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'"

Nearly 30% on my site

[ttlgDaveh]

For a site I run [ttlg.com] Firefox is nearing 30% usage for Feb-Mar 2005 (some 20 million hits) Internet Explorer 59.3 % Firefox 28.5 % Opera 6.9 % Mozilla 3% Netscape 1 % Safari 0.5 %

XUL IDE

[haeger]

Great news.
What I'm missing is a good XUL IDE. I hear that KDevelop is going to support XUL soon and there are others, but one thing that Microsoft does really well is to help the developers to get started. Now if there just were a good IDE with syntax highlighting, completion and testing I think XUL apps would really take off. Don't you?

.haeger

I wonder

[Ckwop]

Are we at the peak of Firefox adoption or is this the calm before the storm?

I would never want to see Firefox reach the level of dominance that Internet Explorer has reacher. Having a 90% market share leads inexorably to the stalling of innovation.

A much better position would be for there to be lots of browsers with around 15% market share. This would foster creativity and would hammer home the importance of standards compliance.

I want the days of the software monopoly to come to an end, and Firefox may be the a catalyst for the wide spread disintegration of such monopolies.

Simon.

Re:comeback

[Timesprout]

Actually by including tabbed browsing they are taking a leaf from Opera's book, same as Mozilla did. Credit where its due.

Other browsers gained more.

[dannytaggart]

use of Firefox rose to 6.17% from 5.59% in January.
Firefox's gain comes at the expense of Internet Explorer, which dropped to 89.04% market share, from 90.31% in December.

So, IE has dropped by 1.27% and Firefox has risen by 0.58%. That means other browsers have risen by 0.67%, which is more than Firefox.

Re:comeback

[Artifakt]

Firefox is likely to release much more often than IE, and to continue to grow, but they will get slower expansion from a typical upgrade. If a new release has some feature as useful as pop-up blocking, or even tabbed browsing, Firefox attracts a big bunch of new users. Unless there's a really impressive feature in some new release, expect incremental growth, and a long struggle with Microsoft.
Full CSS implementation for the net will be sweet, and will probably come about partly through Mozilla Foundation, but it won't draw customers as fast as pop-up blocking did.
Microsoft has one inherent advantage - they load IE as part of windows, so the average user doesn't see the load time. If it weren't for that, they would have lost a lot more share already. Making Firefox smaller and faster, and plugging aledged memory leaks needs to happen, so as to "minimize drag". It's not glamorous work, but doing it minimizes MS's one remaining big advantage in the browser wars.
For firefox coders, if you don't have a feature at least as useful as tabbed browsing to add, it looks like it's all a matter of improving bloat, security, or stability.

Re:True for a lot of open source software...

[dsanfte]

Maybe all that is missing is a few decent tutorials on packaging and AD integration to get open source software into corporate IT-environments?

Bingo. Time for Firefox developers to start integrating browser settings with AD, and making deployment easier.

Who would want to use the more insecure browser in a corporation bent on security? You have no choice right now, though; firefox is nigh impossible to deploy effectively without going to every single client machine and configuring the settings manually.

Re:Nearly 30% on my site

[mic256]

According to this site [ranking.pl] in Poland it is:

1. IE: 84.6%
2. Gecko: 10.2%
3. Opera 4.9%

IE is going down at a pace of 0.2%-0.3% per week. How about other countries ?

Not sure this makes sense

[bblazer]

I am having problems with this calculation - I may probably not thinking clearly this morning. If Firefox has 6 percent and IE is now below 90% (granted they don't give an exact figure) then that means that other browsers like Safari, Opera, Netscape, Mozilla and Conquer total for only 4% of usage? Since Apple has about a 5% market share, and Safari is the de-facto browser for Apple, doesn't that mean that mean that all of the other bowsers I mentioned basically are not used by anyone? My website statistics do not show that. I would guess that IE is WAY below 90%; maybe even approaching somewhere in the 70% area.

Speed issue

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as firefox does not fix it's speed issues, the market share will not beat IE. There are bug reports about memory leaks and regular slow downs after a while for about half a year now. As long as they they are not willing to fix this, some people will not switch to firefox as their standard browser.

Besides, it makes me really suspicious that they cannot handle this bugs. Doesn't leave a good impression on me.

Microsoft could easily win this (minor) war

[FlynnMP3]

All they would have to do is completely support CSS 2.1. Maybe even do CSS3 support with all the extension for accessability for webpages. Bump up of the control of the printing device. Have CSS selectors that act for some of the less used options that are dead if they aren't there. Geek support will gradually come in. They won't like it, but they'll have to eventually admit standards are supported.

Then for the final business reason to keep IE. Make a .NET control that gives complete control over the manipulation and creation of Office documents. Yes, this will put at least 3 companies out of business. But this will also ensure (ensnare?) businesses.

Then everybody will have what they want. Business types just want excel/office for browing the Internet and the tech types will be able to code standards compliant web pages for their intranets.

