Firefox 3 Already Rules the Roost

Barence writes in with a data point on Firefox 3 adoption: it's been available for 10 days, and already one site is seeing 55% of its Firefox-using visitors on version 3. "Microsoft still has three out of ten people running an old version of its browser more than 18 months after Internet Explorer 7 launched, while Firefox has converted more than half of its users to the latest version in just over a week. That should set a few alarm bells ringing in Redmond."

I've switched on day one and only one crash so far

[KPexEA]

I've only had 1 crash and that happend yesterday, after it crashed, a nice popup window asked if I wanted to tell Microsoft about it. I declined.
It got me thinking though, why don't they have their own "tell firefox" about the crash box what sends them the stack trace and page etc so they can debug these problems quicker.

Re:And the one site is

[Tubal-Cain]

Actually, it's www.pcpro.co.uk (TFA's site)

Typical user

[lazyDog86]

I think that I may have more of a typical user experience. I'm not a gamer so I have allowed my home computer to get hopelessly old (pardon me if I skip the embarrassing specs). At some point I actually did upgrade to IE7 and the monster was so fat I could grow old waiting for it to load on my ancient relic of a computer and quickly went back again.

No such issue with FF3. In fact I was excited about better memory management for the same reasons.

So Firefox makes you want to upgrade on old hardware where IE bloat strongly discourages it.

Re:I'm sure I'm not the only one

[Dojikami]

Why don't you use something like this http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE [tredosoft.com] ?

Re:File under "So what?"

[bigstrat2003]

That's also true. I'm a very happy IE7 user at home, but at work, I'm stuck with IE6, since our apps aren't tested with IE7, and thus IE7 is not kosher.

Another stat

[Stalus]

Just another statistic: if I have my dates right, it took IE7 2.5 months to reach 100 million users [msdn.com]. Firefox is currently at 23 million [mozilla.com] and given the current rate (1080/min), FF3 on pace to beat that - even without being distributed as part of an OS (granted, IE7 was only part of volume licensing at that date, and not retail sales).

Re:GMail Issues with FF3?

[ColdWetDog]

Seems like you're not alone [macfixit.com]. I'm holding off upgrading until it's sorted out a bit more. FF2 works just fine for me, thankyouverymuch.

Re:IE - It's not for savvy users anymore

[the_womble]

Everything is fine until they want to copy some text from the web page and paste it to a document (simliarly to what you can do with IE6 and Word) without losing the format...

I just copied your comment from FF2 to Open Office and I can see the formatting. Is this a problem specific to Xandros? Incidentally, copying from Konqueror to Open Office preserves formatting as well.

Re:Why alarm bells?

[sam_paris]

You clearly never used tamperdata, firebug, adblock, flashblock etc..

Re:Why alarm bells?

[Anonymous Coward]

It still doesn't have find as you type, thats a critical feature for most people that I know, including myself.

Re:I'm sure I'm not the only one

[Kickersny.com]

MultipleIEs is nice, but IE6 doesn't behave correctly. For whatever reason, it inherits some of IE7's HTML/CSS rendering and JS execution. I can't think of a specific example to test at the moment, but it's not the same as having separate installs.

Re:My own site stats

[hansamurai]

For my small site I'm at 42% for Firefox 2 and 17% for Firefox 3, everything else is basically IE and a small representative for Safari.

Re:Why alarm bells?

[Anonymous Coward]

IE7 actually starts a new thread for each tab before consolidating it into the parent thread. If you look close you can see a new window launch before it merges with the parent IE window. It's just a cheap workaround for tabs. FF, on the other hand, is natively designed to use one thread and one window.

Re:Why alarm bells?

[EvilSS]

To be fair IE7Pro (a plugin for IE7) adds most of those features. Now if only it could actually make it run well on Vista. You know, like every other current browser seems capable of doing without issue, out of the box.

