Mozilla Usage Doubles in 9 Months 773
TheBadger writes "Thanks to the success of Firefox, Mozilla now appears to have 14.9% of the browser share, double that of 9 months ago. Let this be a lesson in complacency."
Byte your tongue.
Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics (Score:5, Funny)
er, um, Windowsupdate.microsoft.com????
I mean everybody goes there... Even linux geeks have to go there to get updates for their friends who are stuck on Windows and too virus-infected to get updates from via own computers.
Given that I've just proved that everybody goes there, I think that we could use that as a really good measure of what percentages of Web users use Mozilla vs IE.
No???
(( Asbestos suit, Asbestos suit .... where did I put my asbestos suit????? ))
Re:Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics (Score:5, Insightful)
I would guess that google is a little skewed, though. People not useing google are probably useing the default search in their browser, ie; IE. People visiting w3 are probably more net savvy than others, which would also skew the numbers.
I'd say a general interest site like ebay would give a close to accurate picture.
Where the firefox people came from (Score:5, Insightful)
It appears, then, that these are people with old machines who won't put up with an increasingly exploited browser but who can't run I.E. 6... either from a power standpoint or an access standpoint. Windows 98 usage only dropped 3% in that time, so nearly all of the converts must be running the older platform.
I'd be interested to see statistics correlating the two, and whether or not the people visiting w3 skew towards having older computers than the average surfers.
Either way the conclusion is clear: Microsoft is losing people at the tail end of their product line, because they refuse to offer a low-power, efficient alternative for older platforms.
Re:Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics (Score:4, Interesting)
Forget it - we can't win.
Re:Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics (Score:3)
Actually that's word-for-word exactly what you said.
But anyway, I think you misunderstand what statistics are. When you want some data, like say -- off the top of my head -- browser marketshare, nobody expects every Internet-connected user to be included in the data. Obviously that'd give the most accurate result, but it's so ridiculously impractical that there's no point in even discussing it.
So instead one must find a source from which one can obtain a reasonably repr
Re:Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics (Score:4, Insightful)
Depending if you are counting unique users or hits. I might hit Google 10-20 a day -- while the average person maybe only runs 1-2 searches a week. So Google would be highly biased towards people doing research, or trying to find answers to technical questions.
I think you'd probably get the best stats from a general interest news site or perhaps mail.yahoo.com.
Re:Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics (Score:3, Interesting)
You might get more representative samples from a company who gives a **** about web standards and doesn't write crappy code that doesn't work unless you're using IE. Numerous Yahoo-related web sites, including BT Yahoo's webmail, fall/fell into that category for a very long time.
Re:Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Did you believe the parent? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you're in denial.
Re:Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics (Score:3, Insightful)
Ironically, I've just been told my happy little Firefox/Thunderbird combo is under threat at work. I'll probably have to give up Thunderbird for Outlook so I can use Exchange Server, and Firefox "may not be compatible with the corporate intranet". That's what happens when you get a small company full of smart people bought out by an American megacorp. :-(
Re:Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics (Score:4, Interesting)
everything displays the same as IE.
Re:Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics (Score:4, Insightful)
Now they wonder why the help desk is inundated with spyware calls.
Funny thing is the corporate mailserver is still IMAP. People who know use Firefox/Thunderbird and just keep quiet about it, but who knows how long that will last - more and more parts of the intranet are requiring IE, and I'm sure Exchange isn't that far off...
Re:Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics (Score:4, Interesting)
Aside from this, it was intentional for ie to accept broken html, coupled with ms programs designed to write broken html (frontpage, word) that would intentionally not display in netscape, so they could point at netscape and say "look! its broken" and the average user wouldn't know the truth.
Re:Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't remove IE, I just tell them the "e" is what messed up their computer and that the firefox icon is the new link to the internet.
Re:Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually 9.274 or 10% (like in your case) isn't very far off from 15%.
Re:Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics (Score:5, Insightful)
Not far off? It's 50% off...
(ie to go from a market share of 10% to 15%, you have to increase your install base by 50% - that's a pretty big leap)
No surprise (Score:5, Informative)
NationStates.net (Score:5, Informative)
www.nationstates.net
Re:NationStates.net (Score:4, Interesting)
BTW, Great game and great book. Innovative marketing idea, too.
Re:Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics (Score:3, Informative)
Here are some real stats from a large entertainment company website for the month of August.
No. 1 includes all Microsoft Browsers. IE4 - 6 The AOL users are also using microsoft browsers so that 94.5% of users using IE.
Now I wish this wasn't the case but it's true.
