PCWorld Says Firefox is Strong, Vista is Weak

twitter writes "PC World has released their year in review statistics and 2007 was not kind to Microsoft. IE 6 users are equally likely to move to Firefox as they are to IE7 and no one wants Vista. 'How much of an accomplishment is it for a new version of Windows to get to 14 percent usage in 11 months? The logical benchmark is to compare it to the first eleven months of Windows XP, back in 2001 and 2002. In that period, that operating system went from nothing to 36 percent usage on PCWorld.com--more than 250 percent of the usage that Vista has mustered so far.'"

Forecast calls for a 75% chance of hilarity

[Anonymous Coward]

People can come up with statistics to prove anything, fourty percent of all people know that.

/. effect

[calebt3]

The chart occasionally shows Firefox having more hits than IE. Maybe those months had more /. articles pointing to PC World's website?

Re:I've just upgraded one machine at home ...

[dprovine]

[T]hat'll be why people upgrade to Vista - difficulty in obtaining applications that still work on XP.

That may not happen very quickly: at least one developer I know is under orders to write only things that work under XP, and test them with Vista for compatibility. Anything that's Vista-only is explicitly forbidden, because Vista uptake has been so slow.

Economically speaking, if Vista can run XP programs, your market for writing something that runs on both is vastly larger than your market for writing something that only runs on Vista. If you sold software for money, would you write anything Vista-only?

Re:Poor comparison

[gatzke]

"They were all great within the time the [sic] lived."

Did you ever use NT 3.51? 4.0? 2000? They were terrible. XP is the first MS OS that has actually stayed stable for me for more than a few days. I still get bluescreens, but hey, it is a MS product. The "professional" line was worthless in a variety of ways.

For a lot of people, they did go from ME to XP because they had no consumer option. What was the consumer OS from MS after ME? XP Home! Another POS, but far better than ME. So YOU learn your OS history please.

XP was not a descendant of ME, but it was the only upgrade path for millions.

Re:benchmark?

[pembo13]

I used Windows ME for several years without significant problems and only switch because some software I needed wouldn't work on Windows ME.

Re:benchmark?

[morgan_greywolf]

Vista has a ridiculously large footprint. I've seen systems with 2GB of RAM and fairly decent processor (Athlon 64 x2 4200) run Vista and it's sllllooowwww. Much slower than XP on the system.

OTOH, give Mac OS X Leopard or Ubuntu Gutsy that much RAM and CPU and watch it sing.

Sorry for anyone who feels like Vista is great, but facts are facts. Vista is slow and bloated.

Re:benchmark?

[Calmiche]

You know, when Windows XP came out, it was fairly slow and bloated. So was Windows 98. It wasn't the software, it was the available hardware. (Not that I'm defending Vista. I can't stand Vista. I've tried it twice now, the first for a month and just last month for two weeks with a new beta SP1. Nasty.)

I don't know if Vista is redeemable. I'm going to have to wait at least until SP2 before I want to try again.

That should be by late 2009. So, imagine double the processor power, with an 8 core processor, a solid state disk and at least 64 gig of RAM. If Microsoft gets their butts in gear and start listening to their customers, SP2 might be something worthwhile. We shall see how it works out.

Re:Don't forget to mention the pre-bundled copies!

[ShieldW0lf]

Vista is preinstalled on 99.999% of the world's new machinss so... {blah blah you know the rest}.

Close. Vista is preinstalled on less new machines now than when it was first introduced. First there was the big shiny "Vista for All" unveiling, then vendors started trying to get business by offering "Downgrade to WinXP available here!" and being successful at it.

Re:benchmark?

[daeg]

I'd love to see statistics showing the number of Vista purchases vs. Vista usage. I started my job about a year ago and we had around 10 machines purchased before I took over purchasing and they had Vista. Once I had time, I replaced them all with Windows XP -- I didn't bother trying to get replacements from our vendor, it was easier/quicker just to buy XP Pro outright from an OEM supplier. I know I'm not the only one that's replaced Vistas with XP.

What percentage of Vista sales aren't permanent users?

Re:Poor comparison

[Scudsucker]

Just like the U.S. government, MS is so huge, bloated, mismanaged and downright corrupt, the only way it can possibly be improved is for 95% of it to simply go away.

