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Mozilla The Internet

Firefox Appears Ready to Crack 20% Share Next Month 295

CWmike writes "Mozilla's Firefox browser is on pace to hit the 20% market-share mark next month. Net Applications marketing VP Vince Vizzaccaro didn't pin all of Firefox's increase on a change last month to its update dialog; he did note the new approach. 'Mozilla has implemented a change in Firefox 3.0 [Release Candidate 1] where the installation now has a checkbox that defaults to making Firefox your default browser,' he explained. He refused to ding Mozilla for the practice. 'The option is clearly displayed and labeled, unlike Safari, which misleadingly labeled the Safari install as an "update" [but has] since correctly changed to an 'install.' However, this practice is a break from the traditional practice browsers employed of defaulting this option to off.'"
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Firefox Appears Ready to Crack 20% Share Next Month

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  • Default Browser (Score:3, Interesting)

    by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @10:22AM (#23637983)
    What does the "default browser" setting actually do? I always run the browser by clicking the "firefox" icon (or "internet explorer," if necessary). So I don't see when the "default browser" is invoked.
  • by _bug_ ( 112702 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @10:22AM (#23637989) Journal
    Firefox @ 16% [thecounter.com]
    Firefox @ 18% [hitslink.com]
    Firefox @ 40% [w3schools.com]

    So which one is right?
    • by Jellybob ( 597204 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @10:25AM (#23638043) Journal
      Depends which segment of internet users you're looking at.

      Certainly the w3schools is probably wildly off for the majority of internet users, since the people visiting the site are probably involved in web design or development, and are far more likely to be using a different web browser.
      • by wattrlz ( 1162603 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @10:30AM (#23638133)

        Why is it that web designers and developers - and I'm guilty of this too - almost always knowingly use a browser that most of their users won't? I guess it's not so much of a problem anymore, but back in the day developing in Firefox, Opera, or any browser that wasn't IE was a sure way to run into interesting and convoluted issues when your users views your page in IE and it renders all differently.

        • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

          by Warll ( 1211492 )
          It's because of IE that most web devs use Firefox. I mean how can one wilingfuly swear and condem IE to the depths of hell while still using it as your primary browser?
          • by Tubal-Cain ( 1289912 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @11:04AM (#23638575) Journal
            The same way many people can bash windows and continue to use it.
            • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

              by naasking ( 94116 )
              Which is perfectly reasonable when there isn't a viable, (read: largely compatible) alternative.
              • by bsDaemon ( 87307 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @11:48AM (#23639275)
                I know that GNU's Not UNIX -- but it was supposed to try and be. The real question is, why should Linux try and be "largely compatible" with Windows?

                If it were meant to be an "alternative" to windows, using your metric of "largely compatible," then it shouldn't have been a UNIX clone, it should have been a DOS/Win32 clone, shouldn't it have?

                Linux "fails" to take to the Desktop because it fails to be Windows. It fails to be Windows because it is not -- it's Unix. And that means it has a completely different underlying philosophy of how things should be done that goes back over 30 years.

                Then again, it seems that most people who "switch" to Linux, especially these days, do it because they want cheap/free windows, then complain when its not windows.

                This is like buying a Crysler 300M then complaining that its not as nice as the Bentley Brooklands that its a rip-off of.
              • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

                by AI0867 ( 868277 )
                Whereas firefox is even compatible with IE's bugs. (<blockquote> overflows and more)
          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by drodal ( 1285636 )
            Well, At time, microsoft was betting the farm on the fact that most people would NOT bother programming for anything BUT IE. Some people around me had that attitude. I didn't because I wouldn't help microsoft conquer the world. It was hard in the netscape 4.7 days though. So I would develop in netscape and test with IE. Yes it's a lot easier now. And yes Firebug helps too.
        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Why is it that web designers and developers - and I'm guilty of this too - almost always knowingly use a browser that most of their users won't?
          Who cares? As long as you test your work in the other browsers all's well.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Rydian ( 29123 )
          Any web designer or developer worth the paper their paychecks are written on should be testing their sites against all of the major browsers anyways.