Re:Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics (Score:4, Insightful)
Or did you think that geeks would be visiting some large entertainment company's website (unless it was pr0n, of course)
Does the site require MSIE? (Score:4, Insightful)
Any of this would slant the stats.
Re:Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics (Score:5, Informative)
Here's the stats for a financial services website, which while doesn't attract traffic such as the likes of Schwab, is visited enough to be a good sampling:
Anomolies are present due to better browser detection implemented mid 2004. This particular site put out a couple of articles (out of many hundreds of other articles on its core topic, financial services) which suggested a browser switch to clients.
Apparently several paragraphs of advocacy make a difference.
Re:Read the page (Score:5, Informative)
is the rest of the parent's quote.
Re:Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Browser usage among mountain bikers and Mac use (Score:3, Interesting)
Safari wrt user-agent strings (Score:3, Interesting)
Indeed, but Safari is a wily beast. Its default is "Mozilla/5.0":
from http://developer.apple.com/internet/safari/safari_ faq.html#anchor2 [apple.com]
My
In a perfect world... (Score:3, Insightful)
How much longer will people vote for politicians who let corporations shit all over consumers in the name of profit?
Re:In a perfect world... (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you mean 'web development tools' or 'browsers'? I think the majority of people would instead benefit from the latter. In either case, I would argue that there is no 100% standards compliant browser or web development system, so forcing MS in either scenario would be a touch extreme.
Re:In a perfect world... (Score:3, Interesting)
I just find it amazing that tools like frontpage output HTML looking code that isn't true HTML. Non-IE browsers will choke and render the page so poorly that it's un
Re:In a perfect world... (Score:3)
Re:In a perfect world... (Score:4, Insightful)
No, IE bears the same relationship to computer viruses and spyware that dirty needles do to AIDS. It's a kind of Typhod Mary of computer software, especially in its incarnation as the Microsoft HTML control that Outlook uses to display email.
I'm not kidding. I banned IE and all other mail and internet programs that use the MS HTML control about seven years ago, after they integrated IE and the desktop. I could see that this was an incredibly stupid move back then... I didn't know what the results would be, but I knew they would be bad. After Melissa hit, I figured Microsoft would voluntarily undo the damage[1]. After a few years I realised they didn't care, that IE would never be acceptable, and they were probably criminally negligent for using this design.
Seven years no, and we had ZERO large scale virus problems despite not using any standard antivirus software at all for years. It wasn't until our parent company dcided to merge our networks and force us to switch back to IE that we started getting real virus and spyware problems.
So, yes, really, IE is worse than some horrible virus. You don't even have to use IE or Outlook to get all the resulting spam[2] and viruses flooding your mail server. This is like a virus that makes their victims actively seek out uninfected strangers and try to sell them viagra and vacation timeshares.
[1] Boy, was I naive, I really did believe they were just unaware of the problems they were courting and really cares about security: remember, they'd just released NT and it actually had a good security model.
[2] Spammers are using viruses to take over people's computers and send spam for them.
Re:In a perfect world... (Score:3, Interesting)
After having to go over an idiot user's head to get him to stop using IE and Outlook, after he argued with me even as I was cleaning the trojans and spyware out of his computer that were there as a direct result of his decision to ignore the company's ban on IE and Outlook, after I spent half an afternoon
Re:In a perfect world... (Score:4, Funny)
> download it?
wget --help
Rainer
Is This True? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Is This True? (Score:5, Informative)
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.3; Linux) (KHTML, like Gecko)
it's probably just being included in the Mozilla stats.
I wish the browser id tag had never been put in. Devs would have no choice but to write to the standard.
Re:Is This True? (Score:4, Informative)
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)"
that's probably not how it works at all.
Or are you saying that IE is inlcuded in the Mozilla stats too?
IE6 went down and IE5 went up? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:IE6 went down and IE5 went up? (Score:5, Insightful)
Biased source sorry (Score:5, Informative)
Personally, I keep an eye on thecounter.com [thecounter.com] to see how Mozilla's market share is doing. It's certainly more realistic than the linked article statistics page. Pity Google removed browser stats from the zeitgeist [google.com] page.
Bias Defined. (Score:4, Insightful)
Just one thing, w3schools.com is a site for people who write websites, so they'd naturally have a much higher percentage of non-IE browsers than the more general browsing population.
Sure, people with the most basic web knowledge know to avoid IE. If you filter out people with a clue you are left with 99.999% winblows users. I'm happy the cluefull are migrating in increasing numbers. It shows that whatever real and perceived barriers there are to using non M$ software are going away.
Do you suggest we get all our stats from the clueless and deluded? Perhaps we should just get the facts from Bill Gates.
