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Mozilla The Internet

Mozilla 1.8b1 Released, Firefox Growth Slowing 425

Posted by Zonk from the get-out-there-and-download-people dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla 1.8 Beta 1 has been released, and in addition to numerous bug fixes now includes ECMAScript for XML (E4X). Mozilla 1.8 will serve as the code basis for Firefox 1.1. In other Mozilla related news, WebSideStory saw Firefox's usage growth slow down to just 15% (Jan-Feb) from 22% (Dec-Jan) making Firefox's 10% marketshare goal for 2005 potentially more challenging. Their stats also saw Internet Explorer usage drop below 90% for the first time in many years."
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Mozilla 1.8b1 Released, Firefox Growth Slowing More

Mozilla 1.8b1 Released, Firefox Growth Slowing

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  • Is this the end of the ride? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by smug_lisp_weenie ( 824771 ) * <cbarski.4503440@bloglines.com> on Sunday February 27, 2005 @05:40PM (#11797137) Homepage
    ...It does seem that everyone I know, personally, is already either using Firefox or just the kind of person that'll probably always use internet explorer forever. Let's hope this isn't the case...

    ...on the other hand, it is not uncommon, according to some business theories [zonalatina.com], for products to reach a temporary plateau after having reached all "early adopters" and that the majority of users will follow after a delay. Maybe that's where FireFox is now...who knows...
    • i know this sounds selfish...but i really hope firefox doesn't grow too much. i'll keep telling my friends and family because i don't want them to get stuck with the spyware-infested craphole that is IE....but if it gets a larger marketshare or anything, we can look forward to more pop-ups, viruses, trojans, and explots that target it specifically. hell, even now i'm noticing more and more popups that bypass firefox's anti-popup software

      • Firefox isn't made by Microsoft. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by cbreaker ( 561297 ) on Sunday February 27, 2005 @05:52PM (#11797263) Journal
        You're assuming that Firefox has the same amount of bugs and vulnerabilities that IE does and it's not the case.

        A lot of why IE has been so problematic is that during their war for the browser they "extended" the crap out of it, adding a lot of out-of-standard enhancements and extensions. IE has countless API's that keep web sites and applications stuck on IE and making it harder to switch to something else (really, no different then anything else Microsoft has ever made.)

        Firefox is open source, it adheres to standards more strictly, and it's a lot more light-weight. There's less opportunity for malware to get in with Firefox, and if there's a security flaw it's fixed a lot faster. On the other hand, because of IE's extensions and extra functionality, it makes it much more difficult for Microsoft to back off on all the extra (and not soundly designed) features because everyone is stuck on them.

        • Re:Firefox isn't made by Microsoft. (Score:5, Interesting)

          by skraps ( 650379 ) on Sunday February 27, 2005 @06:09PM (#11797419)
          In the last two weeks, I have had pop-ups get by the Firefox popup blocker.
          • They really are Firefox windows.
          • I refresh the page and the same popup appears again, along with the "we blocked this popup for you" bar across the top.
          • I tried it on another machine with Firefox, and had the same result.

          • Re:Firefox isn't made by Microsoft. (Score:5, Interesting)

            by XO ( 250276 ) <blade.eric@NoSPAM.gmail.com> on Sunday February 27, 2005 @06:19PM (#11797517) Homepage Journal
            Yeah, several pages that Slashdot has linked to in the last couple of weeks go right through Mozilla / Firefox's pop up blocker, in fact, with one of the Tab extensions that I have loaded in my home copy of Mozilla, it is supposed to treat all new windows as tabs.. and I've NEVER had a popup window happen in that browser.. (not even the ones I want to get, even enabling them in the preferences) till the other day.. clicked a story off of Slashdot, and it popped open a new window, which then closed a second later, and I had 4 new tabs open, all with different ads in them.

            • Re:Firefox isn't made by Microsoft. (Score:5, Informative)

              by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 27, 2005 @07:01PM (#11797839)
              It could be this: the popup blocker doesn't block popups launched from Flash (it's technically a hard thing to do, as Flash is essentially an embedded application running within Firefox and can do whatever it wants).

              Sometime in the last couple of weeks, Fastclick, a major ad network, started exploiting this to get its popups around Firefox's popup blocker. The ad scripts load a small Flash movie which then lauches the popup.