Oh...and as a side note. Work on security a bit too. Personally, I don't see how they are going to fix it with backward compatability a overriding requirement. If they can't get rid of ActiveX, then their security problem won't go away.

-I hate unripe sigs.

CNN Story

[furballphat]

It's pretty neat how far FireFox is beginning to spread. CNN carried this story on TV just a half-hour ago. They mentioned that FireFox was becoming the most popular alternative to IE. My coworkers (who's job includes watching CNN) came by and asked me why this FireFox thing is better. I told them about tabbed browsing, popup blocking, lack of security issues, and other niceties.

One of the coworkers downloaded FireFox right away. I actually expected him to take a little while to wean off of IE. After I showed him FireFox's features, however, he set FireFox to his default browser and deleted his IE shortcuts! I think we're definitely making headway. :-)

Re:Not entirely true

[agraupe]

But.... OMG it's *different* and I'm stupid!!! However would I manage that sort of thing??? Do you assume that I am competent at my job and could figure that out on my own?

Seriously, though, I never thought of doing it this way (mind you, I've never had to; I'm just a home user). This will be good information, because the "can't deploy on a network" troll is popular on all FF stories. And, believe me, I don't think that, in most environments, lack of configurability on the user's end will be a problem: at my school, we can't open a new window via the menubar.

A Tad Scarry...

[Anonymous Coward]

When my father-in-law says, "I'm running Linux now," I about piss myself. Then I realize he just installed Firefox on his Windows box and confused all FOSS by lumping it in with Linux. Then, while trying to explain to him that FOSS is good but it's not just all Linux, I get questions reguarding the slowdown of his computer mysteriously timed with the install of Kazaa.

/me bashes head with phone.

Re:User-Agent cloaking

[cgenman]

Opera masquerades it's User Agent as I.E. by default. It's actually a bit controversial in the Opera community, as while it reduces their numbers for a long time it increased the number of sites that didn't crap out.

It's also pretty easy to filter for if you realize that a Mozilla compatible I.E. with the word Opera attached to the end is not likely to have come from Redmond. But the numbers that these companies are throwing around sound about right for Opera's marketshare, so they're probably doing such filtering already.

Re:Firefox for the masses...

[KMitchell]

I would probably label it Help me choose and put a "grandma friendly" second dialog box up that requires a specific "ok, I understand the risks" selection to not bail. Style-points aside, that's a brilliant idea.

Stop navel-gazing. Password protect your stats.

[zxSpectrum]

Hey, you know that by making your stats available on the web you are doing the following:

You are helping (referer) spammers!

1. Thousands, if not millions of websites are beginning to experience real problems with Referer spam [kuro5hin.org]
2. The prime motivation for referer spam is PageRank whoring
3. Web sites that publish refererers, give spammers the illusion referrer spamming helps [virtuelvis.com].

So, for the love of [insert deity here], would you please password protect such pages

Re:Next IE version.

[rbarreira]

I agree, the flaws and annoyances that I talked about were things such as popups (although I've heard that IE on XP SP2 already blocks popups - well? I don't know because I use win2k) and spyware.

But I'm not quite sure that Firefox will continue to grow much after the next version of windows... We'll see :)

Do they count popups?

[DeathAndTaxes]

heh I'm wondering if they are counting popups and malware-spawned browser windows toward the IE percentages. Several people are saying 70 to 80% is more likely, but if you count the extra 'hits' from popups and such, that could easily push those numbers higher. ;-)

Closer to 30% according to my server stats.

[SoupIsGood Food]

I help to run "one of those" sites, the nature and scope of which I will leave entirely to the reader's imagination, save to say it's unlikely people hit it from work.

Over the course of the past three months, I'm seeing closer to 30% of my traffic as being Mozilla based, with Firefox accounting for almost all of that. 60% is IE, and the rest is split between Opera, Safari, Konqueror and various spider bots. Oddly enough, Opera is better represented than Safari... I attribute this to its popularity on cell phones.

Speaking with other admins, these numbers aren't unique.

IE's lost its monopoly in the home browser market... its overall dominance comes from locked-down corporate desktops, where change comes but slow.

SoupIsGood Food

Re:Firefox for the masses...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a good idea, because "Help me choose" implies that the user understands that they have to choose. I think many users don't even understand that.

maybe a "Click here if you are confused" button would be better?

There will always be a leader

[PhreakinPenguin]

I've seen references to the fact that people want to see alot of browsers with a medium sized market share because it stimulates inovation and that in turn makes it better for the "consumer". I beg to differ. I think there needs to always be a clear cut winnner in everything. If there's not, then it waters down the product so to speak.

Look at airlines for example. While we all have our favorites, there's not really a clear cut leader in air travel. This has led to average service and fares at best. If there was a clear cut leader, the others would bust their ass to try and overtake them.

