Firefox Continues Gains against IE

kurtz_tan writes "News.com reports that the popularity of alternative Web browser Firefox continues to rise at the expense of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, according to a new study by WestSideStory. The study measured market share by embedding sensors on major web sites such as those of Walt Disney, Best Buy, Sony and Liz Claiborne. WebSideStory retrieves data from 30 million internet users a day passing through its monitored sites. The company then takes a snapshot of two days and compares the growth. Since beginning its measurements last summer, WebSideStory has been cautious to draw any broad conclusions about Firefox's popularity. This time around, the company said many people are not only downloading Firefox, they're sticking with it and using it."

Re:test of my own

[Anonymous Coward]

Here are my own results from Fark image hosting:

1 15159 51.99% Mozilla/5.0
2 12052 41.33% MSIE 6.0
3 561 1.92% Opera 7.5
4 283 0.97% MSIE 5.5
5 184 0.63% AvantGo 6.0
6 129 0.44% MSIE 5.0
7 117 0.40% Opera 7.2
8 86 0.29% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;)
9 75 0.26% Mozilla/3.01 (compatible;)
10 74 0.25% Opera 8.0
11 70 0.24% MSIE 5.2
12 59 0.20% MSIE 5.1
13 34 0.12% Konqueror/3.3
14 28 0.10% FARK.com link verifier (libwww-perl)
15 24 0.08% Opera 7.1

Firefox at 50+% in some places

[SunFan]

Ace's Hardware recently ran a short article that Firefox passed 50% share at their website in December. They had a nice graph showing IE clearly in the majority, lessening over time, and, finally, passing into the minority.

We'll miss you, IE...not!

OT: Fermi solutions

[bstadil]

Way OT but your quote about Fermi solutions is incorrect. Fermi Solutions is the method to Guestimate something using a series of stocastic independent variables.

The amazing thing is that the more you have the better since you are unlikely to guess everyone on the high or low side. The more variables you have the more accurate.

Fermi himself used this to estimate the power of the first Atom bomb via dropping paper confetti from above his head (2 meters) and look where they landed after the blast arrived. He was within 20% if I recall. There is an intersting book called Fermi Solutions that you can find here [amazon.com] I read it like 10 years ago but the publishing date is 2001 on Amazon so maybe it's a different book I read.

The best is yet to come

[digitalgimpus]

Firefox 1.1 is going to be based on the trunk. So it's got a few rendering fixes.

1.1 also contains some decent enhancements [mozilla.org].

IMHO adoption will pick up when 1.1 is released and some of these fixes take place.

1.1 will also have a MSI, which will make it easier for corporations to deploy Firefox to computers within their organization. That will allow for more Firefox gains.

Re:Meaningful Figure

[Seumas]

I have a popular auction site that is along the lines of what you're mentioning. It's very Liz Claiborne (people shopping for Lip Service, Hot Topic, custom jewelry, used CDs, crafts, custom fashions) and not at all "ThinkGeek or something".

I've been very critical of this "Firefox is making a difference" bandwagon for a long time. However, I've been observing my own site's statistics over the last few months and the numbers are, indeed, surprising.

Until recently, my site has been 95% MSIE, just like it has been for almost five years. Viewing just the most recent stats shows that out of 40,000 unique visitors:

77.2% are using MSIE
18.5% are using Firefox, Mozilla or Netscape
2.3% are using Safari
1.1% are using Opera

The reason I take these statistics seriously is that my site is not at all a technical site. It's an auction site with 95% females between the ages of 15 and 50. A lot of AOL users. While there are some very technically savvy people on the site, the majority of them are extremely novice to average. So if a lot of them are moving away from MSIE, it is a significant indication of where the general web population is also going.

Re:-1, Redundant for me, please...

[mAineAc]

There is an ActiveX plugin [www.iol.ie] for Mozilla browsers.

Re:At the risk of revealing a proclivity ...

[tehshen]

You can even use an optimized build [mozillazine.org] if you wish to. I use this one, and the difference is very noticeable.

Re:.88%?

[IWorkForMorons]

Want to make that number rise?

Do this. [hackaday.com]

Spread it around...

Re:.88%?

[SpaceCadetTrav]

This link does not relate to the article or the above post in any way. It has absolutely nothing to do with traffic counting. Thanks for trying.

