Firefox Site Visits Up 237% 379
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.""
Heh. (Score:2, Interesting)
Downscale (Score:4, Interesting)
It would be interesting... (Score:3, Interesting)
Meaningfulness of "Site visits"? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Validity of the article linked to? (Score:1, Interesting)
The sample would be statistically significant at far, far fewer users than that...think 1500 or so.
Re:Nielsen? (Score:5, Interesting)
You'll often find this task is accomplished by "web bugs", tiny 1x1 .GIF images that have no purpose other than to go to a third party to indicate the page was viewed, by what IP address, etc. They'll frequently try to give you cookies, too, in order to study browser habits. (I always block these cookies when requested, just to be obstinate.)
Close button placement... (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously I hit it by accident all the time.
Re:Men? Women? (Score:2, Interesting)
Guess they just stole some idea from there for this statistic
My stats are very high Mozilla percentage (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Downscale (Score:2, Interesting)
men and women (Score:2, Interesting)
...And I feel the compulsive need to point out TFA's incorrect use of "comprise."
Things are changing (Score:5, Interesting)
And why did it happen? Tons of customer feedback directly on the site, and metrics showing that firefox use was climbing. Rapidly. And here i thought those 'feedback forms' wouldn't actually lead to any change.
Re:Sorry to disappoint everyone (Score:5, Interesting)
(I ++love++ Firefox, but it should be noted that it's easier for FF users to load multiple sites rapidly [which it's Referrer tag keys])
Re:Oddly enough... (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm in an Australian scientific site. Recent stats are:
1. MSIE6.x: 42.9% (on decline)
2. Netscape 7.x: 39.7% (on sharp incline)
3. Unknown: 4%
4. MSIE5.0x: 3.7%
5. AOL 9.x: 2.4%
6. MSIE5.5: 2.1%
7. Netscape 4.x: 1.36%
8. Safari 1.x: 0.75%
9. Firefox: 0.47%
10. Aol 8.x: 0.43%
I seriously don't get the low Firefox numbers and high Netscape 7.x numbers - but maybe it is presenting itself as NS7? Majority of viewers are US, probably schools and universities etc.
Interesting though is the overall low IE.
Re:Impact of Firefox (Score:1, Interesting)
The new pop-ups which slide on top of virtually half the news outlets news articles are far more annoying and disrupting than the crap we used to have to deal with.
What's sad is it doesn't do me or anyone any good to complain because marketers and worst still portal sites think it's their right to push that garbage on to my screen. Sort of like Scott Richter thinks he has a right to send me email I've never asked for.
Speaking of google, I'm over the google adwords thing. It was kind of cute, but now it's annoying and needs to be tossed.
While I'm ranting, I'm really over pdf. Some sites have just given up building proper web sites and gone to links to 100 page pdf files that take forever to download and have absolutely 0 rich content that would have required anything more than a pre tag. Most of these sites seem to also always be starving for bandwidth which shows just how truly informed these people were to begin with. And some actually think this is protecting their content somehow. What a sick sad world this has become!
Re:Of course, Firefox is the default home page... (Score:1, Interesting)
The only time I see Firefox use a default homepage is on a clean install where IE was never used anyway.
Re:Close button placement... (Score:3, Interesting)
I put my bookmark toolbar into the menu bar, stripped my 30 favourite bookmarks of everything but their icon, and put 'em all in the toolbar, so the icons are on the same line as "File, Edit,...". Sucks if you go to a site that doesn't have icons though.
Ok, that's enough OT for today
Maybe if Mozilla had better documentation ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, Firefox has all sorts of neat hacking potential which dovetails with increasingly exposed hooks into Google things like Google maps [google.com].
Sadly, some basic browser commands and options are poorly documented and advanced information (on hacking) is largely non-existant. Which kinda sucks because some people find it easy to extend Firefox with bookmarklets, extensions, and GreaseMonkey scripts.
For example, a full Firefox contains a DOM (Document Object Model) Inspector which can help in traking down say how a page hid something in a style sheet. However there is no official documentation for this DOMi. Some outside web pages have helped by explaining what some of the buttons mean, but I have yet to see any discussion of "evalute javascript" and I can't seem to get it to work.