Must be a very firefox friendly site

[prod-you]

I don't see these numbers at all with my site... Our IE to FX 52% to 40% Of the IE users 70% are ie7, 25% are ie6 Of the FX users close to 80% are 2.0.0.14, barely more than 10% are fx3. This is out of 600k+ visits

Re:Great

[brunascle]

Another BIG annoyance: 4chan has a browse button. Upon hitting browse, you can select a lolcat image, and hit OK. This populates a filename field right next to browse.

Hadnt noticed this before, but you're right. And it's not just 4chan, it's all file inputs. You also cant type at all in the text box part of it, you have to browse for it.

There was a Firefox vulnerability a while ago where you could use javascript to change the focused element of the form while you where typing into a textbox and quickly change back, so that 1 character at a time was added to the file input. Eventually, if you typed all of the right characters in the right order, you could fill up the file input with a valid file path, and when you hit submit it would be uploaded. I wonder if this new behavior is in response to that.

Re:Great

[cp.tar]

Actually, Mozilla did a fine job upsetting their loyal customers -- just look at the "AwesomeBar" which is anything but.

Well, it seems to me that it's just a very vocal minority.
And I know some previously very vocal people who have come to like the Awesome Bar very very much.
The tip one of them gave me was: purge your history before you upgrade, let Firefox learn from scratch.

I'd upgraded long before that, of course, but maybe there is something in this piece of advice.
I suspect, though, that Awesome Bar requires some adjustment, and maybe even breaking some habits of the mind.
For instance, you may have to stop thinking where you want to go, and instead start thinking of what you want to find.
I find it most useful, especially with all the bookmark tagging -- I often want to quickly find whatever tidbit I'd once bookmarked and now seems so relevant. The sites I attend regularly are not only bookmarked, but also in Speed Dial; I rarely need to type anything to access them.

The only addition I would like to see in Awesome Bar is Safari-like autocomplete -- with the default choice pre-loaded in the bar, so if I'm happy with it, I could simply press Enter.

Re:Why alarm bells?

[inode_buddha]

I've got mod points but I decided to reply in the hope of offering another solution. See, you really don't need ad blocking extensions when you have a decent hosts file. On *nix that would be /etc/hosts. I can recommend this one [someonewhocares.org] and I'm using it at the moment. Instructions are given for all major platforms. So your browser never even sees ads in the first place with something like that, since it works at a lower level in the software stack.

Re:Why alarm bells?

[omnipresentbob]

Golden, what else would it be? He lost his re-election bid in '92 to Clinton. Why wouldn't they? Firefly is the highest rated show in the history of television.

Re:Why alarm bells?

[init100]

Some reputable sites have mistakenly included ads that try to attack you. I prefer not loading ads instead of having to always be on edge so that I don't mistakenly go to an attack site. With AdBlock+ and NoScript, I'm pretty safe.

Re:Why alarm bells?

[IntlHarvester]

Yeah, but I'm talking more about Dick who surfs during his lunch break and uses whatever browser his IT manager tells him to use.

Harry has already gotten his IE7 through Windows Update. The IE6 holdouts are mostly corporate and maybe people with poorly pirated versions of XP.

Re:Why alarm bells?

[penguin_dance]

Ding, ding. Mod Parent up. S/He's right.

I work as a tech writer/web page coder consultant and mostly work at large companies (20K employees or more). I've yet to go to a company that has upgraded to IE7. I think the reason is two fold. First off they're using an older content managment system for their internet, so they'd have to upgrade that as well as make sure the current web pages still work (trust me they probably won't--mostly because they're coded to work well in IE6.) In fact, the company I work for presently is still using Windows 2000. And IE7 doesn't work with 2000. Most of these companies were going to skip over XP, thinking the next version out would be more stable and secure! Boy is that not going to happen! So for the near future I don't see them upgrading to anything. Yes, IE7 plays better with proper CSS, but it's another headache for coders because they have to code for IE6 as well.

I do have one big gripe with FF3--there's a bug where the tabs are not saved when you close the browser--even with the option set to such, it will open my home page, not the tabs I previously had open. So now I only have one browser upgraded until they get that fixed.

Re:Why alarm bells?

[atraintocry]

Windows users should be careful with a large hosts file, since it will slow down name resolution unless you disable the DNS client service.