Oh yeah, this is what they claim about their study:
The statistics above are extracted from W3Schools' log-files, but we are also monitoring other sources around the Internet to assure the quality of these figures.
Re:Biased source sorry (Score:4, Insightful)
For what it's worth, my web server is used to show my avatar on the megatokyo forums, and that accounts for ~95% of my site hits. According to those stats Gecko has 50%, IE has 40% and others have 10%. Again, the stats you get really depend where you look for them...
Re:Biased source sorry (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps so. I only stated that it's more realistic than w3schools's stats, if you're looking for the "general" market share. Any increase is a good increase, but as one of the first posters to this story said, it's not at 15% yet.
Hopefully 1.0PR (preview release) is only days away
The interesting thing is.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The interesting thing is.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Read your own chart, duh. (Score:5, Informative)
So, in this case, complacency is working fine.
Note the flux. (Score:4, Insightful)
So you assume the IE6 number didn't change, but people upgrade from IE5 straight to Mozilla?
Sorry, but this poll doesn't include "transition stats". What I imagine is that about the same number of people run Windows Update and have IE6 installed as a result (or get XP instead of 98SE) as those who change from IE6 to Mozilla. That should be the reason why the IE6 stats don't change much - it gains from one side just as much as it loses from the other, but it gains and loses a lot simultaneously.
mmmh, not so fast (Score:3, Interesting)
"Web Browsers Used to Access Google" graphic in google montlhy Zeitgeist [google.com] shows an improvement as well, but not as big as mentioned
ehi! why in july report [google.com] the graphic is not there any more???
I'm sure it varies widely from site to sit, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
About a year ago hits from IE were at about 90%.
400-500 hits a day? (Score:4, Funny)
400-500 hits a day, ehh?
Sounds like a:
M A R I J U A N A site to me
Sorry, lost my mind for a moment, please mod me down to preserve this fine news site from my abusive post.
Here's stats from another source (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat.htm [upsdell.com]
MS not complacent...just looking for revenue (Score:3, Interesting)
and THAT is why MS is "so great" for the software industry! [at least THEIR reasoning]
the other 85% (Score:5, Funny)
Re:More cooked numbers (Score:5, Funny)
Re:the other 85% (Score:5, Funny)
Security being mentioned on the news perhaps? (Score:5, Insightful)
The news over last summer with banking information being stolen convinced my old man to ask my about alternative browsers. I burned him a cd with firefox since the New York times mentioned it.
My gf uses firefox on her old pc because she is worried about security after the scare this summer and due to the fact its an older machine and firefox is snappy on old hardware.
People prefer IE but if something like online trading and banking flaws get involved all of the sudden switching may not be such a bad idea.
Something to note (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm more interested in those OS stats. (Score:5, Interesting)
And it shows a fairly steady (if slow) increase.
Those stats certainly dont reflect my collections (Score:3, Interesting)
Firefox in odd places (Score:3, Interesting)
Browser stats for seifried.org (Score:5, Informative)
slashdot vs. non-slashdot hits on my site (Score:5, Interesting)
36.97%=Mozilla/5.0 ; 33.65%=MSIE 6.0 ; 6.45%=Pompos/1.3 http://dir.com/pompos.html ; 6.40%=msnbot/0.11 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm) ; 2.71%=Opera 7.5 ; 2.46%=Yahoo! Slurp ; 2.41%=Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html) ; 1.93%=psbot/0.1 (+http://www.picsearch.com/bot.html) ; 1.49%=MSIE 5.5 ; 0.87%=Konqueror/3.2 ; 0.80%=Mozilla/3.01 (compatible;) ; 0.56%=Konqueror/3.3 ; 0.50%=MSIE 5.0 ; 0.43%=Konqueror/3.1 ; 0.41%=Opera 7.2
Here are the more normal Aug. results with about 0% hits coming from slashdot:
46.89%=MSIE 6.0 ; 16.82%=Mozilla/5.0 ; 7.92%=msnbot/0.11 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm) ; 6.50%=Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html) ; 3.55%=Ask Jeeves/Teoma)" ; 3.14%=MSIE 5.0 ; 2.67%=Pompos/1.3 http://dir.com/pompos.html ; 1.86%=MSIE 5.5 ; 1.82%=psbot/0.1 (+http://www.picsearch.com/bot.html) ; 1.27%=HTTrack 3.0 ; 1.05%=Yahoo! Slurp ; 0.93%=Mozilla/3.01 (compatible;) ; 0.88%=Opera 7.5
Unfair! (Score:5, Funny)
Or not.
