Firefox Site Visits Up 237%

prostoalex writes "Nielsen//NetRatings, a top Web reporting and metrics agency, started tracking the Firefox Web site in June 2004 and has announced 237% growth since then. Nielsen tracks Firefox Web site visits, not downloads or usage patterns, but it notes that "Men accounted for 71% or nearly 1.9 mln site visitors, compared to the women who comprised 29% or the minority population who visited in March 2005.""

DUH!

[zappepcs]

When is it going to stop being cliche' and just be fact... women are not as interested in technology as men, be it cars, home theater, or computers?

This is almost stupid to post on /.

But really

[Primotech]

Is this all that suprising? We all see how much press the wonderful Mozilla Foundation has been getting as of late.

What's more impressive

[Anonymous Coward]

In one year's time, 1 million growing to 2 million (100% increase), or 1 growing to 10 (1000% increase)?

Just be happy

[Nate53085]

I don't understand why everyone is so angry. I think we should all be happy that there is a strong alternative to IE and that its gaining ground. Competition for IE means inovation, and regardless of how pissed off you are about whatever, thats a good thing.

Visits to mozilla.org/firefox up!!

[hendridm]

...started tracking the Firefox Web site in June 2004 and has announced 237% growth since then.

So the people who visit the Firefox web site are increasingly users of the Firefox web browser. Simply shocking!

Re:Downscale

[Stevyn]

Good point. I'm sure most linux users use some means other than mozilla.org to get firefox. However, Linux users don't represent a large population.

I don't trust metrics based on use by number of downloads. I think there is too much room for error on both sides.

Really?

[proteonic]

"Men accounted for 71% or nearly 1.9 mln site visitors, compared to the women who comprised 29% or the minority population who visited in March 2005."

I didn't realize my browser reported whether I was male or female as part of the browser Id string!

HOW DO THEY KNOW

[WizardRahl]

How do they know whether it was a man or woman that visited their website?

Bad Statistics

[QuantumRiff]

How can they say that they've been monitoring for 9 months, and then state that it has 278% year over year growth?

Besides, my web site had 1000% growth, I went from me viewing it to a few relatives looking at a picture I put up from them (40% female, 60% male), so, obviously, my website is faster growing that firefoxes!

Re:DUH!

[strider3700]

well most men I know started using firefox because it cured that little popup issue they had while surfing for porn. Most women I know don't complain anywhere near as much about popups and I've always assumed they don't hunt for porn as much.

I know thats why I switched and i wouldn't be shocked if I'm not the only one.

Re:DUH!

[Anonymous Coward]

When is it going to stop being cliche' and just be fact

Not until western culture stops holding on to the idea that gender doesn't carry behavioral predispositions.

One more time!

[fm6]

Please, please, please. No more "Firefox is gaining ground" stories until we have some solid numbers, not some contorted gee-whiz stats.

This is to be expected...

[Mars Ultor]

...isn't it? Firefox 1.0 was accompanied by a big download push, where techies actively encouraged mom, dad, sis, gramps, dog, and everyone else they could think of to get and install Firefox.

Thing is, Firefox defaults to the Firefox website! So you had a huge push to download and install firefox, and people being what they are (lazy), a whole bunch of firefox installs all pointing at the firefox website everytime they fire up. Let's see how this trend continues for another year or so before we get uber excited.

Impact of Firefox

[shirai]

The biggest impact Firefox will have on web development is it will increase the cost of entry into run-almost-anywhere scripted websites.

Note that I'm not saying this is bad or that there aren't good effects Firefox has (in fact, I believe it is a great browser). Just that the biggest impact on *development* is it will increase the cost of entry on scripted sites.

This may be a good or bad thing. When the web first started, it was possible to be an "HTML Expert" by doing layouts with tables. I kid you not. This was advanced at one time and people had to figure out how to do it.

With browsers having pretty much settled down (meaning that Microsoft stopped releasing new browsers and 90% market share belonged to Microsoft), the wealth of knowledge on HTML coding has grown considerably. It was hard to be an *expert* at HTML or Scripting because everyone had done it before. That said, there are some truly brilliant people at sites like QuirksMode [quirksmode.org].

Now I feel that the new direction that uber-coders are going for is *useful* DHTML scripting (also known as JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets and the Document Object Model to manipulate HTML live). By useful, I don't mean a cursor with a trail of stars. I mean things like popup calendars for date selectors, rich text editors, GMail and WYSIWYG page editors with live previews.

