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Mozilla The Internet

Firefox Browser On An Upward Trend 670

Posted by timothy from the expected-but-still-nice dept.
carbolic writes "The Firefox browser is ramping up as fast as Internet Explorer is ramping down. According to these stats posted from the Engadget logfiles, IE has dropped to 57% of all browsers used to visit the site, while Firefox is up to an amazing 18%! The Engadget stats reflect an early-adopter consumer crowd and backing those up, this chart from w3schools shows the same trend. I guess CERT's recommendation and a mature product are finally paying off for the Mozilla project. Less than 2 years ago, IE had a 95% lock on the market. Anyone else see a trend here?"
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Firefox Browser On An Upward Trend More

Firefox Browser On An Upward Trend

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  • Hmmmm (Score:3, Insightful)

    by squall14716 ( 734306 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @06:31AM (#10254771)
    95% to 57% on one site? Trend? Where?

    • self fullfilling prophecy (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @06:49AM (#10254896)
      The problem is, Firefox people will go read the site, there by pushing the points up more.

      Most IE users (that I know) are pretty much ignorant when it comes to browsers.

    • Re:Hmmmm (Score:5, Interesting)

      by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @06:53AM (#10254914)
      Yes, but now try the same with a mainstream site. The figure is still most likely 90% IE and 10% Mozilla, Firefox, Safari + others.


      What I find funny are those sites that throw you off if you don't have IE - often when the site works fine using a faked user agent. They must have a lot of money to burn if they can turn away 10% of their revenue just for the sake of fixing a few (or no) broken pages.

      • Re:Hmmmm (Score:5, Informative)

        by fymidos ( 512362 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @07:14AM (#10255039) Journal
        A trend is not about absolute numbers.
        Another site may have 90% Explorer and 4% firefox.
        If last year the figures were 92% vs 2%, then the trend is the same as w3schools (where firefox usage jumped from 8% -> 18 %)

        • Re:Hmmmm (Score:4, Interesting)

          by ViolentGreen ( 704134 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @08:46AM (#10255662)
          What would be interesting to me would be to see the trend of IE browsers on Mozilla's site over the past six months or so. If it shows an increasing or even steady trend, then it is excellent news for the Mozilla folks.

          • Re:Hmmmm (Score:4, Interesting)

            by dspacemonkey ( 776615 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @09:07AM (#10255832) Homepage
            You mean an 'entrance' in the weblog as IE, followed by an 'exit' a few minutes later as Firefox ;o)

            ok...ok - I know it wouldn't work like that, but it's a nice thought.
            They could go through their logs looking for IE hits on the firefox download page, followed by a firefox hit on the default after install (I forget which URL the fox sends you to straight after install) page. The same IP, within 5mins or so of each other = 1 new user

            ...or someone who has had to re-install...again...after killing their PC...again...

      • Re:Hmmmm (Score:5, Informative)

        by bunratty ( 545641 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @07:28AM (#10255127)
        How about Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]: 80% IE, 20% Mozilla & company [wikipedia.org].

      • Re:Hmmmm (Score:4, Informative)

        by kaden ( 535652 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @08:17AM (#10255437)
        For what it's worth, you can see the same trend emerging in the logs of Fark [fark.com]. I don't know if that qualifies as mainstream, but I think it gets a wider variety of users than /. or any of the above referenced sites.

        As you can see, about 25% of people viewing Fark use Firefox/Mozilla, and 33% use a non-IE browser. I can tell you that just 3 months ago the total number of non-IE browers was around 20%. The numbers might actually be low, because Fark has a high number of people who read from work, where they're often forced to use IE.

        In my opinion, FireFox has a "killer" feature in that it (so far) isn't really vulnerable to many exploits or malware. I call it a "killer" feature because users, regardless of skill level, will use FireFox over IE simply because of security, and you already see it happening.

        • Re:Hmmmm (Score:5, Interesting)

          by bonkedproducer ( 715249 ) <paul@@@paulcouture...com> on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @08:27AM (#10255515) Homepage Journal
          Another example that is visited by few geeks (and fewer people with live brain cells) is www.wtfpeople.com - they've noticed the trend in Firefox growth enough that they changed their header graphic from "FUCK ALL BROWSERS EXCEPT INTERNET EXPLORER" to "FUCK ALL BROWSERS EXCEPT THOSE THAT WORK" - and they've never changed the code at all, just heard enough from visitors that they checked it out for themselves.