Uh, no. But thanks for drinking the anti-government Kool-Aid anyway. Government agencies can do great things when competent people are put in charge, as Clinton proved in the 90's with FEMA. But when the government is run by people who hate government, you shouldn't be shocked, shocked! when it fails.

Re:benchmark?

[toddestan]

It's not normal for XP. My Sempron 3000 idles at about 2% or so. When I have Opera open with about 12 tabs, Winamp playing an internet radio station, and my IM client running it still 'idles' at about 5-10%, which seems reasonable.

Re:Virtual reality check

[toddestan]

IE6 (all operating systems) 35.22%
FF (all operating systems and versions) 18.35%
IE7 (all OS) 18.15%
Other.. the rest

May I ask what "the rest" is, being that it's about 29% of your numbers? I would guess that Safari, IE5, and Opera are probably at about 5% combined, so that leaves a bit to be accounted for.

Re:The hating-Vista bandwagon

[Snooby2008]

I agree with you totally. When I think what's wrong with Vista after using 2 Vistas few months, I must say....nothing. There is no problem with them that would concern Vista itself. Vista is much more ready than Windows 2000 I got shortly after it was published. And XP...it was quite disaster far as I recall at first. Now people are so happy with XP, that I find it bit humorous. True, I can't get all hardware working on Vista. But this is true in Linux too. And I don't hold it against linux, so why I should hold it against Vista? But I can understand why people don't want Vista. They have things that don't work on it and they don't want to do hassle of paying, upgrading, installing etc. just so they could use Vista. They don't have the upside why to do it. Perfectly rational thinking, I agree. But why hate Vista because of it? If you don't want to upgrade but Microsoft forces you to, it's not fault of Vista. And if you don't have to upgrade to it, what's the problem then? If you don't have something really important on XP and your hardware works on Vista, why would anyone prefer XP over Vista? I honestly can't think why somebody would switch back to XP if he doesn't need to. Personally I think Vista is many ways lot smoother OS and has smarter security system than XP. Having the admin password popup box asking me do I want to install or do things, makes me feel lot more safer than the old XP style 'what you dont see cant harm you' style of security.

Re:The hating-Vista bandwagon

[GuyfromTrinidad]

I too have been using Vista for over 6 months and initially had serious problems with incompatibility of drivers and even worse the machine would occasionally freeze, but I don't hate it. For home use it works for me. For work I like tiger(will upgrade to leopard in a couple of months) and Ubuntu. But I guarantee home use of Vista will improve especially after SP1. Vista is suffering from not fulfilling the lofty expectations that Microsoft set for it, the same could be said of Leopard slightly but Apple has better PR and fans who are not crucified in public for defending their products. The fact is XP will remain king in the corporate world because people have become accustomed to it and are slow to change(I know business places that still use 98). I'm not saying we have to love Vista but lets be a little more creative in our hatemongering.

Slowness can't be fixed with a check box....

[Crazy Taco]

The annoyances with Vista can at least be fixed with unchecking a few boxes.

You know, I really wouldn't have much of a problem with Vista if it weren't such a bloated resource hog. For the most part, I like the new features, the new APIs I can use as a developer (WPF, WF, WCF), the new look, and believe it or not, I don't even mind UAC. I've actually been a fairly ardent defender of Vista on Slashdot until about a week ago, and now I'm finally starting to come back over to the pro-XP side, mainly due to performance.

My issue is this: I do not understand why Vista is so dramatically slower. It chews through resources like no ones business. Putting it on my PC was a giant performance hit, and my games run worse now than they did before just because of Vista using all my RAM. I'm having to add another couple gigabytes to my machine (taking my total to 3) to get about the same level of performance I got on XP with 1 gigabyte. Now, I know Vista has more eye candy, and if all that eye candy had to be created by the CPU as in past versions of Windows, then I would understand. But Vista requires and uses graphics cards and their hardware acceleration. Much of these animations that used to be done on the CPU are being offloaded to the graphics card (at least supposedly), and I've got a relatively new PCI-Express graphics card with 256 MB of memory. Considering the kind of 3rd games I was able to play with that card, I can't understand how Vista's menu opening animations can slam my performance so hard, unless they did no optimization at all. And if it isn't the new UI that is slowing my system to a crawl, what in the world is responsible for the massive performance degredation? XP probably had 95% of the features in Vista, so why is that extra 5% causing approximately 50% worth of additional bloat?! I just don't get it...