DHTML is still hard and mostly poorly documented. Anybody who has made a rich text editor for MSIE knows that it isn't too bad anymore. There is more documentation on how to do it. Definitely not *a lot* but enough that you can find your way through it.

Try this though: Make an iframe window that simulates a regular window. Okay. Now do it so that is supports MSIE, FireFox and Safari. If you want to (eventually) support more than 75% of the market, you have to support FireFox now and I'd throw Safari on the list as it is the default browser (I think) on the Mac.

Some of the toughies are the event handlers for these browsers which are quite different. I've written code to make them both work with one code base but there is virtually no documentation on this. There are dozens of quirks not listed and the only way you can figure 'em out is through trial and error.

Okay, I know I haven't covered all my bases in making this argument, but I think the smarts you will need to be an uber-coder for DHTML just got harder. This is good because there is room for new experts. If you are a great coder, there is a chance to be a brilliant cross-browser DHTML coder. If you are strictly average (nothing wrong with that), your job may have got harder.

Ironically, code re-use on JavaScript seems to be very low.

By the way, if you need evidence that cross-browser DHTML is hard, it even took Google a while to get Firefox compatible with GMail. Think how much cash they've got.

Signing out...

Re:Oddly enough...

[trawg]

The most popular browser/OS combination to my sites is FireFox/WinXP too - but I'm the only one that uses them, so that information doesn't mean anything :)

Parent would be worthy of its Informative mod if there was some scope to its claim (I could mod as overrated but I'd rather actually find out what sort of number of people we're talking about here, because its pretty impressive if Firefox is the #1 browser on a decent-sized site!)

Re:Just be happy

[jbn-o]

Who are you saying is angry?

I'm quite pleased that a GNU GPL-covered web browser is making so many inroads on so many desktops around the world. The FLOSS OS distributors are all doing fantastic work helping to promote its use, and of course the Firefox website is quite popular after every mention in the New York Times. I hope that people will use Firefox as a means to moving to a free software system someday.

Re:HOW DO THEY KNOW

[pohl]

They can probably use cookies [wikipedia.org] and web bugs [wikipedia.org] to establish useage patterns that they correlate to machine/browser combinations. While not perfect, it may allow you to make demographic estimates within some acceptible margin of error. You could combine that with other sources of data, such as samples of people that voluntarily answer demographic questions when asked.

Re:Downscale

[gad_zuki!]

A couple thoughts:

1. Statistical lag. It is only the recent surveys that have caught those newer users. The older data and surveys, many of which are linked to 3rd party cookies and web bugs which FF usually blocks, were probably under-representing FF usage.

2. Statistical method. Every "survey" has its ups and downs. You'll get a definitive answer when the top 5000 or so websites give up all their access log files. This, of course, will never happen. So tomorrow you may read a study about how FF usage has fallen. Look into the method and see if you trust it. Keep in mind the 3rd party cookies/web bug issue which might over or under represent FF usage.

Regardless, the war is pretty much over. The big fear was MS taking over the web. Well, that's not going to happen with at least 10% of users using non-IE browsers. The second big fear was developers giving up cross-browser work. And lets face it, its a pain in the ass to do with even semi-complex projects, but theyre doing it because of the vocal FF user-base and smart managers who know losing 8% of their customers (or making them fire up a different browser) is bad business.

Re:Majority of Slashdot visitors use IE

[One Childish N00b]

That ignores the fact that Opera identifies as IE6 by default, and that seems to have a pretty big following around these parts. It also ignores the fact that Konqueror and the Mozilla babies can all, either through Preferences or extensions, identify as IE as well (unfortunately, I can't speak for Safari).

It also ignores all the Slashdotters reading the site while skiving off work on a locked-down Windows box, where IE is the only option availible. That's not to say 'OMG NO1 ON /. HAS IE J00 TROLL LOLZ0RZ!!!', but just suggesting that user-agent strings aren't the most accurate way of assessing who's using what browser, and even if they were they'd still not be a 100% reliable source of information on people's preferred browser.

Re:Impact of Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd have to respectfully disagree. DHTML is like any other progamming language. It can be used well or it can be used badly.

Have you used GMail? I hope you aren't telling me it would be better without DHTML.

Also, I far prefer travel sites that use a DHTML popups for date selection than one that forces you to type the date.

Re:Sorry to disappoint everyone

[VolcomPimp]

They don't track hits from the same IP like that.

Re:One more time!

[nickco3]

There's no such thing as geniunely solid numbers, all web-traffic figures are contorted gee-whiz stats.

Re:Things are changing

[Xarius]

Instead of "officially supporting" browsers, why not "officially support" web standards and be done with it?