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Mozilla The Internet

Firefox Shooting For 10 Percent 564

Random BedHead Ed writes "An article on ZDNet Monday features an interview with Bart Decrem, the Mozilla organization spokesman, who says that by the end of next year they expect to have 10% of the browser share. "We have the momentum," he says. He attributes some of the success to faster browsing and a lack of software bloat, and suggests that other open source projects might see similar success if they trim features. The article also quotes some very interesting figures from ZDNet's own web servers. About 9% of ZDnet visitors were using a Mozilla browser in February; now in it's at 19%." The average for OSTG overall is about 30%.
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Firefox Shooting For 10 Percent

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  • Show us your stats! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 26, 2004 @11:36AM (#10631870)
    Come on Hemos! Pull back the curtain, let the truth set you free! Slashdot readers want OS/browser stats.
  • My Website's Stats (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 26, 2004 @11:36AM (#10631874)
    My website's percentages (I would say a somewhat stereotype independent website):

    September 2003:
    MS Internet Explorer 95.9 %
    Netscape 1.8 %
    Mozilla 1 %
    Opera 0.4 %
    Safari 0.4 %

    September 2004:
    MS Internet Explorer 92.5 %
    Mozilla 4.1 %
    Netscape1.4 %
    Safari 0.8 %
    Opera 0.5 %

    October 2004:
    MS Internet Explorer 90.9 %
    Mozilla 2.7 %
    FireFox 2.1 %
    Netscape 1.4 %

    My guess is that my host just updated awstats so that firefox and mozilla are seperated. It does list FireBird (less than .5% every month), so that kind of confuses me. Either way, IE is going way down, and Mozilla/FireFox are going up.

    -LBArrettAnderson (I seem to be banned permenantly).
    • by Malc ( 1751 ) on Tuesday October 26, 2004 @12:02PM (#10632204)
      My website's percentages (I would say a somewhat stereotype independent website):

      2003-2004:
      MS Internet Explorer 1 %
      Netscape 0 %
      Mozilla 99 %
      Opera 0 %
      Safari 0 %

      I guess I'm the only one who finds what I have to say interesting. ;)
      • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 26, 2004 @01:07PM (#10632910)
        Put some nice pr0n there, post your web address here , wait to get slashdotted and post new statistics like:

        Hardcore:
        93 % - IE
        3 % - Firefox
        2 % - Safari
        1 % - Opera

        Zoo:
        45% - Safari
        25 % - Mozilla
        20 % - Firefox
        3 % - IE
        1 - Opera

        Group:
        69 % - Konquerror
        22 % - IE
        5 % - unspecified

        Gay:
        100 % - Opera

        In this way the developers will know what category of users they should foccuss on...
  • So can we say they are ahead of Macintosh now?
    • Ahead of Mac how?

      Firefox runs on Mac, Windows, GNU, etc.

      More people using Firefox on anything than people running anything on a Mac less Firefox? Perhaps, but I'm sure a fair few Mac users run Firefox.

      I have a Mac, amongst other things and it runs Firefox.
  • by ivan256 ( 17499 ) * on Tuesday October 26, 2004 @11:38AM (#10631891)
    .. that all those obnoxious web developers who make their sites IE only "because it's got 99% of the market" will have to stop telling us to "just use IE" and learn to develop standards compliant websites?
    • Of course not. 90% of the market is still enough to prevent having to develop cross-platform. How many versions of AutoCAD do you see for Macintosh or Linux?

      • by ivan256 ( 17499 ) * on Tuesday October 26, 2004 @11:47AM (#10632003)
        10% of the browser market is probably 1000% or more of the AutoCAD market.

        What really matters is wether it would cost more to make your site standards compliant than it would bring in through the added users. Since the cost of making the site correctly in the first place is very low, likely the same price as doing it incorrectly, that's almost never the case. Ignoring a segment of the market, no matter what percentage of the market it is, when the costs of supporting them are less than the return is stupid. As that segment grows, it becomes clear just how stupid neglecting that market segment was.
        • ``Since the cost of making the site correctly in the first place is very low, likely the same price as doing it incorrectly''

          That's not true. Any script kiddie with a WYSIWYG tool can generate a website that has hideous code but will be grokked by browsers. Making a standards-compliant website requires someone with actual knowledge and a certain passion, and likely needs to be hand-coded. This obviously costs a lot more.

