Firefox Continues Gains against IE

kurtz_tan writes "News.com reports that the popularity of alternative Web browser Firefox continues to rise at the expense of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, according to a new study by WestSideStory. The study measured market share by embedding sensors on major web sites such as those of Walt Disney, Best Buy, Sony and Liz Claiborne. WebSideStory retrieves data from 30 million internet users a day passing through its monitored sites. The company then takes a snapshot of two days and compares the growth. Since beginning its measurements last summer, WebSideStory has been cautious to draw any broad conclusions about Firefox's popularity. This time around, the company said many people are not only downloading Firefox, they're sticking with it and using it."

It's WEBSideStory , not WestSideStory

according to a new study by WestSideStory.

It's WEBSideStory , not WestSideStory

I feel pretty, oh so pretty...

At the risk of revealing a proclivity ...

At the risk of revealing a proclivity, I too use FireFox almost exclusively now even though FireFox is much slower on my computer than Micro$oft IE. For reasons of speed, I initially hesitated in using FireFox, but eventually I could not tolerate all the viruses and malware targetted at IE. On several occasions, my system was so badly infected with malware that I reinstalled Windows.

Admittedly, I am not a typical user. I visit numerous porn sites and am addicted to looking at gorgeous, naked women who would never spend time with me. Unfortunately, those sites are also boobytrapped with pop ups, viruses, and malware. If you do not believe me, then use IE on Windows and surf 1000 sites over the course of a month. At the end of the month, your computer will be unusable, and you will be forced to reinstall Windows.

With FireFox, I am relatively safe when I visit those sites. So far, none of the boobytraps have infected my computer. The only negative is that downloading the pictures takes a while with FireFox since it is not as tightly integrated into the OS as IE. Nonetheless, I am no longer reinstalling Windows on a monthly basis.

Now, where's that can of vaseline.... Just kidding.

Re:At the risk of revealing a proclivity ...

Well, one thing to consider is there is more than FireFox in the alternative browser scene. If you find it slow, you might try Opera or K-Melon(I think the KHTML engine on windows). They might be faster, while equally secure.

Re:At the risk of revealing a proclivity ...

f you find it slow, you might try Opera or K-Melon(I think the KHTML engine on windows).

Kmeleon is Gecko, not KHTML. I don't believe that KHTML has been ported to Windows.

--Asa

hah

granted you see this in every article...

A Microsoft spokesman did not immediately comment for this story

but i love that.

.88%?

Not much, could probably be explained away by pure error.

Also, the websites they use probably skew the results as well; Disney, Best Buy, Sony, and Liz Claiborne?

If they want accuracy they should try throwing a few porn sites in, or maybe popular search engines.

I imagine if you had a more accurate sample that Firefox's share might be a little higher.

Re:.88%?

Also, the websites they use probably skew the results as well; Disney, Best Buy, Sony, and Liz Claiborne?

If they want accuracy they should try throwing a few porn sites in, or maybe popular search engines.

I disagree. At first I thought that you could increase measured non-IE browser share by including, say, Slashdot. But then I realized that the whole point of choosing the studied websites is that those websites appeal to Joe Sixpack, and not the geeks who would normally gravitate towards using non-IE browsers.

So in this case we have the worst case scenario (websites used by few geeks), showing that Mozilla is gaining over IE. Ane you're complaining?

--Rob

Re:.88%?

Also, the websites they use probably skew the results as well...

If they want accuracy they should try throwing a few porn sites in, or maybe popular search engines.

Granted, their method isn't perfect...that probably isn't possible. But it's a lot better than your idea. These guys want a picture of normal, actual internet users that they can count. Neither search engines nor porn will provide that.

In the porno case, you just hand everything to IE, as all those hits from the popup windows roll in. Also, the control in those situations is passed mostly from the user to the site, which isn't ideal for these tests either. And search engines are visited by scripts a lot, most of which misidentify themselves as one browser or another. So, either way you're adding a lot to your inaccuracies.

