Firefox Usage Near 25% In Europe 391
A user writes "French researcher Xiti claims that Mozilla Firefox keeps winning terrain in Europe. 24.1% of Internet users in Europe use Firefox. Slovenia (44.5%), Finland (41.3%), Croatia (36.5%), and Germany (36.2%) lead the way, followed by a group of mostly Eastern European countries. Remarkably, The Netherlands is only at 13.3%, right before Andorra. Oceania maintains a slight lead over Europe, at 24.8%; the rest of the world trails at 11.9% to 15.1%."
IE States: More Useful? (Score:5, Insightful)
Got to give props to the Firefox guys though. They're getting there
Re:sounds way of low for home users (Score:2, Insightful)
Two important questions... (Score:5, Insightful)
2. Does this survey make any attempt to take into account 'individual PC users' vs. 'internet cafe' users? i.e. Is this percentage of COMPUTERS or percentage of USERS? (Or, more likely, percentage of individual web hits?)
I can't find any technical details on how this survey was conducted, other than the slight mention of number of websites involved.
Re:Two important questions... (Score:5, Insightful)
For years many OSS and Firefox proponents have claimed that MS crippled the web and killed innovation with IE. Now that the IE monopoly is crumbling whats changed? I dont use either browser and frankly my browsing experience is the same as it has been for the last few years. Wheres all this innovation I was told I was missing?
Re:sounds way of low for home users (Score:5, Insightful)
OS platforms are 88% windows, 9% Mac, and nearly 3% Linux.
This tells me nothing until I know the target audience for your site and the number of visitors.
Re:Two important questions... (Score:4, Insightful)
We aren't held back by everybody using Internet Explorer. We are held back because enough people use Internet Explorer. Even if only one in ten people use Internet Explorer, that's enough to force the average website to ensure compatibility.
Furthermore, it's a vicious circle. If web developers aren't taking advantage of nifty things like SVG, then there's far less pressure on browser vendors to incorporate these features.
Re:Ballmer chair jokes.... (Score:4, Insightful)
did I see something about "a clue"? doh.
Attention Dumbshit Moderators (Score:5, Insightful)
Complacency and apathy is exactly the sort of reason why Microsoft still commands the desktop and why people aren't switching over to superior products like Firefox. It's also the reason why alternative fuels are struggling to take off (fossil fuels are still profitable for producers and cheap for consumers) and why it takes near-catastrophe for the United States to enact appropriate social and environmental policy.
Since I am an American, you can take your indignation at my criticism and shove it.
Re:Yeah but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Languages? (Score:4, Insightful)
Correct my North-American egocentrism, but aren't most of the countries listed predominantly non-English speaking?
- RG>
Re:Linux came from Europe... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Ballmer chair jokes.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Your unrelated points are all excellent, and true about Microsoft in general, but you apparently don't understand the concept of leading such a beast, even in the abstract. It's okay, very few people do.
Re:Nice indeed, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
The reason it works well enough for the average user is that we developers make it work by piling on hacks and generally jankie code. I'm fat because I eat and I eat because I'm fat.
I just wish there was a way to break the vicious cycle of IE usage quicker.
Re:Ballmer chair jokes.... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Languages? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Nice indeed, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yeah but... (Score:5, Insightful)
You might be right. But the Amiga was vastly superior to any other PC available at the time (or for some time after Commadore went out). Hell they still used Amigas for the graphics on Babylon 5 years after Commadore went out. It could be that Europeon usage is a measure of quality rather than success?
Re:Yeah but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes it does, prostitution and hashish are just good clean fun. The US just has a problem with them because it was founded by puritans and remains full of pruds to this day. Snooby pruds at that, here in the US we actually think our outlook is superior because our outlook includes viewing ourselves as superior.
It will take time. (Score:3, Insightful)
And as long as we can't just block IE users at the door, it makes it very hard to show you any of the cool stuff we might have done, had the Internet not been so crippled.