          At least, until the script kiddie FUBARs the site, of which I have seen the results a
          • Any script kiddie with a WYSIWYG tool can generate a website that has hideous code but will be grokked by browsers. Making a standards-compliant website requires someone with actual knowledge and a certain passion

            Webmasters of commercial websites that deny non-IE browser access are not typically script kiddies with WYSYWYG design tools. They're typically Microsoft fanboys with with Microsoft certifications that they don't want to become useless who took the time to figure out how to write the javascript n
        • "Since the cost of making the site correctly in the first place is very low, likely the same price as doing it incorrectly..."

          unfortunately, for the type of site you seem to be describing this doesn't play out. I'm assuming you mean the typical sell something site that has been built in FrontPage...the people paying the cost rarely know that the site won't work in non-IE browsers, because they don't know that non-IE browsers exist. They pay the developer for a site and the developer makes the decisions, an
      • by jilles ( 20976 ) on Tuesday October 26, 2004 @12:28PM (#10632489) Homepage
        10% is more than enough (in fact todays marketshare is apparently already enough) to convince any site developer depending on advertisement revenue or ecommerce revenue that he shouldn't lose those precious customers. It's enough for customers to complain if the site they bought from Leet Hackers Inc. doesn't work in some browsers (and users complain, loudly).

        10% matters enough that MS has started to convert www.microsoft.com to something that is quite nearly xhtml compliant and renders fine in mozilla. Even they realize that some of their customers use something else than IE.

        The only sites I am aware of that don't work in mozilla tend to be targeted to windows users (typically authored by inexperienced developers and painfull to browse even in IE), older frontpage stuff or legacy stuff like 1st generation banking sites (most decent banks have since fixed their software and if yours hasn't: vote with your money). You're not missing much these days if you browse mozilla (and you miss a lot if you browse IE).

        Sure, MS won the browser war but they lost the war over webstandards. Nobody uses their proprietary extensions and the technical roadmap for the internet is now drawn by others because MS has effectively stopped developing their browser. And now their marketshare will start to shrink unless they do something.
    • The idea of "standards" are foreign to most web designers, even those that really ought to know better (/.).

      Instead, they will make two versions of the page, one for IE and one for Mozilla/Firefox, and tell everyone else to "upgrade". Just like they did when Netscape and IE both had significant marketshare.

      PS: The Firefox version will of course be so outdated and broken, that you get better results by pretenting to be IE and let FireFox "bug compatibility" handle it.
  • by uid100 ( 540265 ) on Tuesday October 26, 2004 @11:38AM (#10631894)
    Is there a tool that can make FF the browser that comes up when *any* request for a brower is made by external programs?
    Example: I build a Win2k box for my Dad who uses netzero. Netzero will still launch IE for the web based emai.

    thoughts?
    • Acrocrap pdf reader has the same problem when clicking embedded links - it launches IE no matter what's the default browser.
    • by the_weasel ( 323320 ) on Tuesday October 26, 2004 @11:42AM (#10631952) Homepage
      Some applications have hardwired to launch iexplore.exe - so changing your default browser won't help if NetZero is one of those applications.

      Thats when you complain to NetZero so they know its not appreciated.
      • by general_re ( 8883 ) on Tuesday October 26, 2004 @11:50AM (#10632053) Homepage
        Some applications have hardwired to launch iexplore.exe...

