Firefox Continues to Bite into IE Usage

InformationSage writes "According to Information Week, Firefox usage is now over 6 percent, pulling Internet Explorer usage down below 90 percent. 'Firefox is currently the only browser that is increasing market share on a monthly basis, and it is growing at the direct expense of Microsoft's Internet Explorer'"

comeback

[Sv-Manowar]

Microsoft are hoping that by taking leaves from Mozilla's book, such as Tabbed Browsing and putting them into IE7, the will stop the users who are not very tech savvy from changing to firefox, therefore still keeping the larger user base

Mozilla has an advantage with the fact that they can release a new version practically anytime, with updates nightly or anything. IE updates have to go out to everyone using it, and in general the people will not know as much, therefore creating more trouble.

Re:What about Mozilla?

[m50d]

Obviously it's not growing every month. Firefox is the one that's had the publicity behind it, it's the one people have heard of, it's the one people are using.

User-Agent cloaking

[quokkapox]

Any statistics of Firefox usage based on http log analysis will have to be adjusted upwards by some unknown factor based on how many people surf as MSIE using the User Agent Switcher Extension.

Re:comeback

[FidelCatsro]

IIRC tabbed browsing first apeared in NetCaptor an alt IE GUI browser , then in opera 4.
Wikipedia seems to agree with me
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetCaptor [wikipedia.org]

Re:A "Beta?"

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.frontmotion.com/Firefox/

MSI Package can be rolled out with Group Policy in an Active Directory domain.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Not entirely true

[wfberg]

While Internet Explorer can be managed using group policies, which you have to use to lock down windows anyway, that doesn't mean firefox is entirely unmanageable in a network environment.

Firefox accepts a startup flag (-profile d:\foo) that tells it what it's configuration directory is. You can install firefox on a shared directory, and have it retrieve settings from a (read-only) shared directory (or on a per user basis).

While it's not as finegrained as internet explorer's policies (where you might prevent some-one from changing only the homepage, and nothing else, or vice-versa), it's by no means unconfigurable.

This sort of thing should hardly come as a surprise. Applications have been using .ini-style settings or profiles stored in directories for ages. Using shared or synchronized files (with appropriate permissions) to propagate settings has been a common way to manage applications for ages as well.

Now, it's a shame firefox doesn't come with a handy-dandy MSI file, but then, neither does Internet Explorer. Then again, "deploying" firefox is a question of copying/sharing a directory and adding a shortcut with a -profile flag. Much easier and less prone to failure than a (remote/MSI) IE install.

Also, check out sysinternals. They have some real handy tools like PsExec (in the Pstools package); basically rexec for windows, which can really ease your pain when managing a zillion workstations where some change needs to be applied NOW.

And for more security options, check out windows-2003 server and XPs "software restriction policies"; and the great tdifw [sourceforge.net] firewall (no GUI, just a service configured by copying a text-based file to your workstations and restarting the service, mucht better than any Norton offering) (wipfw [sourceforge.net] might also be nice).

Re:Not entirely true

[MP3Chuck]

"Now, it's a shame firefox doesn't come with a handy-dandy MSI file"

Well, the latest trunk builds [mozilla.org] do. Obviously, a corporate or university (or other large-scale deployment setting) woudln't want to roll out a development build, but I would think that we can see official MSI's for the next point release.

You sure there is no way?

[fireboy1919]

Firefox has a master configuration directory. Pretty much every single aspect of the browser is configurable through that directory. In fact, you can do a lot of things with it there that you can't with IE.

If you want to set a particular action for your people, edit the configuration stuff. There's a lot of documentation on how to do it.

Mozilla is making their browser configuration work pretty much the same as everything else in OSS: through config files, which considering the complexity is probably a good idea.

With a GUI you'd have to play "find the menu item" to get anywhere. Ironically, though, if you want to do that, then you can log in as superuser (admin), and edit this file through the browsers config inteface for most versions of it (and for most parts of the configuration).

But to switch subjects, your "corporations are a much bigger market than home users" comment is almost certianly wrong when you're not talking about an app that you sell to users.

Consider this:
1) Almost everyone who works in a corporate environment has computers to work on at work, and ones for home. Thus, almost every corporate user is also a home user.

2) Not everyone who has a computer is in a corporation. Thus, there are a lot of home users who are not corporate users.

The bottom line is that there must always be more home users than corporate users. Sure, they may not actually want to buy Mozilla, but that doesn't mean there aren't more of them.

It makes sense that Mozilla would concentrate on its primary marketshare. Especially when it does what you want. They probably assume that if you're paid to do global configs, you can figure out how. I suppose that was a wrong assumption in your case.

