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.'"
Default Browser (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Default Browser (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Default Browser (Score:5, Informative)
And any program which follows the guidelines will launch it, and not a hardcoded internet explorer.
Re:Default Browser (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Default Browser (Score:5, Interesting)
- Casual Firefox user clicks link from friend
- IE opens asking if it should be set as the default
- An IE user is reborn
I suppose this list replaces the ??? between "ignore system setting" and "Profit!"Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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That would be an odd setup (Score:5, Informative)
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public static function firefoxSux():boolean
{
return false;
}
Re:LOOK! LISTEN! HEED! (Score:4, Funny)
$browser = get_browser();
$name = $browser['browser'];
$version = $browser['version'];
if ($name == "MSIE") {
switch ($version) {
default:
$stillsucks = true;
break;
}
return $stillsucks;
}
while (ieSucks()) {
switchTo('Firefox');
}
Re:LOOK! LISTEN! HEED! (Score:5, Funny)
I totally agree
Internet Explorer is simply the best tool ever (for downloading Firefox) i wouldn't even think of using anything else
Wait... what was the question?
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Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
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OT Mod comment (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:OT Mod comment (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:OT Mod comment (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Default Browser (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, I use a little utility called Launchy [launchy.net] and whenever I want to start an app (not using the Start menu), I hit Alt-Space and type the first few letters and hit Return...
What's the RIGHT number? (Score:5, Interesting)
Firefox @ 18% [hitslink.com]
Firefox @ 40% [w3schools.com]
So which one is right?
Re:What's the RIGHT number? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Well, isn't that ironic? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Well, isn't that ironic? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Well, isn't that ironic? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Let us ignore commodity hardware for a second and think back a few years.
One would not buy a "PC" to run scientific applications or do any serious 3D modeling -- that is what Sun and SGI were for. Likewise, while one COULD generate documents on a an O2, just using Office or WordPerfect on a "PC" is
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Doing so makes whatever browser you're using for your normal browsing irrelevant.
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Re:Well, isn't that ironic? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Well, isn't that ironic? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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So the two reasons, Firefox is better, but users don't know. Those two things combined keep Microsoft in business.
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Re:Well, isn't that ironic? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Also, it's much easier to develop for firefox and then tweak for IE than vice versa.
Re:Well, isn't that ironic? (Score:4, Informative)
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).
Re:Well, isn't that ironic? (Score:4, Insightful)
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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:Well, isn't that ironic? (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
Re:Well, isn't that ironic? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:What's the RIGHT number? (Score:5, Informative)
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!
Re:What's the RIGHT number? (Score:4, Insightful)
If 0.01% of your potential customers cannot use your website
If a fifth of your potential customers cannot use your website... you fix it!
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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
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Actually, many of them probably would if they could, but the Americans with Disabilities Act makes it illegal to do so.
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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.
"According to NetApplications" -- bah! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Don't forget w3counter.
27.46%
w3schools of course is totally off, but w3counter on the other hand...
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defaults (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:defaults (Score:4, Informative)
ecommerce impact (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Re:ecommerce impact (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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.
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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
I'd guess all. Not that it needs to be. If the "goody" is something like check
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And for the record, there is nothing in GGGP's anecdote that has raised any red flags for me.
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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
installation (and 'since correctly changed'?) (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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
Doesn't seem entirely unreasonable.. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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Time to Celerate! (Score:2)
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)
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.
Default for How Long? (Score:4, Insightful)
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 really (Score:2)
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Percentage is meaningless (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Percentage is meaningless (Score:4, Funny)
Have they made it multi process yet on unix? (Score:3, Interesting)
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)
The most successful FOSS product? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
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MS given up? (Score:2)
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.
Slashdot browser usage distribution?? (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
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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Re:So ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Stop being so nitpicking. I am no total Firefox fan (have lot of issues in Ubuntu), but this is not a case to bash them.
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Re:So ... (Score:5, Informative)
It's especially innocuous here, because if you accidentally make Firefox your default, IE will simply ask you if you would like to make IT the default browser upon the next run (with the default again checked "yes").
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Most programs make themselves the "handler" for whatever file type they support by default upon install. Quicktime, MS Media Player, and Real all do this with media files. Every photo viewer I've ever installed does this with image files.
Which is a huge pain in a lot of cases. I haven't used Windows for a while, but I remember that clicking on a JPEG image was likely to open a completely random program because I had a dozen apps that were all capable of viewing JPEGs (even though only a couple could edit them) and whichever one had been updated most recently claimed the associations. It's fine to add yourself as a possible handler for a particular type of content, but becoming the default is just likely to piss users off.
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The difference between this and what Apple did is Apple made it look like it was a required security update and then installed an unwanted piece of software. This however is just a setting change that can be easily reverted. I certainly don't find it a problem when IE makes itself defau
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Odd that when I installed RC1, and ran it for the first time, all it did was ask if I wanted it to be the default, with the check box filled.... Uncheck it, and done.
This is what IE does every time you start it, until you go in and tell it not to check to see if it's the default.
At least Firefox only asks once.
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This behavior's pretty much expected of browsers at this point
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