        Might be fun to rename IE to iexplore.bak and FF to iexplore.exe - add the FF folder to PATH and see what happens. No promises, 'cause I haven't tried it, but like I said, might be fun ;)

        • Might be fun to rename IE to iexplore.bak and FF to iexplore.exe

          I'd prefer renaming iexplore.exe to iexplore.pos :)
        • by Feanturi ( 99866 ) on Tuesday October 26, 2004 @01:02PM (#10632858)
          Might be fun to rename IE to iexplore.bak and FF to iexplore.exe

          I gave it a whack on my test machine, and it sort of works. What I did was installed firefox to C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer so as to not worry about path issues. Made a copy of IEXPLORE.EXE and made my IE shortcut point to the copy, made a copy of firefox.exe and renamed that copy to IEXPLORE.. This way, when firefox is called for normally, nothing is different for it. MSN launches firefox now when checking my hotmail, except it doesn't actually load hotmail, that doesn't work seem to work, with the way IE is being called by MSN. Then, when I launch IE manually later, it loads two instances of the browser: 1 with my start page and 1 with hotmail in it. If I hadn't run MSN just prior, and tried to check hotmail in firefox then it just does the start page. IE also now gives a warning about running in compatibility mode, and that some features may be disabled (probably a good thing, heh), but my online banking works so it works well enough. I'd figured there wouldn't be major issues with filename conflicts, though something obviously did bork somewhere.
    • I've just dealt with something similar. The first step is to go through (manually and painfully) Win32 file associations and make sure nothing points to Internet Explorer. That, and having FF set as the default browser, should significantly reduce the need for IE.

      The next step, and one that I have yet to try, is to find a test system and symlink the IE binary to FF. It's a disaster waiting to happen, I know, but I think the experiment itself is worth the effort, let alone any possible success. In case you

    • by antiMStroll ( 664213 ) on Tuesday October 26, 2004 @12:41PM (#10632622)
      In Win 2k:

      Start Button > Set Program Access and Defaults > Choose a Default Web Browser

  • Is it not expected that ZDNet readers would skew towards Mozilla? How about the percentage of users to the top ten visited websites? Save for google.com, why would we expect that Mozilla access rates to those site would be markedly higher?
  • No surprise (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 1000101 ( 584896 ) on Tuesday October 26, 2004 @11:39AM (#10631904)
    The typical ZDNet visitor is much more technically savvy than the average internet user. This explains why their Mozilla use rate has increase. Go to www.aarp.org and you more than likely won't see the same results.
  • by garcia ( 6573 ) *
    Well according to the data on my site of which most of the traffic comes from slashdot referrers I have found this since 6/04 for MSIE 6.0 (and only 6.0) and Mozilla 5.0:

    June '04:
    MSIE 6.0 - 6444 (56%)
    Moz 5.0 - 2330 (20%)

    July '04:
    MSIE 6.0 - 8673 (48%)
    Moz 5.0 - 5144 (28%)

    August '04:
    MSIE 6.0 - 8954 (42%)
    Moz 5.0 - 7331 (34%)

    September '04:
    MSIE 6.0 - 15515 (41%)
    Moz 5.0 - 12550 (33%)

    October '04 (through yesterday):
    MSIE 6.0 - 16209 (39%)
    Moz 5.0 - 14540 (35%)

    Yup, my numbers are just as meaningless and ske
    • by Naikrovek ( 667 ) <jjohnson@p[ ]com ['sg.' in gap]> on Tuesday October 26, 2004 @12:23PM (#10632418)
      I use IE to browse slashdot because installing or using firefox at work will get me fired.

      with the SCO stuff that's going on, my company WILL NOT allow anyone to install ANYTHING that we haven't protected ourselves from. This basically means that we pay hundreds of dollars per line of source code to use open source software for the sole purpose of saying that "We got it from a vendor, sue the vendor not us!"

      in the event that some company comes around and claims that they themselves wrote firefox and decides to sue every user, i guess we'll be protected.

      I call bullshit. it drives me MAD that i can't use PuTTY or Firefox at work. Its an easy choice i guess, to use IE or get fired, but I'm already looking for another job because of it. Yes I HATE IE that much.
      • by Quila ( 201335 ) on Tuesday October 26, 2004 @03:34PM (#10634802)
        I've posted this before, but here's a bit of the Windows XP license, and a lot of other software has essentially the same thing in the license:
        Privacy: (MS) 16. DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTIES.... ALSO, THERE IS NO WARRANTY OR CONDITION OF TITLE, QUIET ENJOYMENT, QUIET POSSESSION, CORRESPONDENCE TO DESCRIPTION OR NON-INFRINGEMENT WITH REGARD TO THE SOFTWARE.

