Firefox 3 Already Rules the Roost 591
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."
IE - It's not for savvy users anymore (Score:5, Interesting)
Look, my father-in-law knows NOTHING about computing, but a LOT about using the Internet. We bought him a computer several years ago. His browser?
IE5, of course. Why? Because that's what was installed on the machine when we bought it.
The majority of people who THINK about what browser they use, use something other than IE. Firefox 3 is obviously a great leap forward for the Mozilla brand, and...well, there you go.
Re:I'm sure I'm not the only one (Score:5, Interesting)
I can't upgrade IE.
Since large bits of my job involve web interfaces to various systems, I have to make sure things still render right on IE 6. Since you can't run 6 and 7 on the same machine, I stay on 6. When I need to check 7 I ask a coworker who has upgraded to check it out.
Of course, I use FF for everything because IE 6 was so far behind. Seven has improvements, but I still find annoyances, and I'm happily used to FF.
Then again, I can't go to FF3 quite yet either. Needs to be a little bigger than 50% (at a tech heavy site). I'd like to see the numbers for Yahoo or Google.
My own site stats (Score:5, Interesting)
PS Sorry for the small sizes of the graphs. Gnumeric was having a bad day :(
IE needs to die, as in NOW. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Great (Score:1, Interesting)
Maybe you should complain to the right people next time.
You mean like the people who broke backwards compatibility and made needless API changes?
stats from a site for a non-technical audience (Score:5, Interesting)
In the last few months, I have been seeing an increase in firefox from maybe 10% in January to close to 45% today. Of that 45% of FF users, 23% are already using FF3. I think that is pretty impressive. By comparison, 52% use IE and the majority of them, 67% use IE7.
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:1, Interesting)
IE survives on inertia, not quality.
So does Firefox. IE7 and Firefox are basically equal in terms of features, unless you care about add-ons (and personally, I have yet to see one FF addon that excites me). Firefox used to be better than IE, mostly because it had tabs. Now IE has tabs, and the playing field is level again.
I don't think so (Score:1, Interesting)
Uh, I don't think so.
I'm looking at today's logs for a general purpose web site that I host and it's not that way at all.
For 2,564 unique visitors, with 84,000 requests, there were 2,803 requests from Firefox 2.x, and 714 requests from FireFox 3.0.
In contrast, IE 7.0 had 26,370 requests and IE 6.0 had 19,982.
Granted this is a relatively "small" sample, but it's all from today's traffic, and the site is not targeted at any particular demographic (power users, etc).
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:4, Interesting)
Come to think of it, that'll be a good comeback to the snarky "Oh, TFA has ads? I didn't notice, cause I use adblock" comments... "Oh, you use adblock? How quaint, I trained my mind to do that ages ago."
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:5, Interesting)
IE7 and Firefox are basically equal in terms of features, unless you care about add-ons (and personally, I have yet to see one FF addon.......
There is no way this is not a troll. If not, I am thoroughly dumbfounded how anyone can fail to find value in the pure nuggets of gold that are ff extensions.
Re:IE - It's not for savvy users anymore (Score:2, Interesting)
And that won't change until OEM companies start actually caring about the software they install as default on their computers.
Why don't we see SpyBot S&D installed by default? Why not Firefox (or any other browser other than IE for that matter)? Why don't we get Avast Home or AVG instead of a bloated Norton/McAffee Evaluation? CD Recorder Software? Office Utilities?
Capitalism: The best product is always the one from the highest bidder!
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:4, Interesting)
Adblock and NoScript aside (and with them shorter loading times) the spell checker is still a killer feature for me.
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:5, Interesting)
Do I need to continue?
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:3, Interesting)
Correlation is not causation, and I think there is some legitimate doubt as to whether advertising, subliminal or otherwise, really does work. I wish I weren't at work and could take the time to google it more thoroughly, but I was under the impression that current research showed advertising's primary effect is just to brand a product, and that the advsertising only gets you to recognize a brand, not to prefer it. In other words, Coca Cola's advertising, doesn't make you want more Coca cola, it just makes sure you don't forget that Coke exists.
