FireFox, taking back the web?

[Sudharsan Govindarajan]

These are the site stats for JavaRanch by Extreme Tracker:

Browsers used to view the site:

Netscape 17.01% - MSIE 82.22% - Other 0.57%

Is that a trend already?


Sudharsan

[Svend Rost]

To be honest, I doubt it.

First of all, I don't think us ranchers represent the normal internet
user. I guess alot of people with a CS (ect.) background have been working
in unix environments, and therefor been using mozilla, netscape ect.

Second, most new pages are beeing designed to IE - not firefox. If this
changes, then we'll see more and more firefox users.

/Svend Rost

[Jeroen Wenting]

correct. It shows more an increase in people using Macs and Linux boxes than a decrease of the userbase of IE on Windows machines.

IE is still the best browser on the market for most users. The "nice things" in FireFox aren't nice for many people, however much the zealots say they can't live without them (but then, there's people claiming they can't live without Halflife 2 either)...

Edit: it possibly also shows an increase in internet access among workers in multinational corporations.
Many of those have IT policies and infrastructures which are very old and will still be using Netscape 4. If one multinational with 10000 workstations using NS4 suddenly allows a site to be accessed and it's done in droves that will skew the visitor statistics for that site bigtime (I doubt it's happening here though).
[ November 24, 2004: Message edited by: Jeroen Wenting ]

[paul wheaton]

That information is cumulative for well over a year.

But this is interesting ... A few hours have passed and now the stats say Netscape 17.03% - MSIE 82.21% - Other 0.57%

I wonder what the numbers will be in a few days?

[Mike Gershman]

I just got my first unsolicited Firefox pop-up. I guess the spam creeps found Firefox worth hacking.

[peter wooster]

Originally posted by Mike Gershman:
I just got my first unsolicited Firefox pop-up. I guess the spam creeps found Firefox worth hacking.

I use FireFox at home but IE6 at work since we have standard M$ desktops. I get no pop-ups on FF, but they are a constant nuisance on IE6. I do find FF very slow to startup, but the response is fine once running (I'm using a 600MH Athlon K7).

Almost everyone I know has switched, including average users like my wife, she actually switched before I did, but then she has a 2GH Pentium M.

[Tony Alicea]

"I do find FF very slow to startup, but the response is fine once running..."

Me three. I mean, me too!

[Rajan Chinna]

I too started using FireFox browser recently....
I am not able to open hotmail rich text editor.
Does anybody face this problem ?

[Jeroen Wenting]

Weird, I get no popups on IE...
But then I've installed a popup blocker which blocks popups (as is included in WinXP SP2 as well).
Of course I at least have a choice whether to enable or disable Javascript functionality which is legal (if oft abused) and am not forced to block it...

[Sudharsan Govindarajan]

Originally posted by Rajan Chinna:
I too started using FireFox browser recently....
I am not able to open hotmail rich text editor.
Does anybody face this problem ?

That is not a problem; that is the way the site is designed. Yahoo's rich text editor also won't show up in FF.

[Sudharsan Govindarajan]

The stats again, 26 hours later:

Netscape 17.04% - MSIE 82.19% - Other 0.57%

[Warren Dew]

At this rate, IE will be down to 75% in a year!

Actually, that doesn't sound so impressive, does it ... maybe when we get enough of a baseline to do more than a straight line approximation....

[Rajan Chinna]

Sudharsan

That is not a problem; that is the way the site is designed. Yahoo's rich text editor also won't show up in FF.

Do u think there is rich text editor in Yahoo web mail ? I think yahoo have only text based email.

[Sonny Gill]

Just downloaded Firefox and giving it a try...it does seem faster than Mozilla.
Installation was a breeze, and it automatically imported all my settings from Mozilla. Pretty impressive, compared to Linux installations for many other programs.

[Madhav Lakkapragada]

I recently switched to FF at home. I have a Windows 98 (ya, go ahead laugh it off) box and the weirdest thing is IE is not performing very well on my Windows box. It constantly dies, prompting me to send an error message to MS, which I did on a number of occasions. It so bad now, I can't even open Hotmail using IE 6.0.
I made the switch to FF.