        Translation: We don't guarantee we own it (CONDITION OF TITLE), don't guarantee you won't get legally harrassed because of using it (QUIET ENJOYMENT), and don't guarantee it doesn't infringe on anyone else's copyright (NON-INFRINGEMENT). Your employer has no more guarantee using commercial software unless specifically stated otherwise in a contract.

        Show your boss the licenses to the commercial software you're using and watch the sparks fly.
  • Why bother? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Pan T. Hose ( 707794 ) on Tuesday October 26, 2004 @11:40AM (#10631914) Homepage Journal
    Why even bother with 10% when after Google releases the G-browser (Google branded Firefox [slashdot.org]) it will shoot for 90%?
  • by ave19 ( 149657 ) on Tuesday October 26, 2004 @11:41AM (#10631925)
    I use Firefox all the time, but I gotta say, it'd be easier to use if I didn't have to think in Russian.

    Solider: "Bumagi Pazhaluysta!"
    Eastwood hands him a roll of toilet paper.

  • On my site, I get an average of about forty percent Firefox and fifty percent IE users.

    I think it's because most of the people I deal with are in the antispyware/privacy community, so that could skew it a little.
  • Site Stats (Score:5, Informative)

    by RomSteady ( 533144 ) on Tuesday October 26, 2004 @11:42AM (#10631942) Homepage Journal

    I can't comment for other sites, but for our city's website, http://www.laytoncity.org/ [laytoncity.org], here's our breakdown as of 9:14am today:

    Internet Explorer - 91.8%
    Mozilla - 2.9%
    FireFox - 1.9%
    Netscape - 1.5%
    Unknown - 1.0%
    Safari - 0.7%
    Konquerer - 0.0% (2 visitors)
    LibWWW - 0.0% (1 visitor)
    • Re:Site Stats (Score:3, Interesting)

      by legirons ( 809082 )
      At the risk of this thread becoming a list of statistics:

      41.0% Internet explorer 6
      17.7% \"Window (W.T.F.?!?)
      14.4% e-SocietyRobot
      8.92% Mozilla 5
      4.05% Internet explorer 5
      2.33% Googlebot
      2.13% Ocelli
      2.11% Mozilla 3.01
      1.13% Slurp
      1.07% Jetbot
      0.65% msnbot
      0.49% HenryTheMiragoRobot
      0.35% Wget
      0.26% NaverBot
      0.24% Googlebot-Image

      What's worse is that most of those "MSIE" hits are probably robots too -- just look at the number of copies of internet explorer downloading pages only linked-to from invisible hyperlink
  • by Begemot ( 38841 ) on Tuesday October 26, 2004 @11:43AM (#10631957)
    ... if by any chance you have MS LAN with AD, you can deploy Firefox to all your clients nearly instantly using Firefox MSI [mozillazine.org]. It works like a charm and increase their chances to keep the promise.
    • by RzUpAnmsCwrds ( 262647 ) on Tuesday October 26, 2004 @01:29PM (#10633157)
      The Firefox msi is OK, but if you are in a medium to large company you will want to roll your own.

      - Download Firefox 1.0
      - Install it
      - Configure it how you like it (homepage, themes, bookmarks)
      - Move your profile directory (in your home directory) to the defaults directory for Mozilla
      - Use advanced installer to pack it into a msi

      That way, you can set up Firefox with bookmarks for all your company homepages and with a skin (my favorite is qute) that integrates well with XP.
  • by MooseByte ( 751829 ) on Tuesday October 26, 2004 @11:44AM (#10631970)

    Business 2.0 has an interesting article [business2.com] titled "Microsoft's Worst Nightmare" with some additional background on the rise of Firefox.

    Reading the text you can almost imagine Redmond concocting a cunning plan to distract 19-year-old Blake from his Firefox duties, involving free tickets to a tropical island with Natalie Portman. And daily hot grits via room service.