              You can block plugins from launching popups by using a hidden pref but this will block all plugin-launched popups, even ones launched in response to a mouse click. To do this, enter about:config in the Location bar, hit return and then right-click any where in the content area and choose New > Integer. Enter privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins as the name and 2 as the value.

              • Re:Firefox isn't made by Microsoft. (Score:5, Informative)

                by starwed ( 735423 ) on Sunday February 27, 2005 @07:38PM (#11798086)
                Flashblock [mozdev.org] is a good extension to get rid of this problem; as long as you don't mind clicking on those flash driven plugins you actually want.
                • Seconded.

                  The one feature I wish Flashblock would add is a whitelist. There are some pieces of flash I'd always like to see, such as navigation bars on some sites. The rest of flash, forget it.

                  Flash is one of the worst things ever to happen to the web. "Look folks, here's another non-standard standard we're going to foist off on you, one complete with its own security holes and annoying behaviors that you (as an end user) can't modify."

                  • Re:Firefox isn't made by Microsoft. (Score:4, Informative)

                    by Akaihiryuu ( 786040 ) on Sunday February 27, 2005 @08:05PM (#11798280)
                    Flashblock has a whitelist...at least the version I have does. The only sites I whitelist are places that I go just to watch flash movies (like homestarrunner.com and joecartoon.com). Other than places like that, I could care less about flash, so flashblock is a godsend.

                • Luckily recent versions of Flashblock include a whitelisting function. So as soon as you realise that you're regularly visiting a site that you do want to see the Flash animstion on, it's a (nearly) simply matter of going into the extension preferences and adding that site to the list.

                  Actually I was really glad to find that they had that. Blocking flash ads and useless presentations is good. But having to click-to-allow every single file on a site you visit specifically for the Flash cartoons is somewhat

        • Re:Firefox isn't made by Microsoft. (Score:5, Informative)

          by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Sunday February 27, 2005 @06:50PM (#11797763) Homepage Journal
          "You're assuming that Firefox has the same amount of bugs and vulnerabilities that IE does and it's not the case."

          It cannot be assumed that FireFox doesn't have the same amount of bugs and vulnerabilities, it hasn't had as much attention paid to it. Frankly, the 'as much' number isn't all that important anyway. It needs to have one vulnerability to be a problem. Suppose a FF extension becomes really popular, and somebody finds an exploit in it?

          I'm not defending IE here, rather I'm pointing out that one should be careful in making broad assumptions about the future.

          • Re:Firefox isn't made by Microsoft. (Score:5, Interesting)

            by mcc ( 14761 ) <amcclure@purdue.edu> on Sunday February 27, 2005 @07:56PM (#11798218) Homepage
            It needs to have one vulnerability to be a problem.

            People say this frequently but it is simply wrong. Imperfect security is not the same thing as bad security.

            From some sort of theoretical perspective one vulnerability and many vulnerabilities are equally exploitable. From a practical perspective things are different. What is necessary for there to be a "problem" is for there to be a large quantity of vulnerable systems of a certain sort installed. There are a number of conditions which must be met to go from "a vulnerability exists" to this point. Among them are the range of installed versions of the system, the range of versions which contain vulnerability, the range and nature of individual vulnerabilities that vulnerability represents, the time between the discovery of the vulnerability and the patches, the patches take to be installed by the end user, and in general the likelihood that a potential exploiter of vulnerability may expect that attempts to exploit will be successful.

            All of these are effected by the frequency and quantity of bugs, not just "has there been a bug ever". In particular, if major security patches are released on a bimonthly basis because the vulnerabilities are many and frequent, it is much harder to get everyone to upgrade and install all of these patches than if there's one big urgent security patch once. (One might say that hacking on this scale is a social process, not a technical one.)

            There is some sort of basic human inability to create a perfectly secure software program. But this does not mean a focus on security cannot be beneficial.
          • It cannot be assumed that FireFox doesn't have the same amount of bugs and vulnerabilities, it hasn't had as much attention paid to it.

            Actually, being open source, it's had far more attention paid to it than IE has.


          • Suppose a FF extension becomes really popular, and somebody finds an exploit in it?