Are they asking to much of Windows admins?

Re:Next IE version.

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty slick. Modded up on the same [slashdot.org] freakin [slashdot.org] comment [slashdot.org] 3 times. I'll have to try that one...

Triplicate comment, MOD DOWN as redundant!!!!!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Moderators, check pbrane's [slashdot.org] posting history. The baboon has already posted the very same comment three times to this story, and hundreds of times to previous Firefox stories (and occasionnally to non-Firefox stories too!). Mod down. Mod down hard!

Re:A "Beta?"

[jd142]

Here's what you have to do:

Make your base image with firefox installed and configured the way you want it.

If the users login with a generic login, like "computerlab" then all you have to do is make note of the location of their profile directory. Set the files in there writable only by system and administrators after you configure firefox the way you want. If you need to make any changes after that, use a GPO and have windows run a bat file on startup(when it will run as system) that replaces any changed files in the profile. Deny users the ability to create new files in c:\documents and settings\%username%\application data\mozilla\firefox\profiles. This is the easy scenario.

If your people are logging in with their own idea, then you have to work around Firefox/Mozilla's assinine profile directory naming convention, arguably the stupidest thing they've done. Everything as before, except your script that runs on computer start up has to loop through all of folders in c:\documents and settings and then find out what Firefox decided to name the default profile. *Then* you can copy your files.

IMO, the profile naming convention and the refusal to use registry settings under windows are the two biggest mistakes made by the Firefox team. Because I can't write a custom adm file to make a GPO to control firefox in a lab, I can't role it out. It takes too much of my time to configure and then work around the problems with the software. With IE, I just set a GPO and suddenly no one can run activeX components. No one can override the popup blocker, no one can set the home page or change the backgrounds.

Firefox may be more secure out of the box, but the inability to easily manage it in lab settings makes it less secure there.

Re:Next IE version.

[MojoRilla]

It would be pretty hard for MS to walk away from ActiveX. After all, all plug-ins for IE are ActiveX components. So every single one would have to be rewritten (unless Microsoft adopted the Mozilla standard, fat chance). And if Microsoft removed ActiveX, many, many websites would be instantly broken, because they use the non-standard clsid object tags.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Nearly 30% on my site

[isorox]

That would be funny if you didn't run www.getfirefox.com

Mod Grandparent down as REDUNDANT!

[Anonymous Coward]

pbranes [slashdot.org] posted the same drivel three times to this article already, why is this still a +5?

He knows very well that Firefox is easy to set up and administer remotely, he's just looking for a nice meal of fish... and apparently he's getting it!

If you have modpoints, don't reply, mod down instead!

Re:Post more of your personal website stats

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't care if you care, but our techie sites get over 70 million page impressions per month, and Firefox makes up about 30% of it. We have advertisers who specifically target these users.

Re:What about Mozilla?

[bunratty]

There is a group of people who are planning to fork the code, and continue work on it

That's not entirely accurate. There is a group of people who will continue working on the code, but there are no plans to create a fork. That way, the Suite developed by the group will continue to benefit from all the Gecko improvements and bug fixes that Firefox does.

Re:Mozilla's hard to manage?????

[gui_tarzan2000]

We have it on almost 600 stations in a K-12 school system. No problems with what you're talking about. It was rolled out using the config they provide and our login script. Simple and easy to manage.

Re:Nearly 30% on my site

[The-Bus]

Interesting. I might as well give stats on some of the sites I have access to stats to:

1. My site has IE usage below 25%, mostly because I link to it from here. It actually has an entry for Galeon, which until I searched, I had no idea what it was.

2. A NY musician's site registers as 18% Firefox/Mozilla/Netscape.

3. A financial services site (which from experience caters to the most mom-and-pop audience you can imagine) has only 2.9% Firefox usage. A similar site on the west coast of the US has about 4.5% Firefox usage.

Mind you, the total hits between these sites is about 1m, so we're not talking about anything fool-proof.

This basically backs up what we already knew: The more young and tech-oriented an audience is, the more likely it is they are going to be using Firefox. Which is great, because that will make it spill over into the general public.

Re:Watch for MS to make an announcement...

[CritterNYC]

This could be especially bad news for Firefox if IE 7.0 incorporates MySoft Technology's Maxthon code. I've been running Maxthon for over a month (I started with Version 1.12.00 and recently updated to 1.2.00) and believe me, once you're used to Maxthon it's hard to go back to the "stripped down" Firefox. Not only does Maxthon have tabbed browsing, but also true mouse gestures and the very powerful AD Hunter function, which can block out many online ads that slow down the computer and/or install spyware/adware without your knowledge in addition to blocking out most pop-up ad windows.

