (Score:3, Informative)
Let's be fair, Mozilla/NS7/Firefox have more in common than IE5/IE6 have in common with each other.
So, the usage for gecko-based browsers is actually 22.81%. Not a huge number, but it's a big difference. Mozilla browsers don't quite have half the market-share of IE, but it's getting closer...
A little advice to the FF team. (Score:3, Informative)
It really doesn't seem that security is a main feature of FF at all.
Examples:
1) After install, the option to "Save passwords" was on by default. WTF? So anyone that logs into the family, one login machine now automatically has access to the bank accounts and whatever else you need a password on? We all know that "normal" people do not lift a finger to secure their machines, so most will probably never even realize that FF is storing passwords or even when they do realise it, know how to disable it.
2) I tried adding a search engine plug-in from the FF site. The plugin managed to show an icon but no text in the search window drop list. Hmmm. I selected it anyway. CRASH! So it is clear that either FF is buggy or the plugin was buggy which would mean that the FF team is not vetting the plugins on their own web page. Given that most of these plugins are from third parties, I see a huge security nightmare just waiting to happen here.
3) I do not have flash installed on my machine. Several web pages use it. When running into a media type that has no handler, the FF user is prompetd to "Install missing plugin..." without even being told what the missing plugin is. This method of allowing the user a single click to DL and install plugins is another vehicle for security problems (as we already know, such plugins are frequently supplied by untrusted and unvetted sources)
Some minor things that I found a bit annoying...
Unnecessary links added to my favorites list that I had to delete. (JUST LIKE IN IE!) Things like "Fire Fox Crew Picks" are really pretty worthless and frankly, just as annoying as MS adding it's commercial partners to my links list. If FF really is to be better than IE then it cannot copy some of IEs more annoying points. Be fair, be generic, don't push ideologies in your use of supplying preconfigured links.
The install program has no digital signature and when installing on Windows from IE, it looks for all the world like you are installing a trojan with all the warnings. How many people at that point will be scared off from installing it? This isn't expensive or rocket science to take care of, but it does smack as a tiny bit of effort. Do what it takes to prevent those warnings. (I certainly do in the software that I write)
This may be a debatable point, but I was annoyed that by default FF ignores installed proxies and goes straight to the net. IE tries to find proxies first, then goes to the net directly if not found.
So as a browser I give it a 95% score. I found that sites generally work pretty well, but as for security potential, I give it 10%. I feel that FF is a huge accident waiting to happen with the obvious and overt lack of secuirty planning evident in the way the entire FF archetecture and default settings currently exist (as observed by it's external behavior)
I think the mentality of "It won't happen to us" or maybe "It CAN'T happen to us" might be affecting the development of this software a bit too much. It seems that there have been no security lessons from IE's problems learned here at all.
Microsoft did it to themselves... (Score:2, Informative)
When otherwise loyal tech-heads heard that MSIE 6.01 would be the final standalone version of Internet Explorer they decided to look for something that wasn't 'doomed'.
http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-1011859.html?tag=
So why did Microsoft make such a claim? Arrogance. That had 90% of the browser market.
Microsoft has since recognized their mistake:
http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/04/06/2
Re:Firefox desserves this... (Score:2, Informative)
I second the notion. But. (Score:1, Informative)
Firefox is the best non-IE browser I've seen yet. However, it's probably been mentioned multiple times that the kind of people who use IE are the kind of people who don't come to Slashdot. 99% true.
I use IE still because of Avant Browser (www.avantbrowser.com [avantbrowser.com]), a great browser that uses the IE engine but adds tons of features. I'm not interested in the IE engine, I'm just interested in the features. (And we're talking just about every conceivable thing you could want in a browser and more--it's easy to turn off the features you don't like.) Firefox already has a huge leg up on IE because of tabbed browsing, but I had to post to a Firefox forum to discover that simply reordering the tabs by click + drag is a seperate component (expansion) for Firefox that you have to download.
Something as simple as this should be part of the core Firefox install. Until you get that Exp, you can't reorder tabs, and it's such a rudimentary feature of tabbed browsing that I think Firefox, great thing it is, is not hooking as many people as it could because this intuitive feature is not present by default.
I'm rooting for Firefox, but until they A) put rudimentary features like click + drag reorder in, and B) Explain what the hell "expansions" are in an impossible-to-miss way, Firefox isn't living up to its full potential. (And I'm rooting for Firefox, I really am. But it's not done growing up yet!)
I will note that I was educated as to the link about Firefox Expansions. It's there, on the website. But it's not nearly prominent enough. Highlight it with background, put it at the top, take it out of the sidebar, but give it some important status. Even if Expansions are not part of the core Firefox code in order to keep the core install file small to download, THAT'S A GREAT FEATURE, and you shouldn't shove it off to the side simply because the authors of several expansions are not part of the core Firefox programming group. Firefox, I love you, and I wish you the best. Keep on track, and you'll have me for a user. In the meantime, I will spread the word as best I can about you.