            Wait, wait! Don't tell me! Let me guess!

            Is it..... um, no.
            How about...... no, that's not it.
            Oh, I know...
            You disable the fucking extension!

    • Seems like a silly prediction to me (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 27, 2005 @05:44PM (#11797176)
      Does it make sense to make statements like "yup, that's as many customers as they'll ever have" based on a slowing growth rate, after exactly one major release that the public was aware of?

      Circumstances change over time
      • admittedly, a pretty flimsy basis for any meaningful predicitons...

      • Growth rate still huge (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Mr. Underbridge ( 666784 ) on Sunday February 27, 2005 @10:57PM (#11799639)
        Does it make sense to make statements like "yup, that's as many customers as they'll ever have" based on a slowing growth rate, after exactly one major release that the public was aware of?

        Especially since they're still growing, and incredibly quickly. They picked up about a percentage point a month two months straight. Since it started that at about 4%, they were seeing 25% *monthly* growth. Good god, how long could that have possibly continued?

        Oh, and they only grew 14% this month. So I agree, that kills the whole "as many customers as they'll ever have" crap.

        I mean, really. This is THE open-source success story of the year. How many companies see 14% monthly growth? Legally operating companies? Not between 1998-2000?

        At this point, they'll easily see 7.5% by June. They'll need some continued press, and hopefully a few more killer IE bugs, but 10% by December is a very reachable goal.

        I swear, sometimes I think the asshats around here won't be happy unless IE's at 0% by Thursday.

        • "Especially since they're still growing, and incredibly quickly. They picked up about a percentage point a month two months straight. Since it started that at about 4%, they were seeing 25% *monthly* growth. Good god, how long could that have possibly continued?"

          Thank you so much for that. I was waiting to see how long it would take for someone to point out something obvious even to a mathematically challenged Arts major like me:

          A steady rate of increase will result in lower percentage growth every mon

    • No, the media hype about it is just over.

    • Well, here is how things are for me. My family uses AOL (and I can't get them off it) so they are stuck. I wanted to use Firefox (I gave it a try) and while it was nice, the font rendering on my Windows box paled in comparison to the job IE did (this was on a laptop with a 15" display that had ~102ppi, well above the average ~72, and I had fonts and such turned up one notch). It just wasn't an option to use it every day (I last tried it after the 1.0 release). Now I've gone to a Mac after my old laptop got

      • Re:Is this the end of the ride? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by cloak42 ( 620230 ) on Sunday February 27, 2005 @06:08PM (#11797408) Homepage
        Since both browsers take you too the same Internet, there will be a number (and not an insignificant number) who see "nothing different" and so they stay with IE.

        Exactly why you should get them using Firefox. If they don't see a difference, then that makes it all that much easier for them to switch.

        You know what I do?

        My mom bought a new laptop from Dell recently, and she asked me to drive up and configure it for her, which I did. What I did was to use Windows' "Set Program Access and Defaults" to use Firefox as the default browser, and completely removed IE altogether from menus, the desktop, etc. by telling the configuration program to not allow access to it. This is easier than it seems, since Windows will remove all icons and shortcuts to it so there's no way to bring up IE unless you either run WindowsUpdate or specifically type 'iexplore' into the Run dialog.

        I then installed an IE theme into Firefox and *poof!* To them it runs exactly the same, and nobody is the wiser. If I really wanted to make it transparent, I could've renamed the shortcuts and changed the icons, and I could probably have figured out a way to make it actuallY SAY "Internet Explorer" in the title bar.

        I did the same thing today with a friend of a friend who had so much spyware she couldn't even check her webmail.

        In both cases, I didn't even need to make them THINK they were running IE, as once I told them that they wouldn't notice a difference in their web surfing experience, that firefox had copied over all of their previous settings and cookies, and that they wouldn't be getting any more spyware unknowingly, they were ecstatic. All they really needed was to have their default browser changed and IE removed so they didn't load it without thinking, and they were happy as pigs in shit.

        I really don't think it's too hard to make people understand that the benefits of using a better program easily outweigh the small inconvenience of remembering that it's not called Internet Explorer. Once they understand that all of those annoyances won't be showing up later on, they are more than happy to double-click on a different icon.