I do recall watching a presentation online given by Google's CTO, in which the CTO demonstrates their use of eye-tracking equipment to analyse web pages. The subject didn't look once at any of the visual advertizing on a given web page, not once.
Corp vs home (Score:2, Interesting)
Those FF installs will all be personal users, the majority of IE users are on corp desktops. Need you look further.
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What are you talking about? (Score:3, Interesting)
So when you come across a site that has content that you enjoy, but also contains annoying ads
Then I have a decision... but I also have yet to have this happen. I have found a pretty high correlation between sites with terrible ads and sites with completely idiotic (in my view, at least) content.
That's quite a minority opinion, and yet you don't understand why people don't agree with you?
I understand it perfectly well. I just don't agree.
Re:And the one site is (Score:2, Interesting)
Even worse look at this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Present_to_1999 [wikipedia.org]
Q1 - 2000
IE - 79.09%
Netscape - 19.25%
FF - not launched
Opera - 0.13%
Safari - not launched
Team IE has 79.09%, Team Netscape/FF have 19.25%, Opera has 0.13%
Q1 - 2008
IE - 78.80%
Netscape - 0.06%
FF - 15.87%
Opera - 0.79%
Safari - 3.32%
Hmm, IE is doing about the same, Netscape/IE have lost about 17% of their market share (19.25% down to 15.87). Opera has gone from 0.13% to 0.79% and Safari has gone from nothing to 3.32%.
But here's the key thing, the total non IE share has stayed constant, the only change has really been people converting from Firefox to Safari, presumably as they bought Macs, since Safari has essentially no market share on Windows.
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:3, Interesting)
He didn't say people don't respond to ads, or even that *he* doesn't respond to ads. He said the subliminal thing is hogwash.
Coke ads try to associate Coke with a good time, with youth, and with friendship. What, exactly, would they stick in there "subliminally" that they aren't trying to create an association with...liminally?
Not to mention that every study of "subliminal" advertising has debunked it as BS. I'll take my psuedo-science on astrology.com; I'd rather not have to deal with it on /.
Re:Great (Score:3, Interesting)
I like the awesomebar. So now mozilla gets to choose between supporting me, or supporting you. Sucks to be you.
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:5, Interesting)
This doesn't really seem like it should be a mystery.
Tom is a computer guy. Some of his top visited sites are sourceforge, slashdot and his own LEGO Mindstorms blog. His home machine runs the latest nightly build of Linux and he can speak fluent hexadecimal. He uses Firefox because he detests the business practices of Microsoft, he appreciates the interface design and standards-compliance of FF, and understands the importance of supporting open source programming.
Harry is a guy who uses a computer. Some of his top visited sites are the Microsoft Start Page and Yahoo! Games. His home machine is a color television. He uses IE because, to him, the little "e" icon is what his trainer told him to click on to get on the internet.
Which if these folks, do you think, is going to have upgraded to the latest version of his web browser?
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:3, Interesting)
...it could require a fairly heavy overhaul for modern browsers.
That's absolutely correct. I'm currently working on a web application at the corporation I work for. It's been so badly coded (long before I arrived) that making it compatible with IE7 (not to mention Firefox or any other browsers) would be a nightmare that would probably take our development team a year to complete. And I'm not certain I entirely agree with you on the interface point. I think major interface changes between versions of a program are huge deterrents to upgrading for many people.
Re:IE is not a hyped-up product (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:2, Interesting)
Great analogy. Another point to add: Until Vista I do believe (maybe OEM XP SP2 but I haven't seen) Microsoft was still shipping Windows with IE 6. Ergo your Harry type person is still being given the older browser to start with their nice shiny new PC up until you *really can't get XP anymore.
IE7 is a whole WORLD better than IE6. I wish they'd make IE6 disappear altogether but I'll just have to wait until widespread extinction.
FF3 has found at least a few ways to disappoint me so far (install issues, occasional freeze ups on page load, old plugins broken and taking a while to get up to speed, annoying intercepts that I haven't figured out how to turn off yet) but I'm enjoying it not stealing all of my memory and bogging down my machine like FF2 did.