Firefox 3 Already Rules the Roost 591
Barence writes in with a data point on Firefox 3 adoption: it's been available for 10 days, and already one site is seeing 55% of its Firefox-using visitors on version 3. "Microsoft still has three out of ten people running an old version of its browser more than 18 months after Internet Explorer 7 launched, while Firefox has converted more than half of its users to the latest version in just over a week. That should set a few alarm bells ringing in Redmond."
And the one site is (Score:5, Funny)
mozilla.org
Why alarm bells? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:5, Insightful)
Note the implicit constraint on operating system.
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I really doubt the interface has much to do with it, the intranet explanation holds more water.
IE7 is simply not backwards-compatible with the psuedo-CSS in IE6 (which is a good thing, overall). Most of the well documented IE6 "hacks" break horribly in IE7, so if a site wasn't properly coded in the first place (conditional comments and so on), it could require a fairly heavy overhaul for modern browsers.
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:5, Interesting)
This doesn't really seem like it should be a mystery.
Tom is a computer guy. Some of his top visited sites are sourceforge, slashdot and his own LEGO Mindstorms blog. His home machine runs the latest nightly build of Linux and he can speak fluent hexadecimal. He uses Firefox because he detests the business practices of Microsoft, he appreciates the interface design and standards-compliance of FF, and understands the importance of supporting open source programming.
Harry is a guy who uses a computer. Some of his top visited sites are the Microsoft Start Page and Yahoo! Games. His home machine is a color television. He uses IE because, to him, the little "e" icon is what his trainer told him to click on to get on the internet.
Which if these folks, do you think, is going to have upgraded to the latest version of his web browser?
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, but I'm talking more about Dick who surfs during his lunch break and uses whatever browser his IT manager tells him to use.
Harry has already gotten his IE7 through Windows Update. The IE6 holdouts are mostly corporate and maybe people with poorly pirated versions of XP.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
...it could require a fairly heavy overhaul for modern browsers.
That's absolutely correct. I'm currently working on a web application at the corporation I work for. It's been so badly coded (long before I arrived) that making it compatible with IE7 (not to mention Firefox or any other browsers) would be a nightmare that would probably take our development team a year to complete. And I'm not certain I entirely agree with you on the interface point. I think major interface changes between versions of a program are huge deterrents to upgrading for many people.
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:4, Informative)
Ding, ding. Mod Parent up. S/He's right.
I work as a tech writer/web page coder consultant and mostly work at large companies (20K employees or more). I've yet to go to a company that has upgraded to IE7. I think the reason is two fold. First off they're using an older content managment system for their internet, so they'd have to upgrade that as well as make sure the current web pages still work (trust me they probably won't--mostly because they're coded to work well in IE6.) In fact, the company I work for presently is still using Windows 2000. And IE7 doesn't work with 2000. Most of these companies were going to skip over XP, thinking the next version out would be more stable and secure! Boy is that not going to happen! So for the near future I don't see them upgrading to anything. Yes, IE7 plays better with proper CSS, but it's another headache for coders because they have to code for IE6 as well.
I do have one big gripe with FF3--there's a bug where the tabs are not saved when you close the browser--even with the option set to such, it will open my home page, not the tabs I previously had open. So now I only have one browser upgraded until they get that fixed.
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:4, Interesting)
Come to think of it, that'll be a good comeback to the snarky "Oh, TFA has ads? I didn't notice, cause I use adblock" comments... "Oh, you use adblock? How quaint, I trained my mind to do that ages ago."
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole "subliminal" thing strikes me as a giant load of hogwash.
Just think about it.
Coca Cola and Pepsi use lots of money in advertising. The fact that they are leaders in the world, even the fact that people actually buy sugared tap water must mean something.
Nike sells sports clothes at designer prices, and people actually buy them and wear them. To think that advertising has nothing to with it is nonsense.
People respond to advertising, to think you are so special that you don't is both arrogant and naive.
Aside from that, I don't care either about ads, I have learned to live with them, but I don't think they do not affect me.
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:5, Insightful)
When faced with 10 different choices, and having no data by which to differentiate them, humans choose the familiar. If you've never had a Coke in your life, but you've seen the logo everywhere you go for a decade, when faced with 10 unknown colas and no opportunity to do research, you're most likely to pick the Coke because it feels like a known element even though it isn't.