    • Re:Hmmmm (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @06:55AM (#10254927)
      I also run one site, but mine isn't geared towards techheads. (Blood conservation for hospital staff.) Here's this months stats so far:

      MSIE 6.0: 86%
      MSIE 5.5: 3%
      MSIE 5.23: 1.2%
      MSIE 5.01: 0.9%
      MSIE 5.0: 1.8%
      Netscape 7.2: 0.7%
      Netscape 7.1: 0.7%
      Mozilla: 2.5%
      Opera: 2%
      Unknown: 0.3%
      Konqueror: 0.1%
      (Missing: 0.8%)

      I'm waiting for Mozilla to grow. Then again, my site still uses frames, so why am I complaining?

      Sum of IE Dropped ~2% since previous months where it hovered around 94.7%+-0.3. Mozilla numbers remain unchanged from previous months; Opera took the space it seems. Oh well.

    • Re:Hmmmm (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Mick Ohrberg ( 744441 ) <mick.ohrberg@gma i l . c om> on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @08:15AM (#10255414) Homepage Journal
      Just goes to show you - all you need to do to defeat Microsoft is to release something better. And release it for free.

  • Firefox desserves this... (Score:3, Informative)

    by mirko ( 198274 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @06:32AM (#10254776) Journal
    It's just a pity that 1.0PR (as announced yesterday) doesn't seem to like all the add-ons and themes it liked so much until 0.9

    • Re:Firefox desserves this... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ack154 ( 591432 ) * on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @06:36AM (#10254802)
      But you have to give the developers time to update their extensions/themes for the new release. Yesterday, the only one of mine that worked was AdBlock (the best one) and then today there was already an update for FoxyTunes - so the work is getting done, you just have to be patient. :)
      • Yesterday, the only one of mine that worked was AdBlock (the best one) and then today there was already an update for FoxyTunes

        Well it would be nice if Firefox were a polite citizen in window manager land too. It totally ignores the window manager settings on what to do if a window is clicked.

        Some WMs are more versatile than others, and for example Icewm allows you to configure focus-on-click-but-dont-raise mode. That's brilliant for me, because I like to type text into partially obscured windows witho

    • Workaround (Score:5, Informative)

      by Compact Dick ( 518888 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @06:38AM (#10254819) Homepage
      Most 0.9+ plugins should work with 1.0PR. Go to about:config [about], locate extensions.disabledObsolete and change its value to false . Worked for me, YMMV. Good luck.

      -- CD

      • Re:Workaround (Score:4, Insightful)

        by otter42 ( 190544 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @07:32AM (#10255148) Homepage Journal
        It didn't work for my Tabbrowser Extensions!

        Maybe I'm just stupid, but Tabbrowser Extensions is singlehandedly the best extension available, IMHO. Why isn't it even on the mozilla extension site? Is there someway to control the tabs without TE? Specifically the oh-so-annoying way that firefox by default sticks new tabs at the end instead of right next to the parent?

  • As much as I'd like this to be true... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by psyklopz ( 412711 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @06:32AM (#10254777)
    The logfiles for a single site can hardly be used as proof of an overall trend throughout the Internet.

    Microsoft's site can probably claim higher numbers of IE users.

    RedHat's site can probably claim lower numbers of IE users

  • Not more people (Score:5, Interesting)

    by joeldixon66 ( 808412 ) * <joel@@@jd53...com> on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @06:32AM (#10254778) Homepage
    I have used Firefox for about 6 months, since it was recommended to me by a friend. I've enjoyed the useful features I never got from IE, the speed of page loads and the fact that whenever a new IE venerability is released I can simply say "Meh".

    But am I alone in the (admittedly selfish) desire that Firefox / Mozilla doesn't become too mainstream? As the usage of Firefox goes up - so too does the interest from exploit kiddies. Can the Mozilla / Firefox team keep ahead of the net nasties when it attains the majority of Internet users?

    I can see that an open source browser can respond to security threats quicker than Microsoft has - but will it remain quick enough?

