IE Dropping, Now Near 70% In Europe

Kevin Spiritus lets us know that XiTi Monitor, a French Web survey institute, has published its browser barometer for July, and Internet Explorer continues to lose ground. "The ascension of Firefox continues... Nearly 28% average use rate in Europe in the beginning of July 2007, with a progression in the totality of the 32 European countries studied. Firefox doesn't loose ground in any of the countries."

How is this not a dupe?

[Anonymous Coward]

Putting the same story in the related stories box does not un-dupe this news.

Methodology

[EveryNickIsTaken]

From TFA:

Methodology: Firefox's use rate corresponds to the totality of Firefox visits during the period in relation to the entirety of visits, all browsers taken together.

They don't explain what "visits" means. Does it mean visits to *their* site? Did they poll a random number of site owners? I'm sorry, but unless they can provide some supporting information, then these statistics are meaningless.

Re:firefox getting bloated

[Horn]

If you care that much about 60 megs of ram for an app that you're using, its time to get more ram.

Re:firefox getting bloated

[professionalfurryele]

Font appearance is a personal taste issue, although I cant tell the difference. How are you measuring RAM usage? Because it isn't the amount of RAM in the task manager you want to worry about. What you need to find out is what do the applications do when the system is low on resources. If firefox is a good little application and surrenders that RAM when the system needs it, then it doesn't matter if it is 'using' it at other times.

Re:firefox getting bloated

[Red Flayer]

The about:config setting you're looking for is config.trim_on_minimize. Set this true.

I think this raises a point, though, in relation to browser share. The majority of users do not want to have to tweak anything. If they need to change Firefox configs in order to match performance under IE7, most would instead go back to IE7.[1]

Personally, I don't think browser share is the ultimate measure of how good a browser Firefox is. The only reason why I think it's important that FF and other browsers eat away at the IE7 share is so that more websites are developed according to standards.

[1] This is amusing, to me. The not-wanting-to-have-to-tweak-anything mentality used to be associated with Apple, not PCs (yes, more on the hardware side, but still). Now it's associated with MS products.

Re:firefox getting bloated

[WIAKywbfatw]

Just a suggestion, but you might want to try Opera. It's smaller and faster than its rivals.

But, as others have pointed out, MSIE is known for not reporting memory usage correctly, so it's very hard to make like for like memory usage comparisons based solely on the numbers reported by Task Manager.