No one is immune to that. Including you.
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:4, Insightful)
And so will you, with your statements.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Correlation is not causation, and I think there is some legitimate doubt as to whether advertising, subliminal or otherwise, really does work. I wish I weren't at work and could take the time to google it more thoroughly, but I was under the impression that current research showed advertising's primary effect is just to brand a product, and that the advsertising only gets you to recognize a brand, not to prefer it. In other words, Coca Cola's advertising, doesn't make you want more Coca cola, it just makes
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe I like the taste of that sugared tap water, you insensitive clod.
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:4, Insightful)
I have touble with both of your examples...
1. Coca-Cola freaking tastes really good. I don't care if it had a big picture of a turd on the front... I would still drink it like crazy.
2. Nike makes really good products. Their sports gear is really high quality. Sure, some of the stuff is priced way higher than what it's worth... but most of it is high quality sports gear that's worth it's pricetag.
People respond to _good products_. Advertising really only helps (for me anyway) with the _initial_ trial. That is, if I had never heard of Coca-Cola before, I might never pick up a bottle in the first place to find out how good it is. But after that initial "tasting"... it's all on the product's merit.
I'm sure that there are people out there that are complete sheep... but there are a lot that aren't.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
He didn't say people don't respond to ads, or even that *he* doesn't respond to ads. He said the subliminal thing is hogwash.
Coke ads try to associate Coke with a good time, with youth, and with friendship. What, exactly, would they stick in there "subliminally" that they aren't trying to create an association with...liminally?
Not to mention that every study of "subliminal" advertising has debunked it as BS. I'll take my psuedo-science on astrology.com; I'd rather not have to deal with it on /.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
For clarity's sake, what you're describing is perhaps a subconcious effect, but not a subliminal one. You don't *know* when you've been subjected to a subliminal message. From the GP:
Since the GP *knows* he sees the ads, they are, by definition, not subliminal. Now, if the ads have an effect on him that he's not consciously aware of (e.g., he sees a bunch of ads, never thinks "hey, I'll really ought to buy some coke",
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:5, Funny)
Not to mention that every study of "subliminal" advertising has debunked it as BS. I'll take my psuedo-science on astrology.com; I'd rather not have to deal with it on /.
*I* spotted the breasts in your post, sneaky.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
> 1. Coca-Cola freaking tastes really good
Compared to what? When blind fold tests are done to the people, they rarely know the difference between their favorite brand and any other cheap random brand. Often the cheap brand wins.
> 2. Nike makes really good products.
Again, would you really know the difference if logos would be removed?
> I'm sure that there are people out there that are complete sheep... but there are a lot that aren't.
If you ask a sheep whether he/she is a sheep, do you really think
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
1. Coca-Cola freaking tastes really good
Compared to what? When blind fold tests are done to the people, they rarely know the difference between their favorite brand and any other cheap random brand. Often the cheap brand wins.
I'm not buying it. I have tried the double blind taste test with soda. I came out 100% on picking out Coke, Pepsi, and store brand. Most of my friends that tried the test did also. As for which they liked the most... It was split between Coke and Pepsi. Not one chose the store brand. I might believe that fountain soda could produce the results that you claim, but that is because fountain soda machines are usually horribly miscalibrated, and it is not uncommon for the soda to taste like cleaning soluti
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:5, Funny)
There are ads on the internet?
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:5, Insightful)
how about the flash ads trying to be load from a server that has been turned into a smokeing ruin and locks up the whole page while the browser vaining waits for it to download?
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is like trying to convince someone to use a pen instead of opening a vein with a razor so that they can write with their own blood. Clearly this guy enjoys the pain of using Internet Explorer.
Seriously, Firefox is faster, uses less memory, has tons of cool add-ons, and it is less likely to attract mal-ware. Heck, it even has a cooler name and logo. Even over a modem Firefox is worth the download.
So far bigstrats arguments for IE have been things like "I filter out ads in my head," and "I don't mind wasting time waiting for Internet Explorer." Wow, that sounds like a nifty deal. I think I'll switch to IE too.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't mind ads. What I mind is intrusive ads - like the ones where they put a major overlay (that fails to dismiss in some browsers). Or the ones hosted on some obscure adserver that fails to respond in reasonable time hindering the browser in rendering the page. Or the adsites that have been spewing up virus infected ads.