Choosing high-traffic sites from major providers does sound like favoritism (or at least just corporate whoring), but it's really probably about as accurate a picture as we can get of how people browse.

Yes, but what is happening to opera?

Figures I have seen on w3cshools [w3schools.com] show a falling usage rate for opera, from 2.3% to 1.9% - almost a 20% drop. If this is a trend is across the entire userbase, then might firefox end up killing opera rather than (as well as?) IE?

Re:Yes, but what is happening to opera?

to be honest, opera is totally incredible for some things, but terrible for others. The amazing thing about opera is that you can make it do EVERYTHING... the settings are just huge.... its also unbelieably fast and low-footprint memory wise. However, what it isn't is a simple browser for general public to use day to day. when I use it i feel like im almost in a 'sub OS'... i feel engulfed by it all and it doesnt make me feel comfortable, whereas with firefox, its very much like its almost part of the OS and just subtley adds its own features.

Opera ---is--- a brilliant browser, i just feel it's not suitable for the general public.

Internet Explorer technologies for UNIX

Do not know why MS discontinued IE for Unix. I can see thay can expand there.

http://www.microsoft.com/unix/ie/default.asp/ [microsoft.com]

Re:Internet Explorer technologies for UNIX

It was probably never more than a sham product anyway. During the anti-trust trials microsoft did a lot of things solely so the lawyers could make ludicrous claims yet have something to back them up.

Re:Internet Explorer technologies for UNIX

Do not know why MS discontinued IE for Unix. I can see thay can expand there.

As one who has tried out msie for solaris, I can assure you that it gave new meaning to the terms buggy, bloated, and crash-prone. It was such a disaster that noboy would ever use it. OTOH, netscape ran fairly well, and stable, on all the major flavors of unix, so there was simply no contest. It's fairly certain that microsoft did the "port" as a political stunt, and an attempted propoganda coup, for 2 reasons:

#1, the blaring hype in ms ads saying "microsoft brings the internet to unix" (yeah right, the internet was pretty much a unix thing until microsoft woke up and came late to the party)

#2, the fact that they ported to an obscure platform like hpux, rather than linux, despite the fact that there were several hundred thousand linux desktop users for every hpux desktop user.

Then they backpedaled, saying "we didn't realize how difficult it was to program for unix". tee hee, a comparison to netscape and it's solid cross platform support puts the talents of microsofts programmers in a fairly bad light here.

And what's the margin of error in the polling?

Without any info given on the margin of error, this 0.88% increase is hard to put in perspective. If the margin of error was 0.7%, then we're not talking about much here. Nonetheless, it's very interesting to see FireFox taking hold, even if very slowly. (I suppose that really shows just how entrenched MSIE is.) -- Paul

Re:And what's the margin of error in the polling?

the margin of error will be huge!

seriously, we do the same thing in the UK, but mostly with retail sites (B&Q, Comet, H Samuel, etc) and there are soooo many things that cause inaccuracies!

firstly, the monitors are clientside - so depending on where in the host page they live, howmany images there are on the page, how fast the user's connection is and how long they spend on a page you may or may not even register a hit.

then misconfigured caches can hided it before it gets you your logging server (but there are ways around that).

but for tracking unique users (rather than pageviews), you need cookies as well:

- some peopl have cookies turned off

- some people have cookies demoted to session-only

- some people clear their cookies periodically (e.g. they've been looking at pr0n and dont want their missus to know)

- some people use 'security' software that strips cookies and/or rewrites page content on the fly.

its a mess. numbers are never accurate and its impossible to accurately determine how inaccurate they are!

but they're right - there is a consistent and significant move toward Firefox

But having said that - it has just been Christmas, and there does seem to be a big difference between home computers and business PCs (home = more up to date, more Firefix, work = older, no alternative browsers)

we're actually seeing a *decline* in firefox figures post-Xmas, but hoping that will change!