    • Re:Not more people (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Rysc ( 136391 ) * <sorpigal@gmail.com> on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @06:43AM (#10254850) Homepage Journal
      Yes. Look at recent changelogs: They're patching /potential/ vulnerabilities and removing ambiguities to make it harder to annoy/confuse people. They're doing this BEFORE it becomes a big problem. Microsoft may know the potential exists, but they wait until their entire user base is up in arms before releasing an update. The Firefox folks notice the potential and head it off. Because of the whole "there are daily builds" thing, likely you'll see patches merged for any serious exploit within a few days, ready for enterprising people to download. And if you don't think average people go for nigthlies: at least with Firefox official releases are damned frequent, not once every six to eighteen months, as with IE.

    • Re:Not more people (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Jarnis ( 266190 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @06:44AM (#10254852)
      It's obiviously a challenge, but considering that most IE vulnerabilities are linked to the tight coupling of OS and browser (and the stupid ActiveX), Firefox offers fewer points of attack for the l33t hax0rs to poke holes at. Yes, there will be vulnerabilities, but I expect a lot fewer than with MS products.

      All Mozilla/Firefox now needs is a good update system. Normal users have already been teached by MS that everything magically gets updated via Windows Update. Not so with the browser - if they use something other than IE.

      Yes, advanced users hate autoupdates. So what, they can always be disabled. Firefox and Mozilla need builtin autoupdaters that at least point the user to a page when a new update is available. Or preferrably just go ahead and do the update by default. That way people can browse safely even as new exploits crop up.

      • Re:Not more people (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Karma Star ( 549944 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @07:01AM (#10254971) Journal
        > Normal users have already been teached by MS
        Who teached you your english?

        On a more serious note, I'd have to agree that firefox seriously needs an automatic update system that doesn't invalidate a user's extensions.

      • Re:Not more people (Score:3, Insightful)

        by petrus4 ( 213815 )
        >Yes, advanced users hate autoupdates. So what, >they can always be disabled.

        Depends on the auto-update program. An app which simply wants to wrest control of my system out of my hands for the time it takes to update something, as well as not giving much feedback or telling me a huge amount about what it is doing is obnoxious, and I won't use it.

        Give me an updater however which lets me choose what I want to download, shows me the commands it uses, (and lets me tweak them if I know what I'm doing, no

      • Re:Not more people (Score:4, Informative)

        by Viceice ( 462967 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @09:49AM (#10256175)
        It DOES have auto Update.

        The new Firefox v1.0PR has a green arrow under the minimise button that does it. Also, it pops up a message once in a while telling you about new updates.

    • Re:Not more people (Score:4, Interesting)

      by wtmcgee ( 113309 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @06:45AM (#10254868) Homepage
      i'm a mac user, so i'm not too familiar with windows and IE. however, i am under the impression that the problem with IE is mainly the fact that it is so tightly integrated with windows, that a lot of the holes in IE are made much more serious because of said integration. a fairly pedestrian exploit can actually cause a lot more damage.

      is this correct, or just heresy?

    • Re:Not more people (Score:3, Interesting)

      by shellbeach ( 610559 )
      As the usage of Firefox goes up - so too does the interest from exploit kiddies. Can the Mozilla / Firefox team keep ahead of the net nasties when it attains the majority of Internet users?

      Heh, considering the pain of installing new extensions using 1.0PR, I'd say yes :)

      (For those who haven't tried it yet, any site attempting to install an xpi is automatically blocked and you have to manually enable it - and there's currently no preference override to allow automatic installation from every site. Then,

  • C'mon (Score:4, Insightful)

    by indros13 ( 531405 ) * on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @06:35AM (#10254797) Homepage Journal
    By the same logica, if a Slashdot poll showed 33% of respondents used Linux, you could claim that Linux is seriously threatening Windows (and that the CowboyNeal OS has 10% market share). It's a self-selecting crowd. When a techie website shows high Firefox use, it's because techies are more likely to try alternatives--we actually know of them.

    I'm waiting for the CNN/Gallup Poll

  • It won me over.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by starvo ( 33598 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @06:36AM (#10254807) Homepage
    Now that the Spell Checker for Firefox is almost as good as IeSpell is for IE (http://www.iespell.com) I've finally switched over to Firefox. And it's become my replacement on my primary Windows PC.

  • Ah, but this isn't (e.g.) visitors to AOL.com... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by darien ( 180561 ) <darien@@@gmail...com> on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @06:36AM (#10254810)
    As the article says, this is a survey of "as tech savvy an audience as you could have." While it's exciting to see tech savvy people getting more and more switched-on to Firefox, we could flip it around and say that more than half of even the most tech-savvy users are still using IE. And with the SP2 pop-up blocker and security improvements they have fewer reasons to change than ever.