I never block locally hosted ads - unless they are flashy or intrusive.
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:5, Insightful)
I just ignore ads, and do so with ease. I never understood the need for an addon to do it, but maybe I'm just really good at ignoring ads or something.
Are you so good at ignoring ads that they no longer are transferred over the wire? AdBlock is. I'm on a modem on some antique, crap copper, and without AdBlock Plus my ~26.4kbps modem connection would be unusable for general web surfing.
I used to also use imagelikeopera, but it doesn't work on FF3 yet (or does it? someone please tell me if it does.) And of course I use noscript, which is pretty much 100% protection from automatic attacks from malicious javascript on first visit (although you can of course accidentally permit something which will hose you, or be hosed by a site owned after you first used it and decided to allow it permanently.)
But hey, I am impressed that your psychic powers permit you to prevent all that data from being transferred over your link... or jealous that you have so much bandwidth that you don't care. Of course, you're wasting bandwidth for no good reason, which makes you kind of a dick, but I guess 2girls1cup has done more senseless damage to internet throughput than you, so carry on.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
So when you come across a site that has content that you enjoy, but also contains annoying ads
Then I have a decision... but I also have yet to have this happen. I have found a pretty high correlation between sites with terrible ads and sites with completely idiotic (in my view, at least) content.
That's quite a minority opinion, and yet you don't understand why people don't agree with you?
I understand it perfectly well. I just don't agree.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Come to think of it, that'll be a good comeback to the snarky "Oh, TFA has ads? I didn't notice, cause I use adblock" comments... "Oh, you use adblock? How quaint, I trained my mind to do that ages ago."
When they convinced you that that was true, that was when you bec
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:4, Funny)
I just ignore ads, and do so with ease. I never understood the need for an addon to do it, but maybe I'm just really good at ignoring ads or something. Some can be really nasty, but the majority I run into are easily filtered out mentally.
Come to think of it, that'll be a good comeback to the snarky "Oh, TFA has ads? I didn't notice, cause I use adblock" comments... "Oh, you use adblock? How quaint, I trained my mind to do that ages ago."
Really, the power of your mind truly amazes me.
I have never been able to ignore those lovely ads that cover half the page I'm trying to view with the power of my mind alone.
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:5, Funny)
IE7 and Firefox are basically equal in terms of features, unless you care about add-ons (and personally, I have yet to see one FF addon that excites me). Firefox used to be better than IE, mostly because it had tabs. Now IE has tabs, and the playing field is level again.
WOW. Clearly, you're a Slider. What colour is the Golden Gate Bridge in your reality? Did Bush get reelected there? And are they still coming out with new Firefly episodes there?
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:4, Informative)
What colour is the Golden Gate Bridge!? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:5, Funny)
IE7 is sooooooooo much slower to respond than Firefox
Hmm, it responds instantly for me:
But I have to say that it seems to be missing a feature or two compared to firefox. Like the ability to browse the web, just fer starters. :)
Re: (Score:3)
Obviously you're simply here to waste time
Well, duh. That's what we do here.
I'm sure you're thoroughly amused right about now.
Yes, the classic internet reflex: call a guy a troll because you disagree with him. Can't say there's anything that pisses me off more on the internet than intolerance like that. Whatever.
Can't get Flash to work in IE7, so you do use FF on occasion, but IE7 is still at least as good as FF and preferable.
Yes. I happen to know that Flash does, in fact, work in IE7. I've had other IE7 installs in the past (including my past Windows install before I upgraded hard drives) that used Flash just fine. Thus, it isn't a problem with IE7 itself, it's a problem with some specific thing in my current
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:5, Interesting)
IE7 and Firefox are basically equal in terms of features, unless you care about add-ons (and personally, I have yet to see one FF addon.......
There is no way this is not a troll. If not, I am thoroughly dumbfounded how anyone can fail to find value in the pure nuggets of gold that are ff extensions.
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:5, Funny)
I have an opinion right now. Considering the number of posts you've made in this thread, and the lack of anything substantial being said other than to counter what others have said...IMHO you are indeed trolling.
Opinions are indeed wonderful aren't they?
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:4, Interesting)
Adblock and NoScript aside (and with them shorter loading times) the spell checker is still a killer feature for me.