          Doing so makes whatever browser you're using for your normal browsing irrelevant.
          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Thyamine ( 531612 )
            How does that make it irrelevant? I use a web browser outside of work related tasks all the time. Why would I not use the browser I preferred most? Certainly for testing a site, I'd expect to check using several browsers, but I don't see a need to visit /. using IE, then Firefox, then maybe Opera or Safari, and then back to IE.
        • by moderatorrater ( 1095745 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @10:45AM (#23638347)
          Because IE's a bitch to develop with. On a javascript error, it tells you the correct line number but it can't tell you which file it's in. It doesn't allow anywhere near the quality of plugins that firefox does, so it doesn't get firebug, greasemonkey, etc. Finally, IE doesn't comply with the standards very well, so it's a lot harder to get the site looking how you want it to. With firefox, when you make a change you can know fairly well what that change is going to do. When you're developing a site and making a lot of changes and tweaks, it's important to have a browser that you can work with. Converting the final product to something IE can render is a lot easier to working with IE the entire way.
          • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @11:26AM (#23638921)

            Mod parent up!

            IMHO Web Dev Toolbar and Firebug are the two biggest reasons for Firefox's adoption. Being able to poke about in the DOM and inspect individual elements, and to put breakpoints into JavaScript, are HUGE wins for developers. Even if your final site will never be looked at by any browser except IE, it's still faster to make it work in FF and then tweak it as necessary.

            To do decent debugging in IE, you have to install Visual Studio... ick.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by mgblst ( 80109 )
            And IE comes with the Operating System, so most people don't know any better.

            So the two reasons, Firefox is better, but users don't know. Those two things combined keep Microsoft in business.
          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            I haven't actually tried this yet, but I got all excited when I saw it: firebug lite [getfirebug.com]
        • by Jellybob ( 597204 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @10:49AM (#23638389) Journal
          It takes a fraction of the time needed to make a site that was built in Firefox to work in IE compared to making a site built in IE work with any real web browser.

          In most cases I can build the site using Firefox, knowing that'll it'll be 99% the same in Safari, Opera, and whatever other browsers you can think of. Then I just need an IE specific stylesheet (that'll be full of nasty hacks) to make everything look right in IE as well.

          And that's not taking into account the extensions that make life so much more pleasant. Firebug alone must have saved me several days of tracing bugs this year.
        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by D'Sphitz ( 699604 )
          Firebug.

          Also, it's much easier to develop for firefox and then tweak for IE than vice versa.
        • by Touvan ( 868256 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @11:16AM (#23638775)
          Firefox has Firebug. It's easier to develop in Firefox than anything else because of that one extension.

          Also, if it works in Firefox, it generally works in Safari and Opera, with minor changes.

          Also, it's easier to add the hacks into a page for IE that displays according to the standards, than it is to make changes to a page developed for IE, to work in all the various other browsers (quirks modes vary more widely across the browser spectrum than standards mode does, and generally, pages built in IE are built in quirks mode, since IE page devs don't tend to care about standards).

          Also, there are a lot of articles online about how to make IE behave in more standards compliant ways, and almost no articles about how to make all of the other browsers behave like IE (since it's largely impossible to get them all to behave the same way when you go at it from that direction).
        • by lattyware ( 934246 ) <gareth@lattyware.co.uk> on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @11:21AM (#23638849) Homepage Journal
          Because Firefox renders our code correctly. IE doesn't. Design for Firefox, you design to standards, design for IE, you design for IE.
        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Lumpy ( 12016 )
          Because web designers and developers are inherently lazy. you DO NOT DESIGN your pages for a SPECIFIC BROWSER. you design them to the standard and DO NOT USE functions that break the site across browsers.

          It's easy to do if you start off doing it right away when you start the design. Only very recently did I start using png files in websites based on the browser stats from my servers.

          IE6 is horribly broken and kept me from using png files. now that IE6 has dropped below FF on my server stats I now use P
        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Stooshie ( 993666 )

          Why is it that web designers and developers ... ... use a browser that most of their users won't?

          Because there are many many plugins to assist with debugging JavaScript, XHTML compliance, AJaX, Accessibility Issues and many other problems that occour.

          Anyway, you should be writing to standards, not browsers. Write to the standards first (FF much more compliant) then test in other less compliant browsers.

        • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @11:39AM (#23639141)
          This is why. [imageshack.us]
        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Pugwash69 ( 1134259 )
          I use Firefox because it's usually a better indicator of errors in the HTML, especially with a w3c validator add on enabled. At least any sites I built to work in Firefox and IE6 didn't break when IE7 came out.
    • by JustinOpinion ( 1246824 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @10:34AM (#23638171)
      It's impossible to pick one right number... because it depends on many things. For one thing, the demographics for different sites are different, and there is undoubtedly a correlation between personal interests and selection of web-browser.