- m

[Sudharsan Govindarajan]

Originally posted by Rajan Chinna:
Sudharsan


Do u think there is rich text editor in Yahoo web mail ? I think yahoo have only text based email.

Yahoo! has rich text editor. If u use IE, you can see a link named 'Add Colours and graphics'; u will get the Rich text editor if u click on that.

Sudharsan

[Sudharsan Govindarajan]

Originally posted by Jeroen Wenting:

IE is still the best browser on the market for most users. The "nice things" in FireFox aren't nice for many people, however much the zealots say they can't live without them (but then, there's people claiming they can't live without Halflife 2 either)...

Tabbed browsing might be a simple feature, but everybody likes it. Even my mom prefers FF to IE. She ain't a Rancher, she didn't even finish her high school.

Anyways, the stats after 2 days:

Netscape 17.06% - MSIE 82.17% - Other 0.57%

[Richard Hawkes]

I heard from a very reliable Redmond source that IE is set to self destruct in eight months, two weeks, and three days.

[Joe King]

Originally posted by Richard Hawkes:
I heard from a very reliable Redmond source that IE is set to self destruct in eight months, two weeks, and three days.

Hasn't that already happened?

Seriously though, IE does seem to self destruct quite regularly. The most annoying IE behaviour I noticed was when I had to do some Word macro work (not the finest hour of my career) and was looking on the Microsoft website at the Word API pages. For some bizarre reason the javascript used by this page caused IE to crash. I was amazed - their browser looking at a page they wrote and the two were not compatible. Crazy.

[Peter Rooke]

Thank you for telling me about this product - hopefully I'll never have to use
IE again

[Jim Yingst]

[Paul Wheaton]: That information is cumulative for well over a year.

According to the site itself, it's cumulative since 23 January 2000. So it doesn't really tell us much about what's going on now. Furthermore, according to the folks at extreme-dm.com, the version we have does not support reporting for Mozilla or Firefox. We'd have to get their latest version for that. It's not clear whether this means Mozilla and Firefox are listed under Netscape 7, or omitted entirely. But I'd advise everyone not to pay much attention to these stats for now...

[Sudharsan Govindarajan]

The stats again, after a week

Netscape 17.18% - MSIE 82.05% - Other 0.57%

[Marcus Green]

For most users the choice of web browser is the biggest easily addressed security issue. There are more attacks on vulnerabilities for Intenet Explorer than any other browser, partly because of its popularity. This was addressed in an article at slate magazine earlier this year

For this reason it makes a great deal of sense to use an alternative browser such as Mozilla/Firefox unless a web site will not work with an alternative. Note that Firefox is built on the Mozilla technology.

Creating a web site that will not work at all with an alternative browser shows a lack of understanding of the web and/or the art of web page creation (or of course a narrow agenda).

http://slate.msn.com/id/2103152/

[Sudharsan Govindarajan]

The stats again, after 2 months and at the time when Firefox reached 20 million downloads.

Netscape 18.24% - MSIE 81.00% - Other 0.57%

[Thomas Paul]

And you figure that the first users will be the ones who care about the browser they use and hate MS so I would expect that the percentage will grow much more slowly now, if at all.

[Jim Yingst]

I repeat: according to the folks at extreme-dm.com, the version we have does not support reporting for Mozilla or Firefox. It is meaningless to try to use these numbers as a measure of Firefox popularity.

[Thomas Paul]

Originally posted by Jim Yingst:
I repeat: according to the folks at extreme-dm.com, the version we have does not support reporting for Mozilla or Firefox. It is meaningless to try to use these numbers as a measure of Firefox popularity.