Don't go by W3Schools Stats (Score:5, Interesting)
Most people who visit w3schools.com are not the average user, they are developers: early adopters. It would take at least another 9 months for global Mozilla usage to reach half these levels.
I prefer to go by the stats published by OneStat.com [onestat.com] in their Pressbox [onestat.com].
However, I do think the rest of the year will bring a significant change in browser usage [fylo.net].
Schools and companies (Score:5, Interesting)
On that note... (Score:5, Interesting)
I was happy using Mozilla, but since I switched to Firefox... I've been thrilled.
It flies, it has some nice plugins (I recommend FTPsync and Browser Agent switching for those annoying sites) and my experience has been nothing but great.
Just because I occassionally switch my user agent string doesn't mean I don't complain. I recently submitted a complaint to yahooligans (A yahoo kids oreiented site).
The stats linked to are useless (Score:5, Interesting)
For a comparison as to how useless those statistics are, I checked out the stats for the most popular site tracked by NedStatBasic. It's startpagina.nl with about 2.8 million pageviews per day.
Here are the browser stats:
IE 5/6: 96.7%
Mozilla: 2.7%
Other: 0.6%
You can see the stats here:
http://www.nedstatbasic.net/s?tab=1&link=5&id=7
Re:The stats linked to are useless (Score:4, Informative)
If you look at the other 9 sites on NedStat's top 10, there is only one site with Mozilla at 13%. The rest show IE in the mid ninties.
It's unfortunate there is no overall source as to what browser is most popular. However, overall it seems that most sites show IE as in the mid 90s as far as percentages are concerned.
Don't get me wrong, I WANT Firefox to gain ground, and I use Firefox myself, both on Linux and Windows. However the claims that it's captured nearly 15% of the market are silly.
Temporary Speedbump (Score:4, Insightful)
* do all the stuff mozilla does
* works with dot net better
* never gets dull, and can slice a tomato perfectly after trimming 4" off your car's muffler
* is a free download
* but wait... there's more (tm) ms will throw in MR. Paperclip browsing buddie at no cost to you.
I switched BACK from Firefox to IE (Score:4, Insightful)
The most interesting thing is that slashdot is one of the sites it has the most trouble with. Take a look at the screenshot [robert.to] on this page! Most of the time it will render /. like that until I hit reload and that will fix it.
I've seen this behavior on Mac, Windows, and Linux. And there's a bug posted on it in the Firefox bug database. What perplexes me is why the /. folks with the necessary skills haven't fixed this problem yet!
Re:I switched BACK from Firefox to IE (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, I see what you mean - clicking Reload is such a hassle!
Re:I switched BACK from Firefox to IE (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I switched BACK from Firefox to IE (Score:5, Informative)
What that bug is (Score:5, Informative)
(Courtesy of another Slashdotter in the know.)
I'm not sure what the schedule is on rolling in the fix.
Re:I switched BACK from Firefox to IE (Score:5, Informative)
I eventually had to switch to the trunk build, which has incorporated a fix for it (although is more of a work-in-progress than the branch build, in general). For those who only encounter it rarely, or aren't willing to bother with the trunk builds, the most reliable way I've found of "fixing" the page is to quickly increase or decrease text size (CTRL++/-). Reloading doesn't always work.
An alternate view... (Score:3, Interesting)
It would be interesting to see how
U.S Patent Office and IE (Score:4, Informative)
This little-noticed law really makes me mad and feel like crying--why a government agency can be so stupid.
Basically, when you file a patent application, if the Patent Office thinks that your invention is not patentable because it is not novel or nonobvious, it will send you copies of prior art patents so you can rebut their rejection.
Now the Patent Office has changed its policy and will not send you those hard copies. Instead, it requires you to download those prior art reference on-line.
Under ordinary circumstances, this would not pose any problem, except that we are dealing with one of the most stupid government agencies in the history of mankind. The United States Patent Office, without much notice, now requires that, in order to download those references, you must register with the Patent Office, then the Patent Office will install a program ON YOUR MACHINE WHICH MUST BE RUNNING MICROSOFT INTERNET EXPLORER UNDER MICROSOFT WINDOWS to allow you to communicate with the Patent Office before you can download those prior art patents that our government must furnish you as a matter of our constitution right and as part of the filing fees paid to the Patent Office.
Thus, basically it has boiled down to this stupid law: if you want to receive a patent, you are now REQUIRED BY LAW to have a machine with Microsoft Windows running Internet Explorer in your office.
In other words, in order to exercise your constitutional rights, you must have a machine that runs Microsoft Windows and you must set Microsoft Internet Explorer as your default browser.