Which leads us to things like operating systems and web browsers. Microsoft is obviously ahead in the OS department but that's led the *nix community to rally and do everything they can to try and overtake them. Same thing with the browser wars. IE has long had a dominant share of the market and that in turn has spawned Firefox, Opera, etc. Each struggling to overtake the giant. I for one love seeing the improvments browsers have made. Besides, we all like rooting for the underdog and that's exactly what Firefox is. For now....

Re:Post more of your personal website stats

[Anonymous Coward]

Explorer 73.4%
Unknown 13.6%
Netscape/Mozilla 11.0%
Safari 0.9%
Opera 0.9%
GoogleBot 0.2%
Konqueror 0.1%
Galeon 0.0%
Links 0.0%

In my defence none of the thousands of sites hosted here are my own, so not my webstats ;)

A quick glance at Unknown suggests "Misc" is a better name, browsers giving blank strings, the Yahoo search engine (slurp ~2%!!), a few MSNBOT entries (a very few, I hope they are buying data from Yahoo or Google), media players picking up movies, Dreamcasts and such like, I'll get my boss to make it my job to enhance the stats engine if I can to list these seperately.

After IE, Gecko based browsers are number one, and the VAST majority of these are Firefox (nearly 10%).

The stats are only based on only the last 500,000 hits, the sites are generally "best viewed in IE" (I'm working on that one), and so one might expect an IE bias.

From these figures one might conclude that any website that only works in IE is failing between 13% and 26.6% of the traffic depending how optimistic you are.

These figures haven't changed that much since the jump after Firefoxes release.

I would share the "OS" stats, but they are truely demoralising for a GNU/Linux die hard like me.

are the US really that far behind in Firefox use?

[Lazy Jones]

Here in Austria (no, not in Soviet Russia), websites are reporting ~20% Mozilla, ~70% MSIE ...

Big suprise this month

[Tobias Luetke]

I run a snowboard store at www.snowdevil.ca [snowdevil.ca] and this months statistics are really surprising.

Obviously this is a pretty young clientele

Browsers:

• FireFox 46 %
• MS Internet Explorer 37.3 %
• Safari 9 %

Operating systems:

• Windows 74.5 %
• Macintosh 13.9 %
• Linux 9.9 %

Go non MS stuff!

Re:Uhh

[westlake]

It would mean that more than 1 in 20 of your customers would have difficulties with your website.

It is one thing to say that 1 in 20 users have installed Firefox. It is quite another thing to prove that 1 in 20 customers of Amazon.com or your local S&L are running Firefox.

Estimates of Firefox's success or IE's decline don't tell you much unless you can break them down geographically, and by age, income, usage patterns and so on.

Re:I wonder

[CaptKilljoy]

That is certainly important. Free Software encourages diversity. back in the day, even in the world of proprietary software, people had alternatives, they would ask you what OS you run, if you had a gui or not, what word processor you used, or what spreadsheet, what browser, etc.

Yeah, and it was a bitch and a half to support. One of the things holding OSS back is an excess of diversity: a profusion of subtly differnt distros, a plethora of package managers, a panopoly of window managers, etc. Diversity is fine if (for example) the steps for installation or troubleshooting of any given software package does not depend on what else you're using; otherwise it's an unmanageable mess.

Bugger diversity. Whatever happened to standards?

Re:comeback

[SeaFox]

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.

What's ironic is one would assume Microsoft would have the upper hand in the updates game since they have their automatic update mechanism to changes things a few KB at a time if they wish.

Whereas installing a Firefox update usually means reinstalling the entire application.

Re:Nearly 30% on my site

[ballwall]

I know this is supposed to be funny. But think of someone who has the power to do this? Image if google all of a sudden put up a link on their front page: "Sorry, internet explorer is not longer supported by google. Please download Firefox here". Right now they're the only ones that can really pull a microsoft on microsoft.

Really all they'd have to do is make people aware of firefox on their front page.

Re:Can't be bothered to switch users from buggy IE

[vsprintf]

Plus, as long as you keep nursing at the MS teat, you are assured a job in the tech support industry, as you are sure to have many, many fires to fight each day, to justify your presence.

Testify. Our security chief at work is constantly putting out memos on how not to get infected or bring malware into the building. When US-CERT put out an advisory suggesting people not use IE, I emailed him asking if there was a plan to move our users to a more secure browser. His answer was one word: No. People don't want their rice bowl messed with. I've introduced several people who were tired of IE problems to Firefox, and the word is speading slowly, despite our laughable "security" folks.

Re:Nearly 30% on my site

[vsprintf]

Image if google all of a sudden put up a link on their front page: "Sorry, internet explorer is not longer supported by google. Please download Firefox here". Right now they're the only ones that can really pull a microsoft on microsoft.

Google is not going to cut off 90% of their users. However, if they added a link saying, "You are using an insecure browser according to US-CERT. Download a better browser here," that could generate some interest and poke a finger in Microsoft's eye(-ee).