  • by EvanKai ( 218260 ) on Tuesday October 26, 2004 @11:46AM (#10631987) Homepage
    Today Dave Winer wrote [scripting.com], "I won't use any non-Internet Microsoft product until they start investing again in MSIE. I don't hold out much hope, but it's the least I can do for the Web."

    Not using MS products IS probably is the least you can do. Whatever happened to Microsoft Free Fridays [scripting.com]? With FireFox aiming for 10% of the Web, it seems like it might be time to do more than the "least" for the web.

    Any interest in a javascript alert message campaign to promote Firefox on Fridays? People could add the script to their site and on Friday an alert message would display saying something allong the lines of "The browser you are using isn't startard compliant or secure. Please consider upgrading to Firefox."
  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 26, 2004 @11:47AM (#10632000)
    I got 100% Mozilla on my webserver logs! Of course my website is callled "localhost"...
    • Liar! I just checked localhost's stats and it's about 20% Safari, 60% Konqueror, and 20% Firefox.

      Actually, sorry for being so harsh. They might've regenerated the stats since you last looked at it.

  • It will happen (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ars-Fartsica ( 166957 ) on Tuesday October 26, 2004 @11:47AM (#10632004)
    The tipping point is coming. The point where enough late-adopters see news stories, tv segments, links on the web, and most importantly, other late-adopters using firefox. I actually think numbers like 25% or higher are achievable.
  • I did my part... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by feloneous cat ( 564318 ) on Tuesday October 26, 2004 @11:54AM (#10632097)
    ... by convincing (begging, whining, pleading) to a friend of mine to use anything, ANYTHING, but I.E.

    She finally succumbed.

    Her reaction: "Wow, it lets me do much more than I could before. I love it!"

    If everyone tells two friends (and they tell two friends), we can finally eliminate I.E. from the universe! BWAHAHAHAHA!
  • Feature creep (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RealProgrammer ( 723725 ) on Tuesday October 26, 2004 @11:55AM (#10632111) Homepage Journal
    The desire to want to match features is an artifact of the hidden source monolithic development model. If you have a product you're trying to sell, you want to maximize how attractive it looks to the purchaser.

    FOSS developers, on the other hand, generally want to use the program they're writing (and don't want its performance to suffer). Also, they're open to the possibility that their niche has a boundary past which they shouldn't grow. There is generally less financial pressure to add new features than there is general pressure to keep the program working.

    The thing that keeps Linux competitive is that Linus won't accept (*) a new kernel feature patch that decreases performance. As a result, Linux benefits from new hardware but continues to work on the older stuff (or at least, you can make it work).

    I think as long as the Mozilla people keep these principles in mind, they'll keep doing great work.
    ----
    (* except for emergency security fixes, or in a development kernel where the current state of a new patch is too slow, but the technology looks like it will eventually be faster.)
    • Re:Feature creep (Score:3, Insightful)

      by RAMMS+EIN ( 578166 )
      Hate to say it, but popular open source software is far from immune to feature creep.

      Just compare the speed and size:
      OpenOffice.org vs. KOffice, or even MS Office
      glibc vs. NetBSD libc
      GNOME or KDE vs. Xfce
      Mozilla vs. Opera
      Firefox vs. Safari

      I may have an occassional mistake, and some omissions, but I think this disproves your claims.

      And, seriously, Mozilla is bloatware, and Firefox needs to do a lot more fitness to get slim and fast.
  • Dissenting Thoughts (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RAMMS+EIN ( 578166 ) on Tuesday October 26, 2004 @11:56AM (#10632121) Homepage Journal
    ``He attributes some of the success to faster browsing and a lack of software bloat''

    Compared to what? Mozilla is a piece of bloatware, and although the Firefox team stripped a lot of bloat, it still isn't exactly a lean browser. Konqueror on my 333 MHz Celeron feels faster than Firefox on my 800 MHz G4, not to mention Firefox on the Celeron.