      Wikipedia does a good job of summarizing the numbers. [wikipedia.org] An overall share of 15% to 30% seems reasonable.

      All that to say: I wouldn't worry too much about the exact numbers. What's more significant is the trends that can be seen across data-sets. Firefox had a rapid rise in popularity early on, but that leveled off. Rather than focus on an arbitrary threshold, like "breaks 20%!", I think the real story here is that Firefox usage continues to grow. Slowly but steadily the browser market is becoming more balanced.

      This is significant, because a few years back, there was a real browser monopoly. I remember using the Firefox pre-1.0 betas, and many sites didn't work (they were tailor-made for IE). Nowadays, the vast majority of sites render perfectly in Firefox.

      This is one of those cases where I think we won. Websites are more compliant than they once were. Alternate browsers are taken seriously. This is what we clamored for a few years ago... and we've largely achieved it!
      • by JasterBobaMereel ( 1102861 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @10:59AM (#23638509)
        It's Simple...

        If 0.01% of your potential customers cannot use your website ... you shrug and get on with your work

        If a fifth of your potential customers cannot use your website... you fix it!

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        It's impossible to pick one right number... because it depends on many things.

        Yep - so the bad news: some internet users will not even have heard of Mozilla, or Firefox. And the good news: among specific user groups, Firefox has reached 100% market share.

        This is one of those cases where I think we won. Websites are more compliant than they once were. Alternate browsers are taken seriously. This is what we clamored for a few years ago... and we've largely achieved it!

        Which (among others) is an important reason I use Firefox. Simply to let organisations & companies know that I prefer a web built on open & supported standards, rather than 'renders okay in your binary-blob-of-choice'. If I'm on a webstore, and I can't navigate, or see details for what's on sale because of some stupid "use

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by teh kurisu ( 701097 )

      I use Safari for day-to-day browsing, but tend to use Firefox for web development because of Firebug (I know Safari has something similar, but I haven't quite got round to using it). So I'm more likely to be using Firefox when I visit w3schools.

    • by schmiddy ( 599730 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @11:22AM (#23638865) Homepage Journal

      I have long distrusted these shady stats companies that provide these figures with absolutely no way to check their validity. I poked around a bit on netapplications.com, and although they don't actually tell you outright, I gather that their Firefox statistics come from corporate websites that they host(?). Needless to say, there might be a huge bias here (e.g. the types of companies in bed with NetApplications might be biased towards having a large influx of corporate users on IE, or something like that).

      So what to do about this lack of statistics? A couple months ago I wrote a bot that crawled webalizer statistics pages, harvested the results, loaded them into MySQL, and produced aggregate browser statistics by month. To make a long story short, I had difficulty getting enough Webalizer pages to make for a really good study (my bot was just scraping Google), but I showed around ~20% Firefox usage. Results here. [mspencer.net] If there's interest in this project, it could easily be revived.

    • http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php [w3counter.com]
      Don't forget w3counter.
      27.46%

      w3schools of course is totally off, but w3counter on the other hand...
  • defaults (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    However, this practice is a break from the traditional practice browsers employed of defaulting this option to off.

    Odd. Nearly every browser I've used warns me that it's not the default if I've set something else to be the default. I don't recall going into every single one of those and turning the "check if this browser is the default" option on.
  • ecommerce impact (Score:2, Interesting)

    by davejenkins ( 99111 )
    I've seen specific cases where, unfortunately, a programming team ignored the firefox angle when testing their code, and wrote in .NET specific goodies that only worked in IE.

    Sure enough, sales dipped almost 20% for a week. We ran the reports, and Firefox was accounting for 21% of site traffic (until that week, where it dropped off to almost nil). We quickly fixed the code, and firefox shot right back up to 21-22%.

    The demographics for this website are a little bit younger than the general population, so i
    • by moore.dustin ( 942289 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @12:32PM (#23639907) Homepage
      Your story is too convenient to be 100% true.

      1) No programming team would ignore FF unless directed to do so. You are telling me you got a group of programmers together and they all loved IE so much they were completely oblivious to FF?

      2) Some .NET goodies didnt work? Only some? If sales dipped like you said... then the whole system had to be hosed to get 0 sales from that demographic.