        • Re:Is this the end of the ride? (Score:4, Funny)

          by skraps ( 650379 ) on Sunday February 27, 2005 @06:21PM (#11797527)
          ...and at the other end of the spectrum, I have had people put up a fight because "[the toolbar icons] are weird looking". After introducing them to themes, the problem subsided temporarily, but I eventually got the call.

          Them: "This site doesn't look right in this new thingy. How to I open it in the windows one?".
          Me: (lying at this point) "That probably means there is a virus at that site!!! You don't want to go there."
          Them: "But I used to go here all the time!"
          Me: "That's why your computer was so fucked."
          Them: "Oh. Well let's say my bank didn't work right with this one.. then how would I open it in windows?"
          Me: "*click*"

        • See More Internet (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward
          What I do is make the top menu icons small, remove the "bookmark" toolbar, adjust the remaining two bars to be useful.
          Then I show them that you can see more of the screen in Firefox than you can in IE, "You can see more of the internet". This makes Firefox look better on every page they see. As dumb as that is, it works.
          I then do as above, removing shortcuts to IE.
      • Grab "FX-ppc7450-2005.02.27.dmg" for your PowerBook, it'll probably change your mind about Firefox versus Safari! :)

        http://homepage.mac.com/krmathis/

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Is this the end of the ride? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by idlake ( 850372 ) on Sunday February 27, 2005 @06:42PM (#11797696)
      I wouldn't call 15% growth in 5 weeks a "plateau"...
    • Read this book [amazon.com]. Crossing the Chasm - Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Consumers.

      Firefox is still growing, but there WILL be a point when we need to "cross the chasm" and get it out to the mainstream.

      As of right now, Soccer Mom, Joe Sixpack, and NASCAR Dad don't yet know about Firefox. I don't think we want them to yet either -- Version 1.0 is great for all of my friends in Academia, but Version 1.1 will be time when I'm more comfortable with EVERYONE using Firefox.

  • Well duh (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 27, 2005 @05:42PM (#11797145)
    When nothing's driving growth rates, growth rates slow. Firefox had a big publicity push around the 1.0 release. Now that publicity push is dying down. The normal thing that happens when publicity dies down is happening.

    Wait and see what happens when 1.1 is released.

  • Slow Firefox Growth (Score:5, Funny)

    by prisen ( 578061 ) on Sunday February 27, 2005 @05:42PM (#11797148)
    Well, by God, it's Microsoft Anti-Spyware's [slashdot.org] fault!

    Disclaimer: The previous statement was not intended to spread FUD. Results may vary, click link at your own risk, yadda yadda yadda.

  • Mozilla nightlies versus Firefox nightlies (Score:5, Interesting)

    by green pizza ( 159161 ) on Sunday February 27, 2005 @05:44PM (#11797171) Homepage
    To me, the Mozilla nightlies are starting to feel faster than the Firefox nightlies, and certainly faster than Firefox 1.0 and 1.0.1.

    Has anyone else noticed this, or is it just a side effect of my old hardware? It seems like Mozilla 1.8 will be noticeably faster than at least Firefox 1.0 and last night's Firefox Feb 26 build for sure.

    • It's a 1.8 improvement (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 27, 2005 @05:45PM (#11797185)
      They are faster. Firefox 1.1 should have the same changes.

    • Re:Mozilla nightlies versus Firefox nightlies (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 27, 2005 @05:49PM (#11797218)
      It almost seems like bloat is a function of nothing but how many people are working on it. Firefox was created to be the non-bloated Mozilla. When there were few people working on it, that goal was easily attained. Now that it's become the primary development focus, though, I'm hearing allegations it's the bloated one.

      Are small projects just easier to optimize?
      • I think it has something to do with how many users there are. Everyone wants something different so the developers try to meet everyones needs. A lot of features are added, and few will use them all.

        I've not noticed bloat in firefox, I think extensions take care of that. You only need to install the bits you use.

      • Interesting theory, but wrong in this case (Score:5, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 27, 2005 @06:20PM (#11797524)
        It has nothing to do with bloat or the number of people working on the project. Instead the speed difference has everything to do with Mozilla (specifically Gecko, the rendering engine) getting much faster between Mozilla 1.7 (off which Firefox is based) and Mozilla 1.8.