    I've heard about many IE users who didn't want to switch, because IE is faster. Opera leaves both of them a mile behind.

    Seriously, there are good reasons for using Firefox, but speed and lack of bloat are not among them.

    Anybody still working on the KHTML to GTK port?
    • by Hollins ( 83264 )
      The Firefox download for Windows is 4.6MB. For it's feature set, this is a small application and can hardly be considered bloated.

      You compare Firefox and Konqueror on two different architectures. When using them both in Linux on P3 and P4 machines, Firefox seems every bit as fast to me, though it starts up a bit slower. Once it's set up with my preferred set of extensions (easy-gestures, bookmarks synchronizer, web-developer, adblock), it provides the best browsing experience I've encountered. This extensi
    • Love KDE. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by twitter ( 104583 ) on Tuesday October 26, 2004 @01:01PM (#10632841) Homepage Journal
      Firefox team stripped a lot of bloat, it still isn't exactly a lean browser. Konqueror on my 333 MHz Celeron feels faster than Firefox on my 800 MHz G4, not to mention Firefox on the Celeron.

      I've yet to try Firefox out on the same platform as Mozilla and Konqueror, but I can say that Konqueror is now may favorite browser. It looks good, it's quick on modest hardware like 333 MHz PII and up, and it's integrated spell check and file manipulation tools across local, ftp and sftp rock. I miss the specific blocking features, but the trade off is worth while.

      For pure speed, Dillo is very cool. It won't do scripts but it runs like lightning under fluxbox on a 90MHz P1 with 24 MB of RAM.

      • Re:Love KDE. (Score:3, Informative)

        by rseuhs ( 322520 )
        If you are new to Konqueror, try this:

        Type in "fish://myuser@any_remote_Linux_box/" in and fall in love.

        It works over ssh, which means it will work with just any Linux distro out of the box. (Because AFAIK ssh is installed and active on almost all Linux distros)

        You will never use FTP again. FTP is insecure, a hassle to set up and generally outdated.

        BTW, the "fish:" links work everywhere in KDE, not just in Konqueror.

  • by davidwr ( 791652 ) on Tuesday October 26, 2004 @11:56AM (#10632122) Homepage Journal
    MS can save corporate, institutional, and kiosk users by simply having a "lockdown mode" that's trivial to set.

    Here's what I envision:
    With a single configuration setting - something a non-techie library employee can set when logged in as an administrator, have it automatically block all potentially-hostile content from everyone that's not on a predefined whitelist.
    The default whitelist is *.yourorganization.com + *.microsoft.com. Whitelisted sites would not necessarily be treated as the "local" zone, but rather they'd be treated the same as if the lockdown were not in effect.

    Plus, add a button to the end-user screen that says "site doesn't work." If a user clicks on this, the administrators will be notified to check it out and, if they deem the site safe, grant it more privilages.

    This is something MS, or possibly even a third-party vendor, could do in a matter of weeks. It requires few if any underlying code changes, mainly just a browser-helper-object and some "re-packaging" of existing configuration settings.

    The long term solution of course is to redesign IE's security model.

    If MS takes no action, they'll continue to lose market share to browsers that don't represent such an open door to hostile code.
  • by tarikida ( 825498 ) on Tuesday October 26, 2004 @11:59AM (#10632148)
    Lack of support to dynamic fonts is a major draw back to the popularity of Mozilla in asian countries and for people who uses browser to read asian websites. Now a days most websites uses dynamic fonts to render their pages and it does not work in Mozilla or in Netscape 6 and above. We cannot ask the websites to change that practice and go with the option of downloading fonts or use unicode fonts. Some of those asian lanugages does not have unicode support

  • Internet Explorer 100.00%
    Netscape 0.00%
    Mozilla 0.00%
    Opera 0.00%
    Safari 0.00%
    Lynx 0.00%
  • by Mustang Matt ( 133426 ) on Tuesday October 26, 2004 @12:17PM (#10632359)
    Aug 2004