Re:Why alarm bells? (Score:5, Interesting)
Do I need to continue?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Or the fact that the "refresh" button is completely separate from the other buttons and there's no way to move it? Or that it takes a registry hack to get the menu bar to show up where it belongs? Or the fact that you *still* can't delete cookies for just certain sites?
IE7's UI is several huge steps backwards, for no apparent reason. Their rendering engine is marginally improved, but Firefox is *definitely* the better browser as far as usability goes.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
It has a reason--it's the bastard step-child of the new Office Ribbon Bar...
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't usually comment on moderation, but I will this time. This guy should have been modded funny. Firefox started from zero, a dead stop. Don't talk about the Suite because as a Suite user, we had a couple million users tops. Firefox after 5 years is at hundreds of millions. IE started with Windows 95 and came bundled with 98, so that's a a couple hundred million without the user having to do ANYTHING, while they had to actively go and get Firefox. That'
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe if you WERE a developer, like I am, then you would understand how innovative FF has been and how much their "lack of innovation" has forced IE to be half as decent as it is today.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Some reputable sites have mistakenly included ads that try to attack you. I prefer not loading ads instead of having to always be on edge so that I don't mistakenly go to an attack site. With AdBlock+ and NoScript, I'm pretty safe.
Re:And the one site is (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, it's www.pcpro.co.uk (TFA's site)
File under "So what?" (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft still has three out of ten people running an old version of its browser more than 18 months after Internet Explorer 7 launched, while Firefox has converted more than half of its users to the latest version in just over a week. That should set a few alarm bells ringing in Redmond.
Huh? This means absolutely nothing. If you want to give us data that's meaningful, tell us how many converts to IE7 there were in the first week, or wait 1.5 years and see how many people are using FF3 versus old versions. Then we'd have some comparable data. A rapid expansion right off the bat, for example, does not necessarily indicate that the final tally will be in FF's favor.
Furthermore, a decent chunk of IE users are the "computer = magic black box" type, who use IE because it's what came on the computer. If those people aren't doing Windows Updates (likely enough, imo), they won't get IE7. By contrast, the vast majority of Firefox users use it by choice, not because it was there. Those people are far more likely to manually upgrade.
This whole "data point" is utterly worthless for determining what's actually going on.
IE - It's not for savvy users anymore (Score:5, Interesting)
Look, my father-in-law knows NOTHING about computing, but a LOT about using the Internet. We bought him a computer several years ago. His browser?
IE5, of course. Why? Because that's what was installed on the machine when we bought it.
The majority of people who THINK about what browser they use, use something other than IE. Firefox 3 is obviously a great leap forward for the Mozilla brand, and...well, there you go.
Re:IE - It's not for savvy users anymore (Score:5, Funny)
>>IE5, of course. Why? Because that's what was installed on the machine when we bought it.
Please have a talk with your father-in-law.
Its for the good of the internet.
Re:IE - It's not for savvy users anymore (Score:4, Informative)
Everything is fine until they want to copy some text from the web page and paste it to a document (simliarly to what you can do with IE6 and Word) without losing the format...
I just copied your comment from FF2 to Open Office and I can see the formatting. Is this a problem specific to Xandros? Incidentally, copying from Konqueror to Open Office preserves formatting as well.
Lame story. (Score:4, Funny)
Booga-booga!
Which one works? (Score:5, Insightful)
In our business environment, we will not upgrade to IE7 because it breaks business applications. No such limitations on FF3 (of course the apps don't work in FF2/3).
Maybe if MS didn't break the non-standardized technologies that they release and companies build apps on, the community might upgrade faster.
Re:Which one works? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe if companies didn't build applications on brain-dead, proprietary, single-vendor platforms they wouldn't run into these kinds of problems.
Re:Which one works? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's getting better now, but what frustrated me a lot was when Microsoft encouraged developers (perhaps sabotage is a closer word) to make applications IE-only even when there was no reason to whatsoever.
Back in 2000 I joined a small startup company (2 developers total) primarily to work on an ASP/VBScript application that included a lot of Javascript. The other developer who'd been there before me had evidently been pasting and adapting some of the examples from MSDN, because the majority of the Javascript code was using () round brackets instead of [] square brackets as an array lookup operator. (Square brackets being the standard universally supported way, whereas round brackets adding no benefit yet at the same time breaking support for every browser except MSIE.) From there, the broken code had been duplicated and re-used and adapted to other things all over the place.