    • Yup, it's true - less COM (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 27, 2005 @06:16PM (#11797486)
      As you know, Firefox is based off the Mozilla 1.7 branch. The Mozilla devs did a lot of work 'deCOMtaminating' Mozilla for 1.8. Essentially they're removing XPCOM interfaces from various performance-critical parts of the app, allowing tighter binding + faster execution. It makes a huge difference, especially on slower hardware. Firefox 1.1 will be based off Mozilla 1.8, so it will take advantage of the streamlining.
    • My debian just updated from Mozilla 1.7.3 to 1.7.5, and there was a -huge- increase in responsiveness, before I start loading insane web pages. (And instead of allocating >150MB RAM after IPL, it now seems to use on the order of 3-4MB, at least until pages are loaded. This makes a -really- major difference in operations when you're on a computer with 128MB physical and 512MB in the swap.

  • Mozilla still good (Score:5, Informative)

    by JaxWeb ( 715417 ) on Sunday February 27, 2005 @05:46PM (#11797188) Homepage Journal
    There is a lot of talk about Firefox, and everyone gets very excited about it, but Mozilla standard is still very good. Personally, under GNU/Linux, I prefer it to Firefox (Under Windows I prefer Firefox, however).

    My sister uses GNU/Linux (Mandrake, with KDE) on her computer (No Windows) and prefers it to her old Windows ME OS. Mozilla was part of the reason - it is easy to use, helpful, securer and just makes sense. I'm not saying Firefox isn't any of these, but on Linux, I think it looks a little "Out of place", and Mozilla does not. My sister also preferred Mozilla to both Konqueror and Firefox.

    Anyway, just wanted to point out that Mozilla itself exists for more than just feeding Firefox.
    • Agreed. I have Firefox installed as well, but I find Mozilla to be faster for certain behaviors. In particular, I use ctrl-click to open links in new tabs (in the background), and Mozilla does it very quickly with no loss of response. Firefox seems to pause, waiting for some sort of website response before the gui starts responding in the original window again.

    • Re:Mozilla still good (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Wow, is your sister available?
    • That's an insult to Linux. Even my old tandy calculator can beat Windows ME in useability. :( Getting someone to prefer Slackware 1.0 over Windows ME is no major achievement.

  • What about these statistics? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by lasindi ( 770329 ) on Sunday February 27, 2005 @05:46PM (#11797190) Homepage
    According to these statistics [w3schools.com] Firefox is already over 20% marketshare. Why is there such a discrepancy between the two?

    lasindi

    • Re:What about these statistics? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The statistics on the w3schools.com site are just statistics on the people who visited that particular site.

      It isn't really surprising that the people who visit a web developers site tend to use Firefox more than the general population does.

  • Growth is phenomenally fast & not really slowi (Score:5, Informative)

    by fname ( 199759 ) on Sunday February 27, 2005 @05:50PM (#11797232) Journal
    It's no surprise that the percentage growth of Firefox in terms of marketshare is slowing down, this is the a natural part of the growth curve for any new poduct. 15% monthly growth is phenonemal, and it is literally an unsustainable growth rate. I'd be more interested to know the growth in raw numbers of new Firefox users; that number is likely almost exactly the same in January than December.

    Here's my math. 0.15*(1.22)=.19, so 19% vs. 22% growth in market share from the December base, but the market is probably 1% larger. The way I see it, the number of new Firefox users is down probably 10% from January to February. Then remember that there were 3 fewer days in February than in January, which would account for the 10% difference. In other words, the number of new Firefox users per day stayed almost exactly the same from January to February. Maybe someone who RTFA can tell us what that number of new uses/day is and how it compares to earlier months.

    The growth is remarkably fast, and may also be remarkably stable. How many more months would Firefox need to reach 10% market share?

  • Not quite accurate (Score:5, Informative)

    by MrWa ( 144753 ) on Sunday February 27, 2005 @05:50PM (#11797233) Homepage
    The summary is not quite accurate regarding Firefox 1.1 being based on Mozilla 1.8; my understanding of the roadmap [mozilla.org] is that Gecko 1.8 - which is used in Mozilla - will form the base of the Firefox 1.1 program. Maybe just a technicality but it is different to say the base on which the programs will built is the same, rather than Firefox will be a stripped down version of Mozilla.