I am someone well versed in programming in many languages, but professionally never learned javascript. Yet I have written a few bookmarklets by example (e.g. find some js code examples that do things similar to what you want and imitate them).
I wish I could find a good discussion of javascript "namespaces" and Firefox hacking. My guess is that there is some contium. Bookmarklets only give you access to DOM stuff, GreaseMonkey [mozdev.org] exposes certain hooks into Firefox, Extensions expose more Firefox hooks, and hacking Firefox lets you do anything.
Re:Nielsen? (Score:1, Interesting)
Adblock (Score:3, Interesting)
I've installed Firefox on three workmates computers, most of my family's computers... and all have Adblock installed using my filters as a starting point... not one of them would load the Red Sherrif code.
Re:Impact of Firefox (Score:5, Interesting)
The plan is that it will actually drive the cost of web development down by forcing IE to get better.
Right now a lot of web developers' time is spent working around IE bugs. A random one of thousands of examples is making a dotted border - a simple, common request. The CSS is "border: 1px dotted blue". Non-IE browsers happily obey. To do this in IE you actually need to make/upload 2px GIFs, and set them to tile in such a way that they look like dotted borders.
If the popularity of standard browsers forces Microsoft to improve IE's standards support, and IE gets things like alpha transparency in graphics and a sane box model, the time/cost saved will outweigh that of having to deal with different event registering models.
In summary, now that there's competition again, web development can actually start to improve once more - it could end up being cheaper even.
Use favicon picker and make your own favicons! (Score:2, Interesting)
Make your own favicons for webpages without, and assign them using the favicon picker extension [extensionsmirror.nl].
I'm doing exactly the same as you, I've got a set of buttons for all my "popular" bookmarks. At the top. However, some sites doesn't have a favicon, then I just gimp one pretty quick (usually based on the logo of the page) and use that using the favicon picker extension. Normally I also send the webadmin of the site the favicon along with a description on how to use it. (If they want to use it)
Re:Impact of Firefox (Score:3, Interesting)
But then there's IE/Win.
The "Username:" and "Password:" labels don't show up. Actually, if I change the colors so I can see what's going on, they're actually getting drawn, then they immediately disappear, as if they're being drawn behind the background graphic. But get this: if you double-click the blank space where the text is supposed to be, the text appears! Click away (to de-select), and the text remains, looking just like it's supposed to. Select All, and the labels disappear again. Alt-tab to another application (not maximized), and the labels appear; alt-tab back to IE and they disappear.
I did some research, and finally found it: this is known as the "peekaboo" bug, and the solution was to add a "line-height" definition to the CSS for the left sidebar div. Not the login box div, but the parent of that. It doesn't matter what you set the line-height to (so you can pick something that looks reasonable), but it just has to be defined.
This took me a couple of hours to track down (since I didn't know what I was tracking down at first, and I had to experiment).
By the way, apparently when I did the initial page layout, I ran into another bug; I don't remember why, but there's a comment in my HTML indicating that the peculiar spacing of a couple of tags is a workaround for an MSIE bug. I don't mean spacing as in where things appear on the web page, I mean spacing as in not putting indents and line breaks where you normally would in the HTML. I don't remember what happens if you don't do it in just that way.
My only fear about IE7 is that it will introduce new bugs while breaking the workarounds for the old bugs.
[ * In IE/Mac, the submit button is getting the width of a parent div applied to it, so the submit button is the same width as the login box. I might look into fixing this, but I really don't expect many IE/Mac users, and it's a purely cosmetic issue, so for the moment I don't care. Note that IE/Mac and IE/Win have virtually nothing in common; they have totally different bugs (and IE/Win has far more of them). ]
Re:Nielsen? (Score:3, Interesting)
Are there web advertisements that are simply "brand builders"? For example, I wouldn't expect consumers to click on a simple "Coca-Cola" ribbon to consider it effective. The only way to rate them would be on a per-impression basis.
Oh, and as far as a few of the most annoying cookie-counters, I ended up sticking sites like siteminder.com in my hosts file. I do wish Firefox had a right-click cookie menu I could use to more easily fix cookie problems, but hey, now I'm just whining ... :-)