What kind of stupid government agency is this? I know many banks used to have the same requirement (i.e., using Microsoft IE running in Microsoft Windows), but they have got rid of this stupid policy because they have to compete in order to survive.
The United States Patent and Trademark can implement and insist such a stupid policy because it doesn't have to compete. But what about those 4000+ patent attorneys? How come all of them are so quiet? Are all of them idiots?
Even our HomeLand Security Department has changed its Microsoft-only policy. It appears that our Patent and Trademark Office is the only government agency in the whole world that requires its users to use Microsoft Windows. Unlike Homeland Security Department, the U.S. Patent Office has to account to no one!
Microsoft survives and propers exactly because our government agencies are unafraid to abuse their power and unashamed of being idiots.
Re:U.S Patent Office and IE (Score:5, Informative)
But very few are aware that U.S. Patent Office is violating our constitutional right by promulgating and enforcing a Microsoft-IE-only policy.
I certainly am unaware of that. Which constitutional right? Can you point to me where in the US Constitution it says that you have a right to recive patent documents on-line in whatever format you wish?
[bla, bla, indignation..] The United States Patent Office, without much notice, now requires that, in order to download those references, you must register with the Patent Office, then the Patent Office will install a program ON YOUR MACHINE WHICH MUST BE RUNNING MICROSOFT INTERNET EXPLORER UNDER MICROSOFT WINDOWS to allow you to communicate with the Patent Office before you can download those prior art patents that our government must furnish you as a matter of our constitution right and as part of the filing fees paid to the Patent Office.
This is all bullshit. Please point me to where the USPTO requires you to run IE. And even if IE was required telephone, mail or fax [uspto.gov] ordering is clearly available.
Thus, basically it has boiled down to this stupid law: if you want to receive a patent, you are now REQUIRED BY LAW to have a machine with Microsoft Windows running Internet Explorer in your office.
Pure bullshit. What law? Which US Federal Code? The policy of a government office isn't a law. Not that I can find any such policy either.
In other words, in order to exercise your constitutional rights, you must have a machine that runs Microsoft Windows and you must set Microsoft Internet Explorer as your default browser.
Again no hint as to which constitutional rights you are talking about. Or what policy.
The United States Patent and Trademark can implement and insist such a stupid policy because it doesn't have to compete. But what about those 4000+ patent attorneys? How come all of them are so quiet? Are all of them idiots?
Or, just perhaps, this policy doesn't EXIST?
My 10 Year Old Son (Score:4, Interesting)
Our own stats. (Score:5, Informative)
Although I think this is great, the statistics from some servers that I manage and run show different and it depends greatly on the type of site. For example this link to a stats report for a site that was Slashdotted [psand.net] shows Firefox users as 26.8% of visitors and Mozilla 16.7%, a grand total of 43.5% against IE, which got 40.7%. All I can say here is well done Slashdotters for using a decent, and probably the best browser - it's excellent.
Looking at another site, not slashdotted, of general interest for all sorts of users, the stats reveal 9.1% Firefox and 5.4% Mozilla, which comes to 14.5% - a figure very close to that posted in the article. Good.
However, it's very different when moving to a commercial site selling a commerical product. For example, on site reveals just 1.6% Mozilla & Firefox users against 96.6% IE users and another, selling Jazz and Latino records, has 4% Mozilla against 87.9% IE.
I reckon that it depends greatly upon who your audience is as to what statistics you extrapolate.
Neutral sites are at about 3% Gecko... (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure enough, the Gecko-using browsers have crept up in recent months, but nothing earth-shattering - what started off as around 2.1% 6 months ago is now 3.2%. Perhaps more interesting is to note that home users are taking up Gecko browsers in a big way (now seeing almost 5% Gecko at the weekends), but on workdays, that slips to back down to under 3%.
Conclusion: Gecko browser usage is increasing on the average site, but only by about 0.2% a month (will take 3 years to reach 10%, which sounds about right).
Re:Note (Score:5, Funny)
Whatever. Close enough.
Re:Note (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I for one welcome... (Score:5, Funny)
from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15
Re:complacency? (Score:3, Insightful)
How long did it take them to get that? Microsoft has been complacent for several years, doing nothing to advance their browser. Mozilla starts to gain ground and then they do something. I'd say complacency fits perfect with what they were doing with IE until just a few months ago.
Re:14% marketshare at w3schools.com (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Opera? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just browsing the features listed on the Opera page I don't see much that firefox doesn't offer natively or by installing an extension, so I see no real reason to switch and a few good resons not to.
Re:Opera? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Firefox (Score:3, Funny)
Your name could be a candidate for the next firefox release.