    MS Internet Explorer No 63689 91.9 %
    Mozilla No 1875 2.7 %
    Netscape No 1363 1.9 %
    Unknown ? 702 1 %
    Safari No 563 0.8 %
    FireFox No 554 0.7 %
    Opera No 315 0.4 %
    Firebird (Old FireFox) No 121 0.1 %

    Sept 2004

    MS Internet Explorer No 56837 91.5 %
    Mozilla No 1685 2.7 %
    Netscape No 1294 2 %
    Safari No 945 1.5 %
    FireFox No 931 1.4 %
    Unknown ? 211 0.3 %
    Opera No 118 0.1 %

    Oct 2004

    MS Internet Explorer No 40864 91.9 %
    Mozilla No 895 2 %
    Netscape No 880 1.9 %
    FireFox No 757 1.7 %
    Safari No 628 1.4 %
    Unknown ? 235 0.5 %
    Opera No 85 0.1 %
  • by Anita Coney ( 648748 ) on Tuesday October 26, 2004 @12:29PM (#10632498) Homepage
    The ability to turn Flash crap on/off with the PreBar add-on is a great feature. I cannot understand why it isn't implemented in the brower. Does anyone have any insight into this why such a usefull feature is not included by default?

  • by Bryan-10021 ( 223345 ) on Tuesday October 26, 2004 @12:30PM (#10632507)
    /. has more than a million readers yet http://www.spreadfirefox.com/ has less than 7,300 names as of today. So less than 1% of readers who are PRO Open Source are willing to put their money where their mouth is.

    People, this is once in a lifetime shot at getting the web back from commercial interested.

    $30 or even a $10 will go a LONG way.
    • by ip_vjl ( 410654 ) on Tuesday October 26, 2004 @12:44PM (#10632650) Homepage
      Or ... people are pro-firefox but don't think that donating to a full page ad in the paper is the best use of money.

      I'm definitely pro-firefox. I've gotten numerous people to switch. I'm willing to spend my time getting someone installed and tweaking the app to their preferences, but I can think of a lot of other places I'd rather spend my money than for a one-shot ad in the paper.

  • by cryptor3 ( 572787 ) on Tuesday October 26, 2004 @12:38PM (#10632604) Journal
    Only shooting for 10%? They should come up with a good slogan to help them hit their goals, like:

    Mozilla FireFox -- The Libertarian Candidate of Browsers

    Mozilla FireFox -- Shouldn't YOUR computer be on Fire?
  • by otisg ( 92803 ) on Tuesday October 26, 2004 @12:43PM (#10632640) Homepage Journal
    A number of people these days speculate that Google will be entering the browser war, especially when they bring up the fact that Google hired the main IE guy from Microsoft. Google _won't_ be building a browser, and it won't even be leasing it. Google may be investing their time, money, and people in pushing the existing Firefox browser, and enhancing its already powerful platform-like features (e.g. extensions and plugins).
    For an example, you can try Firefox/Mozilla search plugin that lets you _full-text_ search your bookmarks from Firefox via Simpy[1]. I am sure you will see a lot more of that stuff soon.

    Firefox is powerful, and when 1.0 hits download servers, all major newspapers will be blabbering about it, just like they were blabbering about GOOG's IPO. Then even non-tech people will dump IE in favour of Firefox.

    [1] Simpy [simpy.com]
  • by Thrakkerzog ( 7580 ) on Tuesday October 26, 2004 @01:01PM (#10632847)
    My useragent is set to GoogleBot. That way, I can see articles which are set to be open to google indexing. IGN does this a lot.

  • by downward dog ( 634625 ) on Tuesday October 26, 2004 @02:03PM (#10633577) Homepage
    These stats may be interesting, maybe not. They are for a small farm equipment manufacturer in the midwest, so they are fairly representitive of a non-techie crowd.

    IE 6.0: 73.2%
    IE 5.5: 6.6%
    IE 5.0: 6.1%
    NN 6.+: 1.6%
    NN 4.7: 1.0%
    Mozilla: 3.7%
    Safari: 1.6%

    And 12 hits from Konqueror! Props to the unix-geek farmers!

IOT trap -- core dumped

Working...