My other issue with the OS is the change in the networking menus... it takes many more clicks to get to the network interfaces screen from the desktop, and the "Repair..." option (which on XP was a disable and then re-enable shortcut that fixed my connection 95% of the time) which has been replaced with a thoroughly useless "Repair and Diagnosee" feature. Has anyone here ever had an issue that was successfully diagnosed by that mindless wizard? And if so, did it EVER successfully repair any problem it found? Still though, despite that massive networking step backwards, that still wasn't enough to turn me off from the new OS. It is the pervasive performance problems that do that. Maybe MinWin [zdnet.com] will save us when they create the next iteration of Windows...

Re:Poor comparison

[Scudsucker]

Sure, lets talk about it - I have yet to slap down some wingnut bullshit today. If you're talking about Ruby Ridge, that happened when Bush was still president, though that hasn't stopped right wing idiots from blaming the incident on Clinton. The ATF started investigating the Branch Dividians in 1992, long before Bill Clinton was sworn into office. They executed a search warrant when Clinton had been in office for 38 days. Janet Reno had been in office for an even shorter period of time when the FBI told her that the children in the compound were being molested, so she authorized the FBI to use force to take the compound, specifically forbidding the FBI from using pyrotechnic devices in the assault. The FBI, who was headed by William Sessions, a Reagan appointee, used them anyway. I wasn't able to find out who appointed Stephen Higgens, but he was the director of the ATF before Clinton took office.

And where would we be without wingnut hypocrisy? Much like the Republican stances on draft dodging vs military service and the seriousness of perjury, wingnuts have shown themselves to be exceptionally flexible when it comes to abusive law enforcement. During the 1992 election, Clinton was constantly attacked for his attempts to void the draft when he was running against the WWII vet George H. W. Bush. Funny how quickly the importance of military service went out the window when George W. Bush was running against Kery. Or when the *same* people who attacked Clinton for his supposed perjury called for a pardon for Scotter Libby's perjury *conviction*. So, my question is, where the fuck did all these civil libertarians disappear to when Bush started raping the 4th (searches), 5th(due process), 6th(speedy trial), and 8th(torture) Amendments?

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Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:benchmark?

[smilindog2000]

I wish I had mod points to up your funny score... For years in the late 80's and early 90's, I was dumb enough to call Microsoft customer support on occasion. It was a 100% waste of time, a truly unbelievable record of failed customer support. Then I discovered that the Dell customer support guys knew practically everything about Windows and it's popular applications, and they'd answer just about any technical question you had. I suspect they did more Microsoft support than Dell hardware support. All that ended when Dell fired their US based support staff and off-shored support to India. Now days, I just run Ubuntu. If I need support, I just use Google. I'm sure Windows users are also quite helpful on the web, but I have to say I absolutely love the community support hovering around Ubuntu.

I suspect that Vista may be the result of Microsoft's aging. In the 90's, when the core of XP was built (NT back then - I was a big fan), Microsoft was growing at an insane pace. Much of the best talent (the kind Google gets now days) went to Microsoft. With that kind of success, XP was a natural result. With the web bust, and with the best talent often going elsewhere, and with Bill Gates effectively retired, Vista may be the natural result. I'm not sure I'd hold my breath waiting for Vista to become as good as XP.

Re:benchmark?

[Macthorpe]

The windows indexer doesnt make searches fast and it runs constantly while chewing considerable resources.

The Vista indexer only runs on idle CPU cycles. It can't 'chew considerable resources' unless those resources are actually physically available, in which case there's surely no issue with using them? If you're not using your CPU, what's the issue with the OS making use of it for you to make things faster?

Yes, it does make searches faster, and saying otherwise only suggests that you haven't used it at all.

This is all by the by, because what you did was ask me to name one thing that Vista does that is useful in idle time and I've easily done that, but you're absolutely determined to pick fault with something so don't let me stop you.