It probably hadn't been the brightest thing to have copied this code verbatim, but it was rather silly and (imho) malicious that it was even expressed that way within MSDN in the first place. The fact that these little and rather pointless things in the MS documentation broke compatibility with everything except Microsoft, for no benefit, meant that the whole product was restricted in that way simply because someone had naively trusted the documentation, or possibly wanted to save a few minutes early on. From that point on, trying to convince managers that it was a good idea to spend time cleaning up the code was very difficult, and didn't amount to much.
Lately I've been doing some DotNet development and although there are the obvious things that are incompatible (like Silverlight), there doesn't seem to be as much blatant sabotage of people's applications to make the Microsoft only. An ASP.Net web application, if you stick to the basics of HTML, Javascript, etc, without throwing in any proprietary stuff, will tend to work nicely in a lot of browsers.
70% 55% (Score:4, Funny)
So in two more weeks, 165% of firefox users will be at version 3. Let's see the numbers after 18 months.
Anyway, my work machine still has IE6, because they're not bothering to upgrade it on the corporate servers and I use nothing but Firefox on it anyway.
Explanation: IE 7 requires Windows XP SP2 (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft still has three out of ten people running an old version of its browser more than 18 months after Internet Explorer 7 launched
IE 7 was never backported to anything before Windows XP Service Pack 2. How many Windows users are stuck on operating systems prior to Windows XP, such as Windows 2000 or Windows 9x? Like IE 7, Firefox 3 doesn't work on Windows 9x, but unlike IE 7, Firefox works on Windows 2000.
Or, Firefox 2 sucked. (Score:3, Insightful)
Or, maybe Firefox 2 sucked that much. I was running the Firefox 3 alphas long ago, only because the RAM situation in 2.x was so atrocious. I had to upgrade my wife as well, because I got sick of hearing from the living room, "I thought you said Firefox was better?" as her system ground to a halt.
Re:Or, Firefox 2 sucked. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Or, Firefox 2 sucked. (Score:5, Funny)
Isn't upgrading your wife a little expensive?
You can run Wife 2.0 and Wife 3.0 beta at the same time if you're careful.
Re:Or, Firefox 2 sucked. (Score:5, Funny)
if you're already on 2.0, chances are you're not the careful type.
3.0b is also prone to consuming larger and larger amounts of resources and clock cycles.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
That feature of the Mormon plugin has been deprecated.
That's not an upgrade, that's my wife! (Score:4, Funny)
Isn't upgrading your wife a little expensive?
Yeah, but many people feel it's worth it since the upgraded version supports plug-ins.
Not too surprising... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Microsoft still has three out of ten people running an old version of its browser more than 18 months after Internet Explorer 7 launched, while Firefox has converted more than half of its users to the latest version in just over a week. That should set a few alarm bells ringing in Redmond."
Whatever is the choice of most businesses is always going to lag behind in adoption.
Case in point, my current client is a Fortune 100 company that mandates IE6 as the browser of choice and is planning to move to IE7 sometime next year. There's thousands and thousands of people right there still using IE6 essentially through no choice of their own.
Big, non-software business is always about the last to adopt any technology.
The reason why (Score:3, Insightful)
Firefox users, on the other hand, tend to be more computer savvy. They are the kind who pay attention to tech news, and most likely they've known about Firefox 3 since before it came out.
That's one clever fox! (Score:4, Funny)
Not apples to apples comparison (Score:5, Insightful)
While I am a happy FF3 user myself, comparing the adoption rates of Firefox and IE is misleading. IE is installed when the computer arrives, and the people still using it either:
1. Don't care what they use
2. Have no choice since it is locked down by work
3. Prefer it over the alternatives.
People in buckets 1 and 2 (which I would argue is the vast majority of IE users) are unlikely to upgrade IE beyond whatever version is on their machine now. People in group 3 are the only voluntary upgraders to IE7.
In contrast, Firefox has the same three buckets, but since it is not preinstalled very few are going to fall into buckets 1 and 2. Almost everyone using it is using it because they want it, and that means that they are far more likely to upgrade to the latest and greatest.