    Just thinking obvious thoughts out loud.

  • Ok let's hear it from..... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mAineAc ( 580334 ) <mAineAc_____@hot ... m minus language> on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @06:37AM (#10254812) Homepage
    The Microsoft lackeys how this isn't a real website this can't be real, just like the last time. I know I tell people all the time when they call, I work tech support for an ISP, how the reason for their pop-up and spyware and other assorted problems is because of security problems with IE. I am just one person so I doubt that I would have much of an impact, but I bet there are a lot of tech support reps out there doing the same thing because they are getting tired of all the calls.

    • Re:Ok let's hear it from..... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Hockney Twang ( 769594 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @06:49AM (#10254895)
      If it wasn't for IE, a quarter of all tech. support reps would be out of a job.

      Ok, not really, but I do work in tech. support, and spend a significant portion of my day dealing with IE-related issues. If a normal rep spends an average of 1 hour each day on IE issues alone, and there are 250 reps at the center I work at, then we're spending 250 hours a day on IE problems. If no one dealt with IE issues, we could shift the workload and fire 30 people! that works out closer to an eighth, but saying "1/8" isn't impressive enough these days.

  • IE-only sites? sorry! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by derekb ( 262726 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @06:38AM (#10254823) Journal
    I'm finding myself quickly leaving sites that are built, either intentionally or out of ignorance, as IE-only.

    With tabbed browsing, fantastic bookmark controls (add bookmark here and synchronized bookmarks), great content tools (bugmenot, adblock), the browser goes almost everywhere.

    Folks who are reading this and who made the plunge, but still use Outlook, SWITCH TO THUNDERBIRD! While I wasn't very happy with the seemingly random way my old emails were imported (messages with multiple mime parts dont have the correct items displayed on the pane, and others meant to be displayed as shown as 'part1.1' attachments), I was incredibly happy with the abilities and extensions of the program.

    Specifically, I found Thunderbird [mozilla.org]very happy to deal with my POP3 and IMAP accounts, interface very easily with GnuPG [gnupg.org] (via Enigmail [mozdev.org])

    Mozilla really sucked for quite awhile, but these days I'm surprised when I find people who still only use IE. How 2001.

    I look forward to the work being done on calendaring.

  • None techie site - more representative (Score:5, Informative)

    by barcodez ( 580516 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @06:40AM (#10254834)
    Here are some stats from a none techie site which gets a reasonable amount of traffic:
    MSIE 89.7%
    FireFox 3.1%
    Mozilla 2.2%
    Netscape 2.2%
    Opera 0.9%
    Safari 0.9%
    Unknown 0.4%
    Firebird 0%
    Konqueror 0%
    Others 0.1%
    Also more interestingly Firefox usage has for the last 4-5 months doubled month on month.

  • Take into account (Score:3, Interesting)

    by tod_miller ( 792541 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @06:40AM (#10254841) Journal
    these stats are for one site that claims to be 'tech heavy'

    Internet Explorer 6.x 53%
    Firefox 18.16%
    Safari 11.25%
    Internet Explorer 5.x 4.07%
    Mozilla 3.18%
    Opera 2.50%
    Netscape 7.x 1.42%

    In addition opera and mozilla and firefox have user agent string plugins, but even ie can be regedited to send

    Mozilla compatible, sod Microsoft (Windows 3.11)

    Of course, stats don't matter, as long as you use what you want. Out of interest,I noticed Yoper is using evolution as the mail client, I personally love thunderbird - any ditros thinking of using thunderbird and sunbird as thier mail/calender?

    should it be thunderfox and sunfox?

  • Slashdot Stats? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Psychic Burrito ( 611532 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @06:41AM (#10254842)
    How about if Slashdot would open up their logfiles? Same crowd, but bigger sample...

  • What about browser spoofing? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by smacktits ( 737334 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @06:45AM (#10254865)
    I would be interested to know how many of those numbers are made up by Mozilla/Opera users whose browsers are set to identify as IE, which is the default on Opera.

    I am not sure about Firefox as I don't use it.

    Probably the numbers would not swing the percentages to any great degree, but it would still be interesting nevertheless.