Re:And what's the margin of error in the polling?

Mod parent up!

\begin{rant}
Statistical figures (or any "scientific" figures, for that matter) are mostly meaningless without an error estimate (a.k.a. "confidence interval"). In fact, the lack of such estimates has been found to be a strong indication of bad research in 57.3% of all cases.

TFA claims IE market share to be "92.7%". As parent succintly explains, that claim is clearly bogus: there are two separate percentages:

1. What they actually measured: entries to 5 specific websites over a 2-day period.
2. What they wanted to measure: IE market share.

Now there are two problems with the analysis: the first is that there is random noise in the measurement of (1). The second is that you cannot simply equate (1) with (2) without some justification. Normally you would combine the measurement errors coming from the noise and from the non-prefect correlation between (1) and (2) to give a confidence interval.

Somehow I doubt that you will find the claimed figures to even be accurate to within %1. Hence the observed rise could be entirely due to random fluctuations or other errors and is likely completely insignificant.
\end{rant}

Meaningful Figure

I feel that this is, for once, a meaningful figure. These are sites that appeal to everyone, not just a figure of browsers on /. or ThinkGeek or something.

If people going on to Liz Claiborne or whatever are using FF, then you can assume that is someone's mom. Either that, or the IT guy trying to look at women's underwear pics through his work's web filtering. :)

Good analysis, though. Let's hope this continues...

Baby steps, right?

Re:Meaningful Figure

I have a popular auction site that is along the lines of what you're mentioning. It's very Liz Claiborne (people shopping for Lip Service, Hot Topic, custom jewelry, used CDs, crafts, custom fashions) and not at all "ThinkGeek or something".

I've been very critical of this "Firefox is making a difference" bandwagon for a long time. However, I've been observing my own site's statistics over the last few months and the numbers are, indeed, surprising.

Until recently, my site has been 95% MSIE, just like it has been for almost five years. Viewing just the most recent stats shows that out of 40,000 unique visitors:

77.2% are using MSIE
18.5% are using Firefox, Mozilla or Netscape
2.3% are using Safari
1.1% are using Opera

The reason I take these statistics seriously is that my site is not at all a technical site. It's an auction site with 95% females between the ages of 15 and 50. A lot of AOL users. While there are some very technically savvy people on the site, the majority of them are extremely novice to average. So if a lot of them are moving away from MSIE, it is a significant indication of where the general web population is also going.

Web

but the company said its Windows-only numbers are more accurate because new configurations in Apple Computer's Safari browser inadvertently skewed results. I'm speechless. We (linux/mac users) don't use Windows, so our traffic doesn't count?

No surprise.

FireFox is actually a good browser.

This would have happened a long time ago if such a good browser had come along sooner.

Firefox is fast, secure, easy to use, skinable, free, and compatible.

For once, IE isn't more popular based on it's merit. It's actually at a technical disadvantage again and it's decline in popularity is a result of that.

I was skeptical about converting most of my less tech savvy associates over to Firefox at first, but when a few actually actively asked me to help them and their feedback was all positive afterwards, I suggested it to a few more and then even more.

Now anyone I don't feel is capable of keeping their system clean while using IE I recommend convert and I've yet to hear one single complaint.

Microsoft might be stubborn

I think Firefox will continue to be popular if Microsoft makes new additions to IE mainly because I don't see them removing any of the insecurities (ActiveX) or bloat or integration into the OS that made people switch to Firefox in the first place. Since when was the last time Microsoft removed a so called "useful" and "major" feature despite its obvious downsides?

Re:Liz Claiborne?

Not to people who think slashdot is a major site. I think that's the point here. It's not geeks using firefox, it's everyday people who most people here never thought would want to switch.

we need a getexplorer.com .. or something

Help fight these horrible new statistics... Install IE today! [sidenet.ddo.jp]

:-)

Firefox at 50+% in some places

Ace's Hardware recently ran a short article that Firefox passed 50% share at their website in December. They had a nice graph showing IE clearly in the majority, lessening over time, and, finally, passing into the minority.