My own site stats (Score:5, Interesting)
PS Sorry for the small sizes of the graphs. Gnumeric was having a bad day :(
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
For my small site I'm at 42% for Firefox 2 and 17% for Firefox 3, everything else is basically IE and a small representative for Safari.
Another stat (Score:5, Informative)
Just another statistic: if I have my dates right, it took IE7 2.5 months to reach 100 million users [msdn.com]. Firefox is currently at 23 million [mozilla.com] and given the current rate (1080/min), FF3 on pace to beat that - even without being distributed as part of an OS (granted, IE7 was only part of volume licensing at that date, and not retail sales).
stats from a site for a non-technical audience (Score:5, Interesting)
In the last few months, I have been seeing an increase in firefox from maybe 10% in January to close to 45% today. Of that 45% of FF users, 23% are already using FF3. I think that is pretty impressive. By comparison, 52% use IE and the majority of them, 67% use IE7.
Spin and counterspin (Score:5, Insightful)
"Microsoft still has three out of ten people running an old version of its browser more than 18 months after Internet Explorer 7 launched, while Firefox has converted more than half of its users to the latest version in just over a week. That should set a few alarm bells ringing in Redmond."
"Microsoft still has over seven out of ten people satisfied with running a previous version of its browser more than 18 months after Internet Explorer 7 launched, while users have abandoned Firefox 2 in droves with over half converting to the bleeding edge version in just over a week. That should set a few alarm bells ringing at Mozilla.org."
Personally, when I see a very fast migration I tend to think the last version must really have sucked. If it did what people wanted already, they'd not be in any big hurry to upgrade. Sure, there's been some exceptions where the new version is the best thing since sliced bread, but they're few and far between by comparison.
IE is not a hyped-up product (Score:3, Insightful)
Internet Explorer is more of a utility and is generally presented as such. If you think Microsoft, with its coffers of gold, is unable to create a wild buzzed-up marketing campaign for IE that competes with Firefox's you're wrong. Firefox is a marketing behemoth while IE's footprint is rather subdued. For this reason, IE will generally get more Automatic Update customers than technology enthusiasts or web enthusiasts who will be using Firefox. To think that many web and blog sites' viewers are not web enthusiasts would be simply naive. Imagine what the web stats would like on samsclub.com, walmart.com, or maybe even amazon.com.
Microsoft needs to have IE because it underlines the Microsoft platform as an Internet platform- if they were to concede the browser market, little would separate the usage scenario between Microsoft Windows and Ubuntu Linux for most modern (especially younger) users. I think Microsoft seeks to deliver a platform rather than just an operating system and the web is an integral part of that.
Otherwise, as long as most open source projects like OpenOffice and Firefox still run in Windows (and they run well in Windows), it will continue to be a thorn in Microsoft's side but not fatal. I think Sun invests very heavily in these cross-platform open source projects because they realize that if enough Windows users start using something cross-platform... well... they might just not see why they're needing to buy Windows anymore.
And that's the real game as I see it.
something wrong with your math? (Score:4, Insightful)
55 % on 1 site != 55 % of all firefox users
don't get me wrong, i like and use firefox, but come on!
As much as I hate to defend Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
Misleading Summary (Score:3, Insightful)
And? We know that MS has 70% of its IE users on IE7, and we know Mozilla has, according to a site, 55% of its users on FF3. We know FF3 reached this benchmark, on a single site, after just over a week. Do we know what IE7's usage rates where after just over a week? No. No conclusions can be drawn. Slashdot should not be posting crap designed to fool stupid people.
Re:Great (Score:5, Insightful)
You're mad at Mozilla because a bunch of third-party extensions don't work correctly? Maybe you should complain to the right people next time.
Re:Great (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So, Mozilla didn't upset their most loyal customer, the add-on developers did...
Actually, Mozilla did a fine job upsetting their loyal customers -- just look at the "AwesomeBar" which is anything but.
Protip for Developers: When I type in a place for URIs, I want the AutoComplete to auto complete URIs. Not try to do some hairbrained plaintext search of bookmarks/history/uris. When I type in "Youtube.com" I should be finding the most common Youtube videos I have opened, not bookmarks from 3 years ago talking about YouTube.