    • Re:What about browser spoofing? (Score:5, Informative)

      by xenocide2 ( 231786 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @07:32AM (#10255149) Homepage
      Even when Opera and Mozilla say they're reporting as IE, they include some Mozilla tags to seperate themselves. Try setting up a small webserver and observing this yourself with a few different browsers. Usually browser statistics like this don't let such hoo-ha fool them. And I doubt the user-agent tag is actually used to give different HTML in the overwhelming majority of web sites.

  • How about some less self-selecting data. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gowen ( 141411 ) <gwowen@gmail.com> on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @06:47AM (#10254879) Homepage Journal
    Such as this, [google.com] gathered by general purpose search engine, Google, in June. Specifically, this graph. [google.com] That "Other" category is not exactly setting the world on fire, is it now?

  • So What? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rudy_wayne ( 414635 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @06:50AM (#10254902)
    Seriously. So what?

    I'm a long time Mozilla user, but this is a silly non-issue.

    If everyone in the world abandons IE for a different browser, the loss in revenue for Microsoft is exactly ZERO. Which explains why IE hasn't been updated/improved for years, because, if everyone in the world abandoned Mozilla, Opera, etc and switched to IE, the increase in revenue for Microsoft would be exactly ZERO.

    • Re:So What? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by balazsa ( 192045 ) <balazsa.yahoo@com> on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @07:06AM (#10254995) Homepage
      Are you serious? In fact the potetial loss rather the control over the dominant client platform. Just think a bit about what you get with proper completely cross platform GUI rendering engine with nice development bindings and wide install base. Just take a look on this [sourceforge.net].

    • Re:So What? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SenseiLeNoir ( 699164 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @08:23AM (#10255481)
      True, the loss to MS is zero in ONLY the browser space. In other spaces, the loss may be FAR greater.

      Microsoft didnt make IE out of the goodness of their hearts, they paid staff, millions of hours of development time, a court case with the DOJ, to get this "free" browser out. And we know MS doesnt give things away unless they are either goign to earn profit somewhere else, or to prevent loss occuring somewhere else.

      going back to 1996/1997, Microsoft realised that Netscape, the dominant browser at the time, were slowly morphing from "Just a Browser" into something that together with Java resembles an OS. It was a platform that allowed applications to be delivered over the net, making the core OS irrelevent. Have a look at archived docs about Netscape's Aurora, and you will understand why MS was scared.

      Secondly the Java & HTML can be developed by MOST students for free. You only needed a Text Editor, a paint package and a freely obtainable JDK. There is no relatively "simple" ways to create windows applications for free. This was the reason why Microsoft gave away Visual Basic Active X edition for free, to get people less intrested in Java, and create More MS centric solutions.

      Therefore dont assume that there is no value to MS from Internet Explorer. It is core to them. They only got a bit of a breathing space because fo the Dot Com bust, didnt create as much intrest for Web Applications as originally thought.

      Obligatory Mastercard Parody:
      - development time: 10000 Man hours
      - Cost of development: $1million
      - Sending SP2 free to anyone who asks: $1 per CD

      Mahing the Windows/Office/Visual Studio triopoly maintained, and seeing Netspace and many other compeitors ground to dust - PRICELESS.

  • A growing trend? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by drspliff ( 652992 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @06:54AM (#10254923)

    Although Firefox is gaining popularity the fact is: IE 6 is the #1 browser. Until we (a combination of the open source community, and regular users) can pursuade a lot of ignorant web developers (dont get me wrong, not all web developers are stupid and ignorant, just a small minority that only design for IE) - then the web can still be a hostile environment for non-microsoft users.

    <rant> Personally I've been an Opera user for a few years (but reguarly use Mozilla/Firefox, Netscape 4 & IE to check the compatibility of my sites), and I was shocked when I went to a site that said 'You have to download the latest version of IE to view this site'... Sure.. I can run IE in wine, but some people really don't think when developing sites. </rant>

    • Re:A growing trend? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by l0wland ( 463243 ) <<moc.oohay> <ta> <dnalw0l>> on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @07:05AM (#10254987) Journal
      Until we can pursuade a lot of ignorant web developers

      What helps for me so far (100% score until now): If you find an IE-only website, make a screendump of what the website looks like in FireFox, and mail it to the sales- or marketing-dept of the company. You can be sure they contact their developer/ site-maintainer about it.