However, I will point to AJAX -- if Microsoft had its way, this would not have worked, or would have been IE-only. If you understand what's going on under the hood (CSS, the DOM, etc), you will understand that AJAX works in spite of the IE monopoly. It's not that MS didn't try to kill things like AJAX, it's that they tried and failed, largely due to the existence of things like Firefox.
Re:Linux came from Europe... (Score:2, Insightful)
Second: You're correct, but why do I suspect if it had been made in the US, "that's not the point, great things are developed anywhere" would be a never-seen comment on slashdot, and "another triumph for the great US of A, easily outdoing those socialist Euros yet again" would take it's place.
Re:Rabid fanbase (Score:3, Insightful)
I care because enough people do this that IE/Windows become a defacto standard. Before Firefox started gaining ground, many websites were coded to IE, not to standards -- and IE broke the standards. This affected me directly, because when I was using Mozilla (and early Phoenix builds, which was later renamed to Firefox), I would often run into websites designed only for IE, which would not work properly on other browsers, even when they followed the standards, assuming they let me in the door in the first place.
There are still entirely too many websites, even non-ActiveX ones, which will use browser detection and block you at the door if you're not using IE.
So, if you use IE, you're directly responsible for parts of the Web sucking for Firefox users, and that is one reason I look down on you.
Even now, websites designed for standards, which work flawlessly in Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konqueror, and many other browsers, continue to fail in IE, because IE does not support the standards properly. But since so many use IE, the standard user response is, "This website is broken." The standard way to deal with this is to spend several times as long developing your website (or web app) in order to ensure that it also works on IE.
Go talk to any serious web developer about the problems of supporting IE. When they tell you, understand that they are not exaggerating at all. It really is at least that bad. And that's just with existing standards; IE has been the most resistant when it comes to supporting actual new standards. (Adding their own does not count; Microsoft does not (or should not) dictate Web standards, that's what the w3c [w3.org] is for.
(And if they are using a toolkit, like Dojo [dojotoolkit.org] or Google Web Toolkit [google.com], that just means the toolkit is doing the work for them. It also means that a very large portion of that toolkit had to be written to fix the problems Microsoft introduces with IE.)
Windows is another problem for another rant. But let me just give you one: Anti-virus software would not have to exist, were it not for Windows. Also, hardware manufacturers tend to write their drivers for Windows only, meaning Windows gets the credit for working on just about any hardware, without having to do any of the work. It also means that they tend to not release specifications, meaning Linux has to reverse-engineer these things.
So, you, as a Windows user, are directly contributing to my problems -- things like my wireless card not working, and the difficulty of finding a wireless card known to work with Linux.
That is why we look down on you. You are making the computing world a hell for anyone who doesn't make the same choices you do (Windows/IE). Microsoft may have made Windows/IE hell to work with, but you, without even realizing it, are making it more and more difficult to choose anything else.
Re:It will take time. (Score:3, Insightful)
I spend most my days fighting stupid IE bugs in CSS or JS, but most Ajax-related stuff works well in IE...
I really wish IE would die the death it deserves but seriously if there is one single good thing its done, its that XMLHttpRequest object...
Places browsing and file managemnt overlap. (Score:3, Insightful)
Another thought, I don't see web browsing and file managing overlapping in features that much (maybe in the visual presentation a bit), why do you assume that it makes sense for them to be integrated? To have one less app?
It's nice to be able to mix http, ftp, sftp and smb in an application that has good viewing capability. Typically http will me to some kind of file that I want to download. In the case of code, it's nice to be able to right click open it in a new tab and check it out before dragging and dropping the files I want to the place I want to keep them. Programs like Kget automate downloading links, and it's nice to be able to manipulate the place I'm going to put them before I download.
There are lots of other places where mixed behavior is nice and once you get used to it, it's hard to do without. I notice that it's missing when I use an XP system and the silly thing insists on opening separate windows. It takes time, obscures what I'm looking at and is hard to drag and drop between. Between that and clumsy virtual desktops, the system drives me nuts.