They get downright rabid on the Mozilla forums if you mention y
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Hadnt noticed this before, but you're right. And it's not just 4chan, it's all file inputs. You also cant type at all in the text box part of it, you have to browse for it.
There was a Firefox vulnerability a while ago where you could use javascript to change the focused element of the form while you where typing into a textbox and quickly
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, Mozilla did a fine job upsetting their loyal customers -- just look at the "AwesomeBar" which is anything but.
Well, it seems to me that it's just a very vocal minority.
And I know some previously very vocal people who have come to like the Awesome Bar very very much.
The tip one of them gave me was: purge your history before you upgrade, let Firefox learn from scratch.
I'd upgraded long before that, of course, but maybe there is something in this piece of advice.
I suspect, though, that Awesome Bar requires some adjustment, and maybe even breaking some habits of the mind.
For instance, you may have to stop thinking
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I like the awesomebar. So now mozilla gets to choose between supporting me, or supporting you. Sucks to be you.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Great (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure I see the problem. You want something that extremely stable and well-supported, then it's usually not a good idea to jump to the newest version of software directly after its release. That just seems to me to be a standard rule, across the board, no matter which developer you're talking about. When you're using the cutting-edge stuff, it tends to have a couple hiccups and break 3rd-party interactions.
So sure, go back and use FF2 for another 6 months. And then give FF3 another shot, see if it's up to speed for the things you need.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Do a clean install instead. You probably have some odd settings remaining from FF2 that are giving you problems, and the problem with other sites could be poor browser detection...which is not Mozilla's fault at all.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll try a fresh install, thanks for the suggestion.
Re:I'm sure I'm not the only one (Score:5, Interesting)
I can't upgrade IE.
Since large bits of my job involve web interfaces to various systems, I have to make sure things still render right on IE 6. Since you can't run 6 and 7 on the same machine, I stay on 6. When I need to check 7 I ask a coworker who has upgraded to check it out.
Of course, I use FF for everything because IE 6 was so far behind. Seven has improvements, but I still find annoyances, and I'm happily used to FF.
Then again, I can't go to FF3 quite yet either. Needs to be a little bigger than 50% (at a tech heavy site). I'd like to see the numbers for Yahoo or Google.
Re:I'm sure I'm not the only one (Score:4, Informative)
Re:GMail Issues with FF3? (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There is the ever-present threat of Operating Systems being marginalized to a role of providing a portal to a web-based OS. Whomever controls the browser will get a good chunk of ad revenue.
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
They won the first browser war. But failed to meet their victory objectives.
What they were hoping if the won the broser war they were able to push their Technologies such as ActiveX, VB Script forcing people to say on windows to browse the web aka MSN v.2.0, having Web Servers use IIS as it would be the only server that will have the IE particular features Slowly replace HTML MS Office formats having all development need to be in done in Front Page for simple stuff or Visual Studios for more complex stuff.
Why did they fail to meet these objectives. A couple of unforeen side effect.
Linux and Apache. While Linux has a small marketshare for the Desktop, for servers it is much larger and far more common. And Apache is still the #1 web server. Being the programmers for these systems tend to have Unix/Linux experience with Apache for the most part for more popular sites they made sure that their code was as much platform independent as possible, by making the justification if we don't pay an extra $5,000 for these features then we won't isolate 10% of the market, an easy sell.
There was DOJ case which put Microsoft in the bad eye of the public. No longer was it considered an exciting company inovating the future. But a big corporation out for itself, squashing others. Making them less likly to use IE only features.
Next was right after the browser wars and Microsoft won, the Bad people who make spyware, malware started targeting IE the victor using easy holes such as ActiveX and the such making many browsers weary of using them, causing the rest of the people who use such features in their site to take them off. As well viruses and hacks against IIS.
Microsoft then needed to shift gears and make thier system reasonably secure now. Causing a huge delay in IE 6 production time until IE 7 leaving both IE 6 and 7 years behind its competitor and causing developers to stick with the tride and true universally compatible methods.
Adobe/Macromedia Flash (Love it or hate it) Killed Java Applets as it was faster and looked better and Active X (for over the internet (Active X survied a lot longer for intranet and extranet apps)) because it was more secure and didn't even think about writting to your disk. Being used by advertisers insured flash was installed widely.
And on and on. IE won it Browser War but it didn't get the riches.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)