      If you contact the "developer" directly, you can end in a yes/no battle about W3C, so get to the guys with the money instead

  • Wiki sidebar extension for Firefox -- Wikalong (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jacoplane ( 78110 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @06:56AM (#10254937) Homepage Journal
    Wikalong [mozilla.org] is a Firefox Extension that embeds a wiki in the SideBar of your browser, indexed off the url of your current page. It is probably most simply described as a wiki-margin for the internet. (Ctrl-Shift-A to activate). I think this is the kind of extension that will really set Firefox apart from IE. Very inventive, shows why having a plugin architecture is cool. Of course, being based on wiki software, this feature needs to obtain a critical mass of users to become truly usefull. However, having a user-maintainted commentary box for every website seems like a great idea. Homepage [phunnel.org].

  • Google (Score:4, Interesting)

    by PerlDudeXL ( 456021 ) <<jens.luedicke> <at> <gmail.com>> on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @07:18AM (#10255067) Homepage
    It would be interesting to see the browser stats of Google. A single site isn't relevant to determine the current browser trend, but Google is visited daily by most internet users I would say.

  • And maybe if we keep telling ourselves it's true.. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by briancnorton ( 586947 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @07:43AM (#10255210) Homepage
    Geez, it's not even april first.

    Does anybody really believe that the 95%+ market share of IE is going to drop to 57% in a few months? We can advocate and yell and scream and whatever we want, but people ain't switching in big numbers.

  • You are the Marketing Department. (Score:3, Informative)

    by technix4beos ( 471838 ) * <cshaiku@gmail.com> on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @07:52AM (#10255264) Homepage Journal
    Title says it all.

    Help spread some Firefox love by visiting the official "Spread Firefox [spreadfirefox.com]" portal.

    They aim to achieve 1 million downloads during the next 10 days. The countdown doesn't reflect that actually it has already been in progress for a couple of days now, but still, quite cool.

    I'm helping their promotion by telling my friends and family, and my website visitors about it. I recommend the same.

    Go slashdotters!

  • Early Adopter, techie trend (Score:5, Interesting)

    by otisg ( 92803 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @08:11AM (#10255384) Homepage Journal
    These stats are correct, but really only for sites that early adopters and technical users flock to. For instance, Simpy (see URL in sig) is obviously something that power Web users will find useful, and its stats reflect that:

    38% -- Mozilla family
    35% -- IE
    4% -- Safari
    3% -- Opera

    On the OS front:

    62% -- Windows
    12% -- Linux
    6% -- Macintosh

    These stats also tells us that a lot of Mozilla/Firefox users are Windows users.

  • Wacky browsers (Score:3, Funny)

    by HermanAB ( 661181 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @08:23AM (#10255482)
    my Firefox identifies itself as vi on a ZXSpectrum and I never have problems with sites refusing me entry.

  • Moz's growth at large (Score:3, Interesting)

    by d-e-w ( 173678 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @08:28AM (#10255524)
    What we're seeing is a market shift, and something like that is driven by a lot of different factors across each "market." So it progresses in jumps and spurts, rather than as a steady upward curve.

    I help run a bunch of fannish websites. Fannish websites tend to attract females with at least a slight bit of geekiness (even if they're non-technical), so the members of fannish communities tend to end up on the "front end" of mass market shifts. Based on message board conversation (unfortunately, I don't run those message boards so don't have access to those stats), a major shift over to Mozilla/Firefox occurred about four months ago. They were geeky enough to recognize that the security holes in IE announced over the past few months COULD affect them (and did, in many cases) and driven by the fact that MS wasn't putting out the updates to keep them safe. There was real fear, and there where the technically geeky of the community offering a solution that they could understand. Although my sites aren't directly connected to these message boards (and we haven't run browser stats in years) I think that if I looked at the logs for the past couple of months, they would reflect that community shift to Mozilla products. (I'm going to ask the server admin to run some historical vs. current stats for me and I'll post them if I get them in a reasonable amount of time.)

    At the same time, the "computer guy" (computer idiot) in my local paper started recommending Firefox. This is a guy whose columns usually make me want to slap him upside the head, because he spreads SO MUCH inaccurate information about computers and operating systems, and reinforces a lot of the misunderstandings that are in the non-technical population. He's gone the distance with Firefox love (too far, really), now recommending it as the solution for any IE-based problem. He's completely lost the MSIE love . . .