Business Week browser poll

[jdreyer]

This may not be worth much more than the pixels it's printed on, but a Business Week poll [businessweek.com] that asks what browser you'll be using in six months currently has Firefox at 48% against "Explorer" at 32%. "Mozilla" is listed separately at 10% so if you take Mozilla and Firefox together that's a nice lead. Opera is sitting at 3.5%.

Remember when there was a "browser market"?

Make sure to cast your vote!

Re:Firefox at 50+% in some places

[arkhan_jg]

FF isn't the only game in town, and I would argue not even the best. Matter of opinion of course, but your not a moron if you don't use FF either.

Not using Firefox does not make you a moron. Still, the vulnerabilities in IE are legion, and constantly being expanded. Take this one for example. [secunia.com]

Some vulnerabilities have been discovered in Internet Explorer, which allows a malicious web site to execute arbitrary commands or install code on your computer without any user interaction.

That exploit was discovered in october 2004, and XP SP2 users are still vulnerable with all updates (even on 12-1-2005, after microsoft had theoretically closed this hole, but only partially suceeded)

Firefox has problems, certainly (what program doesn't?) but they are of a far less serious nature, and patched much, much quicker. Some IE holes have never been patched.

Me, I'd rather not take the risk. The primary purpose of a firewall is to cut down vectors of attack. Stopping using IE is a similar tactic, in my book.

Re:5%

[asa]

Now that it appears that FireFox is coming really close to squeezing on the 5% margin, my question is: will web designers really consider making their sites compatible with 92% of IE and 5% of FireFox? That could be a lot of work, depending on the site. Or are site designers just more likely to say "as long as we have 90% compatibility, that's good enough"? Turning away 10% of your customers seems like a lot, though, too.

Well, we're not targeting 5%, we're very likely already past that and headed to 10% in a hurry. IE has already dropped below 90% according to OneStat and is on the verge according to WebSideStory. Throw in a couple percentage points for other standards-compliant browsers like Opera, Konqueror, and Safair and in a couple months it starts looking a lot closer to 15% than to 5%.

I think that most business I know would adjust the height of their front door if it meant that they could increase their customer base by 15%.

--Asa

Re:-1, Redundant for me, please...

[maxpublic]

but you can't claim that it's 40-worth better (or whatever the actual price is).

Sure I can. Who are you to tell me what I should value or how I should spend my money?

Max

Re:Internet Explorer technologies for UNIX

[sloanster]

Do not know why MS discontinued IE for Unix. I can see thay can expand there.

As one who has tried out msie for solaris, I can assure you that it gave new meaning to the terms buggy, bloated, and crash-prone. It was such a disaster that noboy would ever use it. OTOH, netscape ran fairly well, and stable, on all the major flavors of unix, so there was simply no contest. It's fairly certain that microsoft did the "port" as a political stunt, and an attempted propoganda coup, for 2 reasons:

#1, the blaring hype in ms ads saying "microsoft brings the internet to unix" (yeah right, the internet was pretty much a unix thing until microsoft woke up and came late to the party)

#2, the fact that they ported to an obscure platform like hpux, rather than linux, despite the fact that there were several hundred thousand linux desktop users for every hpux desktop user.

Then they backpedaled, saying "we didn't realize how difficult it was to program for unix". tee hee, a comparison to netscape and it's solid cross platform support puts the talents of microsofts programmers in a fairly bad light here.

Re:Marketing

[asa]

I have seen sites which already use various pop-up-divs with javascript to close them, and as long as the images are proxied by the web server (to the ad server) so that the user agent doesn't know the difference, then they can't block those images.

A sliding div withing the content area is not a pop-up. It's not a pop-under. It is an annoyance and we're working a solution for it but pop-ups have an entirely differnt set of usability problems that are much worse than in-content advertising. I'll consider it a huge success if we've convinced the market to move away from pop-ups even if the alternative are these modal sliding divs that don't break out of the content area.

Also, as far as image blocking goes, while the stock Firefox build blocks images from specific domains (so you wouldn't want to block the ad if it came from the same server or proxy as the good images) a simple ad-on like AdBlock gives users the power to easily block ads without losing the legitimate page content.

--Asa

Re:.88%?

[CTho9305]

Mozilla and Firefox internally cap [mozilla.org] the value of the pipeline depth to 8 requests [mozilla.org]. Setting it any higher than 8 has no effect.

Re:At the risk of revealing a proclivity ...

[asa]

f you find it slow, you might try Opera or K-Melon(I think the KHTML engine on windows).

Kmeleon is Gecko, not KHTML. I don't believe that KHTML has been ported to Windows.