      3) You traffic would not drop to nil in a week, so that is your biggest "I am lying" thing. You are suggesting that all your past users accessed your site that week, saw it didnt work right, and decided to not come back ever again. None of the only check the site every couple weeks? I mean give me a break - this is obviously an exaggeratiom

      4) FF traffic shot back up in a week. (See #3)

      5) Your 'younger' crowd would have been apt to try your site in IE if it failed in FF... at least in lets say... 25% of the cases.

      The bottom line is this story is almost certainly partially fabricated and why? Do you not like Microsoft or maybe you just really like FF? I cannot believe you got modded up for blatant fanboyism.
      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        Well, I'm not the OP, but:

        1) No programming team would ignore FF unless directed to do so. You are telling me you got a group of programmers together and they all loved IE so much they were completely oblivious to FF?

        Never underestimate bad development: http://www.thedailywtf.com/ [thedailywtf.com].

        2) Some .NET goodies didnt work? Only some? If sales dipped like you said... then the whole system had to be hosed to get 0 sales from that demographic.

        I'd guess all. Not that it needs to be. If the "goody" is something like check
        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          Making quite a few reaches to defend him are we not? A defense like that almost proves that he was fibbing.
          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by steelfood ( 895457 )
            How does GP's defense of GGGP have any bearing on the issue at hand? I think if you had any reasonable replies to GP's counterarguments, you would've stated them, instead of resorting to ad hominem attacks on GP and GGGP.

            And for the record, there is nothing in GGGP's anecdote that has raised any red flags for me.
      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        No programming team would ignore FF unless directed to do so. You are telling me you got a group of programmers together and they all loved IE so much they were completely oblivious to FF?

        I *wish* this were true. A .NET vendor for my work did just that, and when we asked why Firefox didn't work they said they'd fix the issues for a very tidy sum, or they'd have to re-allocate time/money from more urgent tasks (we're a small org, the vendor was delivering customizations for a huge .NET product, I had no say in our requirements, and my supervisor has an irrational hate on for Firefox). Of course, they're now proceeding further developing against IE only, so it'll be that much more effort if/w

  • by Animaether ( 411575 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @10:28AM (#23638097) Journal
    "the installation now has a checkbox that defaults to making Firefox your default browser"

    It's an installation of a browser. Why would you -not-
    1. Offer the option to make it the default browser
    and
    2. Have that option pre-selected.

    I would expect a browser to do this. I would expect an image viewer to present me with the option to change image file associations and have those checked by default, a music player to associate MP3s, etc. -On installation-.

    I don't want this happening when you simply start the application (I'm looking at you, Outlook).

    "unlike Safari, which misleadingly labeled the Safari install as an "update"(1) [but has] since correctly changed to an 'install.'".
    Great, so the Apple update checking thingy now has two sections(2). One for actual updates, and one below that for -completely unrelated applications- to be peddled onto your machine. Still selected by default.

    No longer labeling it as an 'update' is a good step, but it's not the major gripe with this practice in the first place.

    1) http://i231.photobucket.com/albums/ee248/msanto/One-Offs%202008/AppleUpdateSafari.jpg [photobucket.com]
    2) http://i231.photobucket.com/albums/ee248/msanto/One-Offs%202008/AppleUpdateSafari2.jpg [photobucket.com]

    Please, please, please Mozilla... don't start peddling Thunderbird to Firefox users in the update checks; or if you do, make sure it's -not selected- by default.
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by heffrey ( 229704 )
      There's actually quite a lot to be said for asking certain questions when an app starts rather than at installation time.

      The questions you ask at installation time should be the ones that sysadmins can answer, like where do you want me to put the app and which components do you want to install.

      The questions you ask when a user starts the app (for the first time) are questions that the user's answer. An easy way to work out which category a particular choice falls in is whether or not the setting is per use
  • by Xocet_00 ( 635069 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @10:29AM (#23638107)
    I mean, most people that go out of their way to download a browser installer probably intend to use that browser as their default, whether it's Safari, Opera or Firefox.

    Picture this: Joe User downloads and installs Firefox, clicks right through the installer without reading and then starts clicking the little Firefox icon when he wants to surf the net. However, since the 'default' checkbox was blank by default, whenever his friend on MSN sends him a link, he clicks it and it opens in Internet Explorer. In my experience, a very large number of users will not notice that they're not in their usual browser for quite a while. They may navigate away from the linked site and do banking or other security sensitive stuff, but now they're in a browser that hasn't necessarily been keeping up with patches because it's rarely being run.