    What I find interesting is that w3schools is one of the sites reflecting the trend. Who uses that site? Web designers and developers. It's a great quick-check resource (no, it doesn't go into depth on most topics, but when you've forgotten the syntax for something . . .). That means that there is a growing shift within the web design and development community. And while they are still probably designing cross-product, they're going to favor designs and standards that work with their favored browser. That, more than anything, could add momentum to Moz's growth. That's the community that has had and spread the IE love for years at this point. If they start to spread the Moz love, we will see further mass shifts to Mozilla products.

  • Oh good grief... (Score:5, Informative)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @08:45AM (#10255658)
    "Less than 2 years ago, IE had a 95% lock on the market. Anyone else see a trend here?"

    Okay, I realize it's considered Geek Chic to rip the methodology (or, more usually, the lack thereof) used by the "reporters" of these stories. But c'mon! My daughter, who's in 9th grade and not a particular fan of math, could see the holes in this one.

    The link used in the sentence quoted above, showing 95% market share for IE, goes to onestat.com. If the reporter had taken the time to check their latest report, IE still has a 93.9% share of the market [onestat.com]. It's right there in their press releases! How hard would it have been to look?

    I love Firefox, and would love to see IE go away. But I'm getting real tired of having to apply my own personal lameness filter when it comes to determining what Slashdot stories actually have "stuff that matters".

  • I realized the trend last week (Score:4, Interesting)

    by TheHonestTruth ( 759975 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @08:52AM (#10255710) Journal
    When the girl sitting in front of me in my law school class was using Firefox. She's not a techie at all and to see jane six-pack using it kinda blew my mind since everything else she uses is Dell-installed.

    -truth

  • Well, why is this suprising? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by borud ( 127730 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @09:21AM (#10255961) Homepage
    IE has not kept up with development and all the other browsers are bloated or bloating. for some reason people have a really hard time understanding that a browser should be a browser and it doesn't matter if all the extra features don't really enlarge its footprint (which is mostly rather irrelevant) -- what matters is that it takes focus away from the work that really needs to be done.

    besides, if you want extra gadgetry in your browser, Firefox has a lot of nice extensions and they are extremely easy to install(1).

    --------
    1) Except for the fact that the the response times from the extension download is horribly slow. Do something about it!

  • Firefox gets faster, IE gets slower (Score:3, Insightful)

    by xot ( 663131 ) <fragiledeath AT gmail DOT com> on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @09:34AM (#10256053) Journal
    I think the key is, people are losing patience.Everyone wants a faster browser which hangs less and eats less memory.IE fails in both.With every new version its getting slower, takes more memory , has more security flaws.
    Whereas FireFox gets more efficient, has all the features that IE has(infact more) and uses much less memory.The browsing experience is smooth and fast.
    A lot of people are hesitant to move to FireFox cos they don't know what it has to offer and Windows ships with IE so it naturally captures most of the market.With just the right kind of exposure FireFox will bloom even more.

  • From my webtrends reports that I run... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by night_flyer ( 453866 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @09:40AM (#10256101) Homepage
    Actual stats from a large consumer site comparing August, 2003 to August, 2004
    August 2003
    IE 88.83% 17,050,971
    Netscape 8.02% 1,541,104
    Netscape Other 1.13% 218,550

    August 2004
    IE 85.29% 12,638,048
    Netscape 11.35% 1,681,625
    Netscape Other 1.57% 231,244

  • IE vs Firefox (Score:5, Informative)

    by Rydian ( 29123 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @09:46AM (#10256151)
    I am a SysAdmin for a company that provides listings for real estate web sites. Sadly we aren't fully w3c compliant, but we make sure all of our code renders properly in both Mozilla/FireFox and Internet Explorer.

    Last week We had 12,156,966 hits to our sites, which is only the search related pages, not photos etc.. 11,689,635 (96.15%) were from Internet Explorer.

    I'd wager to say we would see a much more diverse range of users than a site specifically designed for web designers. I hate to say it, but IE is still as much of a force in the market as it ever was.

  • Hardly a trend (Score:4, Informative)

    by The Spoonman ( 634311 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @10:40AM (#10256707) Homepage
    On my site, which isn't a geek-oriented site and therefore more representative of the general population of the net, IE still accounts for over 95% of the browser market with no change at all in the last few months.

    Trends require more than one anomalous reading.

  • OpenOffice next ? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Alain Williams ( 2972 ) <addw@phcomp.co.uk> on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @10:45AM (#10256760) Homepage
    How long before OpenOffice or Abiword does the same thing to MS word ? This is the conversion that I am waiting for, this is what will kill the M$ monopoly.

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