  • It will pick up once the corps grab it (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Jjeff1 ( 636051 ) on Sunday February 27, 2005 @05:51PM (#11797249)
    One of my larger customers, with some 3000+ desktops, has asked about switching to firefox. Now, there are always some web sites and web based apps that require IE, which makes this a pain. But given the amount of time we spend cleaning spyware from machines, I think I can live with it, I don't know if the users can.

    In any case, a coporate wide switch won't happen overnight. I'd expect to see the next 6 months or so start to see more corporations install linux enterprise wide. Those same corporations will complain about sites that don't work in Firefox, which helps fuel the uptake.

    Also note to FF people - one of the reasons cited for not installing FF enterprise wide was the lack of central patching and policy control. This means patching security holes and forcing down settings to the clients; from my desk, without spending hours writing scripts.
    • Well - we run a standard build of Win2K over many thousands of desktops. It's not perfect, but we have very few spyware issues. Why?

      - ActiveX is switched off and the security settings are tied down and cannot be adjusted without a) admin rights b) knowledge of regedit

      - All web access is controlled through a webproxy running websense filters. You can't get to pr0n sites from work (I know - I've tried :-) )
    • For cetnralized Linux distribution, just add `apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade` and run it from cron. Then just maintain the central repository of approved apps.
    • Problem is, a lot of corporations use ActiveX for their internal web apps. That of course locks them into IE...

  • Some people are just stubborn (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Darth Maul ( 19860 ) on Sunday February 27, 2005 @05:55PM (#11797297)
    I know quite a few people at my office that just won't try Firefox. Even though they know IE doesn't render correctly, even though they know that it allows all kinds of spyware, and even though they constantly have to close popups. They just won't do it! It's like they are not trying it for spite or something. Really weird. It's not like these people like Microsoft, but they are not just ignorant users that think the blue E is the IntarWeb.

    What can be done about these kinds of users? Is this the vast middle-ground of IE users that just won't switch?

    • Its because... (Score:4, Funny)

      by jrushton ( 806560 ) on Sunday February 27, 2005 @06:08PM (#11797407)
      Its because some people dont like to think their stupid and dont know what theyre doing, and the more you point out to them that you know vastly more - the more theyll stick their heads in the sand. Let them be sypwared and laugh from your open source throne.
    • Show them their favourite sites in Firefox. Maybe they think that, no matter what you say, everything will look a bit different, or a lot websites of don't work, or they will have learn to do everything a different way or something. Maybe they think it's like someone saying that Linux is just like Windows to use: kind of true for some, but a bit misleading.

      Drive home the concept that it's the same web they're looking at whatever they use.

      Oh, and show them a site they like but that has really bad ads, wi

    • Re:Some people are just stubborn (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Jeremi ( 14640 ) on Sunday February 27, 2005 @06:57PM (#11797818) Homepage
      Even though they know IE doesn't render correctly, even though they know that it allows all kinds of spyware, and even though they constantly have to close popups. They just won't do it! It's like they are not trying it for spite or something.


      I think typically this sort of behaviour is a result of previous bad bad experiences leading to a "if it ain't completely broke, then for God's sake don't touch anything!" mentality. People are so afraid that their computer will stop working that they don't want to take any risks at all. (keep in mind that these people have no way to fix their computer if it does stop working, so this attitude isn't necessarily a bad one!)

    • Yeah, a lot of people will resist trying the latest new thing, especially if "everybody else is doing it." If they see it in the newspaper, computer experts recommend it, and their friends tell them it's great, they turn and start running the other direction. It's a weird part of human psychology. I remember about four years ago, long after IE had won the browser wars, a lot of people were still clinging to Netscape 4, despite it being old, buggy, and broken. If IE hadn't been installed by default (on macs

    • Done that. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by LuckyStarr ( 12445 )
      Replaced IE with Mozilla in the company I used to work for. Management wouldnt let me so I replaced the Mozilla icon with the blue E and installed Mozillas IE skin. Nobody realised that there was any difference, though management surfed on with IE.

      And no, I wasnt fired for changing to Moz. I quit.

