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Firefox Appears Ready to Crack 20% Share Next Month
Posted by
timothy
on Tue Jun 03, 2008 10:17 AM
from the one-in-five dept.
from the one-in-five dept.
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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A Few Firefox 3 Followups 177 comments
An anonymous reader writes "Using data generated by the Mozilla Firefox download pledge page, the map on this blog post ranks countries, not by absolute number of pledges made, but rather on a per capita basis. This analysis yields some interesting conclusions about where open source is strongest and weakest."
Anonymous Warthog writes "That didn't take long. In a blog posting from the TippingPoint DVLabs security team (of Kraken and CanSecWest hacking contest fame), they confirmed that they reported a vulnerability in Firefox 3.0 to Mozilla a mere five hours after it was released. Additionally, there was a posting on the Full Disclosure security mailing list from someone that purports to have another vulnerability in the works as well. In the grand scheme of things, this probably means nothing to the general security of Firefox, but you can be sure the browser zealots on all sides will be watching carefully."
Finally, from reader Toreo asesino: "Microsoft have congratulated the Mozilla team by sending them their second cake (minus recipe) to Mozilla's Mountain View headquarters to congratulate them on shipping FireFox 3, which went live right on time last night." Congratulations are indeed due on both the browser and the release process — looks like the Firefox fever (despite some seriously taxed servers) resulted in more than 8 million downloads in 24 hours.
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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.
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Re:Well, isn't that ironic? (Score:5, Informative)
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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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Re:Well, isn't that ironic? (Score:5, Funny)
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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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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!
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"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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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.
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.
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.
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!)
Re:Default Browser (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Default Browser (Score:5, Informative)
And any program which follows the guidelines will launch it, and not a hardcoded internet explorer.
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Re:Default Browser (Score:5, Informative)
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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!"Parent
That would be an odd setup (Score:5, Informative)
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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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OT Mod comment (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:OT Mod comment (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:OT Mod comment (Score:5, Insightful)
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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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