    I don't know, but it seems to be that it's safer to default that box to be checked. Users that keep multiple browsers for testing purposes already know to look for it, will remember to uncheck it, and are in the minority anyway.
    • What about users that need firefox for a single application (some ff-only website, say, or an intranet application). They wouldn't necessarily want to change their default browser.

      Firefox's old method, of not making itself the default browser on install but asking every time it's run unless told not to, was much better. It didn't trick users (which this new method will), and clearly gave them the choice re: default in a manner that all but the most impatient users would understand.
  • Be sure to pick up something from the Mozilla Store!

    http://store.mozilla.org/ [mozilla.org]

    I got me one of these: http://store.mozilla.org/product.php?code=MZ34014&catid=10 [mozilla.org]

    Wish I got paid for product placement in my comments...
  • 20% market share? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Fri13 ( 963421 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @10:40AM (#23638273)

    Mozilla Firefox already has much bigger market share on many countries. Ex. on Finland is over 40% and most ITC sites report Mozilla is over 50% market share owning browser. Many other EU country has over 30-40% market share and looks like only few big country has lower than those and where IE still dominates.

  • by mpapet ( 761907 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @10:42AM (#23638305) Homepage
    Am I the only desktop admin who has, in the recent past, seen the default browser switch back to IE after and update from Microsoft?

    I think it's been a while because I control when updates are applied and I don't remember a recent situation when that occurred.

    I have a feeling there may be another update coming to "fix" the default browser. More likely in a new and improved convoluted way involving a dialog box, but still....
  • Not on my web server it's not! And I even get a ton of foreign and 21 year old and under traffic, which is the likely Firefox user and I'm at like 12% Firefox. The rest of my stats are perfectly in line with average for OS and stuff so I know it's a good sampling. If they're calculating this using some really dumb method like downloads of the Firefox installer then obviously their logic is flawed.
  • by A beautiful mind ( 821714 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @10:51AM (#23638413)
    I happen to live in a country where Firefox usage broke 45% months ago and is the most popular browser, overtaking IE by 5-6%.

    I honestly don't care about marketshare after the point of no return has passed where web developers are forced to use the standard in order to make it work on multiple browsers.
  • by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @10:58AM (#23638485) Homepage
    I'm really getting tired of firefox crapping out on me (usually because of flash it has to be said) and because its running one big multi threaded app no matter how many windows you open or seperate instances you attempt to start, the whole lot disappear taking all my sessions with them. The current multi process option doesn't work. Have they added one yet that does because it really needs it if they can't sort out the reliability?

    Presumably they make it multi threaded so it fits into Windows limited process model but surely a multi process version can't be hard to achieve!
  • Maybe (Score:2, Interesting)

    Maybe with 20% market share I will start meeting web site designers who know that Microsoft is not "the internet", that there are other browsers and that the W3 sets the standards.
  • Would having 20% of the share of the browser market make Firefox the most successful *end user* FOSS?

    If so, I think it provides a loud message to old school free(dom) software developers who see crappy interfaces as only a small inconvenience that users SHOULD suck up and stop "whining" about.

    IMHO one of the reasons for the success of Firefox among Jane User is the easy of use and simple interface.
  • I think part of the reason is that MS seem to have given up their fight, a little, to become the browser of choice. They seem to be spending less time trying to create their own DOM structures etc.

    They are probably concentrating on developing new products and getting Windows V#@$a working rather than spending lots of developers time getting the minutiae of browser compliance working.

  • by BlackCreek ( 1004083 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @11:43AM (#23639187)
    Yo,Taco!

    Where, and when are we getting to see the browser usage distribution of Slashdot?

    I bet you could have one of those stories with more than 1000 posts by publishing it in the "Taco Blog", and linking to it.

    It would probably be very interesting to see how (if?) the distribution varies depending on section (games, linux, mac etc).

  • Already there. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by iplayfast ( 166447 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @11:47AM (#23639255)
    I run a fairly busy site [stockchase.com] that has the following stats:
    1. Internet Explorer 97,589 75.07%
    2. Firefox 26,383 20.30%
    3. Safari 4,844 3.73%
    4. Opera 500 0.38%
    5. Netscape 329 0.25%
    6. Mozilla 270 0.21%
    7. Konqueror 37 0.03%
    8. Camino 21 0.02%
    9. Mozilla Compatible Agent 6 > 0.00%
    10.
    Playstation 3 5 > 0.00%

    What is interesting to note is that this site is for stock investors so think middle aged, none-technical crowd.
    (Com-on Konqueror!)

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