Then what is this page:

http://extremetracking.com/open;sys?login=jranch

[Jim Yingst]

It's a page showing statistics gathered by a system which is not capable of correctly identifying Mozilla or Firefox, according to its maker, extreme-dm.com. (I asked them about this in e-mail, and they told me the version we're using does not support this.) This is evidenced by the fact that the page does not mention Mozilla or Firefox by name at all. Anywhere. It's not clear whether this means Mozilla and Firefox are listed under Netscape 7, or omitted entirely. But I'd advise everyone not to pay much attention to these stats for now.
[ January 26, 2005: Message edited by: Jim Yingst ]

[Sudharsan Govindarajan]

Now, when Firefox has reached 75 million downloads, the stat of JR again:

Netscape 21.41% - MSIE 77.87% - Other 0.56%

[Thomas Paul]

the weekly statistics at my site (which is not a techie site) has been running between 87% and 89% MSIE for the last year. I have seen no change except I am seeing more Mozilla and less Netscape. The combined Mozilla/Netscape numbers run between 6% and 7%.

[paul wheaton]

Stats from the JavaRanch www server.

Top 15 of 613 Total User Agents
# Hits User Agent
1 4742717 61.60% MSIE 6
2 1431304 18.59% Mozilla/5
3 1036864 13.47% Java/1.4.1_03
4 247553 3.22% MSIE 5
5 53518 0.70% Mozilla/4
6 44356 0.58% Mozilla/3.01 (compatible
7 16580 0.22% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible
8 13556 0.18% HTTrack 3
9 10533 0.14% Opera/8
10 10003 0.13% Yahoo! Slurp
11 7945 0.10% Konqueror/3
12 7166 0.09% Opera/7
13 6350 0.08% Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)
14 6211 0.08% MSProxy/2.0
15 4535 0.06% msnbot/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)

stats for saloon

Top 15 of 915 Total User Agents
# Hits User Agent
1 977492 62.21% MSIE 6
2 80230 5.11% Mozilla/5
3 67105 4.27% MSIE 5
4 47598 3.03% PHP/3.0.18
5 42689 2.72% Win32
6 21098 1.34% Yahoo! Slurp
7 15221 0.97% Microsoft-WebDAV-MiniRedir/5.1.2600
8 6474 0.41% Java/1.4.2_06
9 4451 0.28% Lynx/2.8.4rel.1 libwww-FM/2.14 SSL-MM/1.4.1 OpenSSL/0.9.6b
10 2678 0.17% Mozilla/4
11 2041 0.13% Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)
12 1844 0.12% HPPrint
13 1526 0.10% msnbot/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
14 1344 0.09% MSIE 4
15 1327 0.08% Microsoft BITS/6.2

[Marilyn de Queiroz]

If you look in "Help" in FF 1.0.6, you see "Mozilla/5.0"

[R K Singh]

It is shocking to know that Netscape once had 80% of the browser market.

[Sudharsan Govindarajan]

Originally posted by R K Singh:
It is shocking to know that Netscape once had 80% of the browser market.

Ja, and thats the power of the Juggernaut M$ !

[Sudharsan Govindarajan]

This is the stats from a French company.

http://www.xitimonitor.com/etudes/equipement10.asp

Firefox has 14% market share in Europe and Australia and 11% in N.America. As record, in Finland it has 30% market share.

[Thomas Paul]

Originally posted by Sudharsan Govindarajan:


Ja, and thats the power of the Juggernaut M$ !

No, that's the power of the stupidity of Netscape.

[Thomas Paul]

Originally posted by Sudharsan Govindarajan:
This is the stats from a French company.

http://www.xitimonitor.com/etudes/equipement10.asp

Firefox has 14% market share in Europe and Australia and 11% in N.America. As record, in Finland it has 30% market share.

They don't say how they did their study (other than it is analysis of traffic on one Sunday) or what types of sites they were analyzing but I am not seeing those types of numbers at my site. Perhaps someone else who runs a non-techie site could give their numbers.

[Sudharsan Govindarajan]

ah, i have a low volume non-techie blog.
It has 71% IE Visitors and 29% of Moz/Firefox visitors, no Opera or other browsers.

[Sudharsan Govindarajan]

Originally posted by Thomas Paul:


No, that's the power of the stupidity of Netscape.

Stupid enough not to give it as free?

[Thomas Paul]

Originally posted by Sudharsan Govindarajan:


Stupid enough not to give it as free?

No, stupid enough to rewrite the code base from scratch and take too long to do it. Netscape didn't lose the browser war because Microsoft was unfair. Netscape lost the browser war because their browser wasn't as good.