--Asa

Re:No surprise.

[beeswax]

Firefox is fast? Compare it to Opera and you'll laugh!

Firefox is secure? Look at these vulnerabilities from last year.

2005-01-11: Mozilla/Netscape/Firefox Browser Modal Dialog Spoofing Vulnerability
2005-01-05: Mozilla Temporary File Insecure Permissions Information Disclosure Vulnerability
2005-01-05: Multiple Browser IMG Tag Multiple Vulnerabilities
2005-01-05: Mozilla Firefox Download Dialogue Box File Name Spoofing Vulnerability
2005-01-05: Mozilla Firefox Insecure Default Installation Vulnerability
2005-01-04: Mozilla/Firefox File Download Dialog Spoofing Vulnerability
2004-12-08: Mozilla Browser and Mozilla Firefox Remote Window Hijacking Vulnerability
2004-12-07: Mozilla/Netscape/Firefox Browsers JavaScript IFRAME Rendering Denial Of Service Vulnerability
2004-12-01: LibPNG Graphics Library Multiple Remote Vulnerabilities
2004-11-25: Mozilla Firefox Infinite Array Sort Denial Of Service Vulnerability
2004-11-01: Mozilla Browser Cross-Domain Dialog Box Spoofing Vulnerability
2004-10-27: Mozilla/Firefox Browsers Unauthorized Clipboard Contents Disclosure
2004-10-27: Mozilla Browser BMP Image Decoding Multiple Integer Overflow Vulnerabilities
2004-10-27: Mozilla/Firefox Browsers URI Drag And Drop Cross-Domain Scripting Vulnerability
2004-10-27: Mozilla Browser Non-FQDN SSL Certificate Spoofing Vulnerability
2004-10-27: Mozilla Firefox XML User Interface Language Browser Interface Spoofing Vulnerability
2004-10-27: Mozilla Browser Refresh Security Property Spoofing Vulnerability
2004-10-27: Multiple Vendor Internet Browser User Action Prediction/Interception Weakness
2004-10-27: Mozilla SSL Redirect Spoofing Vulnerability
2004-10-27: Mozilla Cross-Domain Frame Loading Vulnerability
2004-10-27: Mozilla Browser Cache File Multiple Vulnerabilities
2004-10-27: Mozilla Personal Security Manager Certificate Handling Denial Of Service Vulnerability
2004-10-22: Mozilla/Firefox Browsers PrivilegeManager EnablePrivilege Dialog Manipulation Vulnerability
2004-10-22: Mozilla Firefox XPInstall Default Installation File Permission Vulnerability
2004-10-20: Mozilla Browser Cross-Domain Tab Window Form Field Focus Vulnerability
2004-10-06: Mozilla Firefox DATA URI File Deletion Vulnerability
2004-10-05: Multiple Browser Cross-Domain Cookie Injection Vulnerability
2004-10-05: Mozilla Browser Non-ASCII Hostname Heap Overflow Vulnerability
2004-09-15: Mozilla/Firefox Browsers Tar.GZ Archive Weak Permissions Vulnerability
2004-08-27: Mozilla/Netscape/Firefox Browsers XPCOM Plug-In For Apple Mac OSX Content Spoofing Vulnerability
2004-08-23: Mozilla External Protocol Handler Weakness
2004-06-14: Mozilla Browser URI Obfuscation Weakness
2004-05-25: Multiple Vendor URI Protocol Handler Arbitrary File Creation/Modification Vulnerability

I really wish people would stop with the over-hyping of something that isn't all that.

A lot of people using IE can be somewhat safe if they disable activex and get regular updates.

Re:Yes, but what is happening to opera?

[jesser]

Tabbed browsing: Opera had MDI. Mozilla added tabs. Opera now has MDI that looks and acts like tabs unless you unmaximize a tab.

Pop-up blocking: Opera was the first to have a "block pop-ups" feature, but it stopped all window.open() calls, so users had to toggle it all the time. Mozilla was the first to have a "block unrequested pop-ups" feature. Firefox was the first to block unrequested pop-ups by default.

Re:F*ing developers who build for IE only!

[mbrod]

only idiots design a site for one browser

Not only have I had to deal with recently a web application designed for only one browser but it wouldn't work on all versions of Windows either. Had to run on 2k or NT, wouldn't work on XP. I am not even sure how to categorize actions like that. The people who did that one (not going to name the company) should be in the bad software decision hall of fame.