But Maxthon is still completely vulnerable to all those nice IE exploits that are dropping spyware on people's machines. *THAT'S* why a lot of people are dropping IE, rather than some usability or feature issue. Heck, I made the mistake of checking out a site in IE for my girlfriend when she was visiting. It auto-installed spyware on my fully patched WinXPSP2 laptop (hadn't installed any BHO protection).

As for ads, just drop in the powerful, full-featured AdBlock extension. The fact is, just about any feature you can think of (and every feature in a shell like maxthon) is available for Firefox as a free, open-source, easily installable extension.

Not Exactly. What is being said is....

[Dr. Zed]

The idea is that some bots are going to load web pages using a selected 'spam' referer value so that they can try to get on the 'referer list'.

Once they are on the list, and a search bot indexes the page, that page now increases the selected_'spam'_referer_value_site's number_of_pages_that_reference_the_site.

The more pages on the web that reference a site, the higher its ranking will be in the search engine.

The theory is that, if I have a bot that does nothing but load pages from the internet with the refer of viagra-p1mp.com, and this bot's tenacious loading of pages causes the viagra-p1mp.com site to appear on referer logs, then search engines might actually rank the site slightly higher than if I wasn't hiting those sites with GET requests every 20 seconds.

And about the password protect thing mentioned GGGP and GGP post, I believe that the idea is if you need a password to access the stats, then the bots won't index them. If that is the idea, however, wouldn't a quick edit to robot.txt be better? Not sure, since I didn't make the original posts.

BTW!!!, viagra-p1mp.com is AVAilable. Register it TODAY and GEt a frEE RQLEX.

Re:Stop navel-gazing. Password protect your stats.

[zxSpectrum]

I am saying that automated public republishing of the HTTP Referrer field sent by web browsers is evil. I sm not saying collecting that information is evil, nor am I saying that browsers are wrong in sending this information to visiting sites.

What I am saying is that this information is trivial to falsify, and that there is a shitload of bots that look for websites, and "visit" them repeatedly having set this field. An example:

wget --referer=http://spammer.example.com http://slashdot.org

If Slashdot had been running AWStats, this would have counted as one hit to be listed in the section in AWStats files listed as "Links from an external page".

Now imagine that some spamming asshole had made 100 000 of these visits to your page in four days. This is wasted bandwith for you, it skews your visitor stats, and it has the potential to mess up search engine results, since spammer.example.com may rank higher thank deserved in results pages.

IMHO, Web referrer spam, together with it's siblings wiki spam and blog comment spam, poses a bigger problem for the Internet than e-mail spam does.

Re:But wont..

[joeljkp]

To me, saying that "IE does not support CSS2" implies that if you write a site using CSS2, it won't work in IE. The truth is that most of it will work, with some omissions. To me, an accurate example of IE "not supporting" something would be SVG. By itself, IE doesn't implement any of SVG, and if you write a site using it, no matter what you do, it will not display.

Now if you said "IE does not fully support CSS2", I'd say that would be a truthful, accurate statement, not misleading at all. It implies that if you design a CSS2 site, some of it will fail if you use part of CSS2 that falls outside of its support range.

Note that by your definition, Firefox also "does not support CSS2". See here [w3.org].

I suppose it's the difference between an everyday definition of "supporting" versus a strict definition of "supporting". Seeing your original post, I saw no reason to take it strictly.

Correction About Firefox Bug

[Krankheit]

Thanks to Haeleth for finding the bugzilla link. The URL is (paste into browser): bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=233625

an old story

[eldacan]

I remember having read this some time ago [slashdot.org]...

running to 19% for some legit business stats.

[anticypher]

A friend is the admin for a major hotel chain here in Europe, they have 5 different names for their hotels based on the rating. The servers are all together in a big farm with load balancers and multi-homed links. Their traffic is a mix of home users, business users, and travel agencies.

His stats run about 19% for Firefox, and no more than 65% for all versions of IE combined. Contrast that with 88% market share this time last year for IE.

Because of the dynamic business nature of his sites, they have over 1% spider-bot traffic, he suspects the number is closer to 5%, since many spiders identify themselves as IE to avoid simple anti-spider countermeasures. Home users and travel agencies make up the bulk of the Firefox traffic, its only the brainless business users still using IE.

He also says that Macs now account for over 10% of their traffic, requiring their web developers to test all pages on Macs as well.

Firefox is quickly becoming a major player in the market, despite claims that "overall" it has only 5% or 6% share.

the AC