  • Browser Speed Benchmarks (Score:5, Interesting)

    by telstar ( 236404 ) on Sunday February 27, 2005 @05:59PM (#11797334)
    It's worth checking out recent browser-speed benchmarks. The new beta of Operate placed very well in terms of performance:
    Browser Speed Analysis [howtocreate.co.uk]

  • You know, Firefox's tabs convinced my buddy (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 27, 2005 @06:04PM (#11797370)
    I have this buddy with Windows XP. You know, the kind of person who doesn't understnad just how dangerous .exe files are. As expected, this system was full of all kinds of spyware by the time I got to it. It wasn't even possible to open regedit; a spyware program was killing it. I couldn't even download Firefox from IE; I had to use the old ftp client to ftp over to ftp.mozilla.org to get the program.

    So, I get and download Firefox for him. I explained to him "OK, I'm going to reinstall this system and not give you the admin password when I get time. In the meantime, use this to browse the web". I got rid of the IE icon from his desktop and replaced it with Firefox using the IE icon.

    A couple of days later, my friend says he wants to keep Firefox. He told me the tabbed browsing was "tight".

    I think Firefox is currently the best open source application for non-technical people out there. It is 100% open source and better than the competition (better CSS than IE; more security than IE; more feautures than IE).

  • 3 things from galeon I miss in firefox (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 27, 2005 @06:06PM (#11797394)
    My favourite browser is still galeon.

    There are 3 things that have been in galeon for years and are not in Firefox yet:

    1. Tab detach feature

    2. password manager not based on autofilling (which is dissallowed by some banks thus my on-lin bank site has password unmanageble by firefox [operations requires one-time passwords and tokens so no, there is no extra security in that ]).

    3. sessions - saved in given point of time (windwos with tabs) or when browser crashes

    Also there is one feature needed:

    4. disabling flash player - same way as hjava.

  • In other news.. (Score:2, Funny)

    by grazzy ( 56382 )
    Microsoft windows usage up to 110%.
    Google announches they now handle 112% of the nets searches.

    This just in: Slashdot announches a new strategy to deliver 120% correct stories, no more dupes, fact-errors or posting lame stories about fake screenshots.

  • US users only (Score:2, Insightful)

    by camcorder ( 759720 )
    Since when US users reflect the all users around the world? Considering amount of spam coming from US, users from different places of the world are more careful in selecting secure software than US computer users.
  • 90% for all variations of IE is a lot more than I'm seeing. My tiny website is hardly a cross-section of the web, but my IE penetration is 75% for the past month or so (it's been hovering around there), down from an average last year of 86%, so that's not bad. I'm getting all variations of Firefox at about 7 1/4% ( 1 1/8% for pre 1.0 - which says something. I'm not sure what though.)

    And that's not counting the fact that robots account for 5% of my traffic. If you subtract Robots, that brings Firefox

  • Need a little help here, I'm looking for a firefox theme which emulates IEs look EXACTLY. I have to set up a friend's mothers PC in the next few days and I figure an IE theme would be the best option here. So could someone point me in the direction I need to look please.

    • Here (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 27, 2005 @06:33PM (#11797619)
      IE Theme [prodigy.net].

    • Re:slightly off topic (Score:3, Informative)

      by skraps ( 650379 )
      The "look" and "feel" will become out of sync if you do that. For example, IE's toolbars have little gripper visuals on the left-hand side. You can grab those with your mouse and rearrange the toolbars. You could reproduce the visual on Firefox, but that would be kinda lame considering they wouldn't be functional. That said, good luck and let me know if you find one... I could use it too.
  • Looks like no one is using the Mozilla Suite now, but soon everyone will be using Fx.
    Firefox is not as geeky as it was when I started using it at version ~0.6 beta.

    Maybe it's time to switch back to Mozilla so I can continue to use a browser no one else has.
    I could get round the bloatedness issue by compiling a version with stuff like the mail component left out...

  • Why Firefox downloads are slowing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by randomErr ( 172078 ) <ervin,kosch&gmail,com> on Sunday February 27, 2005 @08:11PM (#11798325) Journal
    It simple why Firefox's usage growth has slow down to 15% (Jan-Feb) from 22% (Dec-Jan):
    1. Februry is a short month
    2. New releases of Firefox updates have all but stopped. Its been about 4 months since the last update
    3. Lack of helper apps/extensions - Not much new (that is publized on places like /.)
    Firefox is solid. Early adopters have it and are happy. No new updates, so new reason to download it.

    No one really knows a whole lot about the new extensions because Firefox relies almost exclusively on the OSS forword of mouth. The current batch of extensions are not quite primetime so no one is pushing them.

    Firefox is solid, but its reached a platue where Netscape was at 2.0. Now Firefox has to take to the next level with better advertising and new features, or fall between the cracks, just like its older brother.

  • Deployment not easy enough (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rduke15 ( 721841 ) <(rduke15) (at) (gmail.com)> on Sunday February 27, 2005 @08:12PM (#11798330)
    It's not easy enough to deploy Firefox (or Thunderbird) in a corporate environment. And/or it's not documented well enough.

    Next week, I would like to install both apps on 12 desktops running Win2K and XP.

    12 is not 1000. I cannot spend 2 days finding how to do it, testing it, correcting, etc. I could install manually, but doing 12 times the same clicking around doesn't sound like fun (I'm not a mouse clicking fan either).

    While I want settings to be in the user's profile, I need to make sure the web cache is elsewhere and isn't copied through the network at every logon/logoff.

    I want to get rid of the moronic paths both apps use with "default" and "some-random-string".

    I would like stuff in the Default Profile, so new users get it automatically.

    This sort of thing doesn't look easy and straight-forward enough yet, and I'm sure that it is what is keeping many admins from deploying it on their desktops.

    I will try it anyway, but I won't be able to bill the time I will have to spend researching how to do it right. Especially since the client didn't ask me to do that anyway. They are happy with MSIE. So I will spend time on my own cost, just to find how to install something that will hopefully generate less work for me in the future because I won't have to spend so much time cleaning infected machines because of MSIE.

    I hope FFDeploy [dbltree.com] will help, but there doesn't seem to be such a thing for Thunderbird.

    Last but not least: Firefox and Thunderbird are terrible memory hogs, with Firefox sometimes growing to insane memory usage levels (75 MB right now, but I've seen it go to 150!), and sometimes also crashing consuming 99% CPU. Fortunately, this last problem doesn't happen very often, but I will hate it when users on whom I forced Firefox call me on the phone because it crashed, so I can tell them to "press Ctrl-Alt-Del, select Firefox, click End Task, restart Firefox but-you-know-it's-a-much-better-and-more-secure-br owser"

    I do believe it's a much better browser, and it's my default browser since it was called Phoenix, but instead of contemplating statisics, I think there is still a lot work to do to make it even better, and to help administartors actually deploying it.

    • Thing with FF is that you can just dump the contents of the program files firefox folder from one machine to the other.

      Once run for the first time, it'll add the profile.

      Use a batch file and do it through the login script.

      Then there's only a few steps - change the icons, which you can copy into the profile. This will get you at least part way...

  • E4X looks pretty sweet (Score:3, Interesting)

    by epall ( 632054 ) on Sunday February 27, 2005 @10:44PM (#11799552) Homepage
    I checked out the docs for ECMAScript for XML and it looks like this is a really cool feature! Now instead of big long yucky DOM calls we get simple parent.child.grandchild access to XML data. This is going to be a boon for people doing Ajax, since it's basically all XML data.
    • This is going to be a boon for people doing
      Ajax, since it's basically all XML data.


      Please don't perpetuate the name. People have been doing this for years, and it was never called "Ajax."

      Adaptive Path did not invent this method.

  • Statistics (Score:3, Informative)

    by Tom ( 822 ) on Monday February 28, 2005 @01:49AM (#11800619) Homepage Journal
    I've done my share, how's everyone else doing:

    1 120850 55.17% Mozilla/5.0
    2 76857 35.08% MSIE 6.0
    3 5897 2.69% Opera 7.54

    But - ah - different statistics. Same site, mind you, same logfiles, just a different tool doing the stats:

    Firefox No 2287166 39.1 %
    MS Internet Explorer No 2202449 37.6 %
    Mozilla No 556825 9.5 %
    Opera No 515143 8.8 %

    Now that's a major difference, isn't it? Ah well, as long as Firefox is #1 there, I'm happy.

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