We'll miss you, IE...not!

The best is yet to come

Firefox 1.1 is going to be based on the trunk. So it's got a few rendering fixes.

1.1 also contains some decent enhancements [mozilla.org].

IMHO adoption will pick up when 1.1 is released and some of these fixes take place.

1.1 will also have a MSI, which will make it easier for corporations to deploy Firefox to computers within their organization. That will allow for more Firefox gains.

You knew *this* post was inevitable...

...Netcraft confirms it. IE is dying.

meanwhile, in the real world....

Really, do you expect firefox can do something if it doesn't start growing faster?

First, "% of browsers used" != "% of boxes". Firefox is having a hit because its users are people who spend a lot of time in internet. There're a *lot* of people who don't use internet a lot, and they don't get eflected in the stadistics just because they don't browse a lot.

Second, If firefox continues growing at this rate, microsoft will have enought time to rewrite their browser. Remember, 100% of windows boxes have IE installed, and as soon as microsoft gives them a update which is "good enought" they could stop using firefox. Don't understimate the power of microsoft, they control the most used software distribution channel for windows boxes - windows update

And let's remember that around 50% of the OS used to browser internet is XP. XP SP2 has a popup killer by default which is one of the biggest reasons to use firefox. And SP2 enables automatic updates, so IE is "safer". It doesn't really matters if IE is secure or not, if microsoft patches it fast enought users won't have problems.

so, what we need is to get *better*, and get better *faster*. Currently, firefox is just "a better IE". Yes, it's more than that, we know, but users only see that "a better explorer". We need to offer something different, innovative. We need to give them more things that are not just "better than the IE equivalent", but cool things that have not equivalent so users will stick with firefox. (don't talk me about extensions, IE has plugins and they could start those to add funcionality!)

And of course we need to have "automatic updates" for firefox. I think those are already there, right? If you don't updae users' browser, they won't do it themselves, automatic update (or at least a window warning about a "fastest, more secure version) is needed if you want that your users continue appreciating all the work you do.

Re:KHTML in Windows ?

And now that Firefox has proven it's superiority to IE, why doesn't some one finish porting KHTML to windows so we have a second good reason against IE ?
Look what we've done with one single engine (20%).
Now imagine what could be done with another free and open engine like KHTML.
Let's hope : another 20% for KHTML, and IE sinking to a mere 45% against two such great competitors.

I think this Firefox growth has a lot more to do with the application than the engine. Gecko has definitely improved but we're still shipping the Mozilla suite with the same Gecko and it's getting only a fraction of the downloads that Firefox is.

I'm all for more quality browsers, but a great engine doesn't gain marketshare without a great application around it.

--Asa

2004 Browser Stats for my employer

I work for a Washington State agency [esd101.net]. The majority of the vistors to our main site are K-12 related (teachers, parents, students, etc). Microsoft products are quite popular around this area due to the steep discounts that Microsoft hands out to K-12 schools and their related state agencies. However, the 2004 stats for my employer's main site are quite interesting.

Operating Systems (Top 10)
Operating Systems Hits Percent
Windows 1589512 94.8 %
Macintosh 62935 3.7 %
Unknown 22019 1.3 %
Linux 967 0 %
WebTV 65 0 %
FreeBSD 42 0 %
Irix 11 0 %
Sun Solaris 8 0 %
AmigaOS 4 0 %
Unknown Unix system 3 0 %
Others 3 0 %

Browsers (Top 10)
Browsers Grabber Hits Percent
MS Internet Explorer No 1185077 70.7 %
Firefox No 437908 26.1 %
Mozilla No 21460 1.2 %
Unknown ? 12121 0.7 %
Safari No 9478 0.5 %
Netscape No 8534 0.5 %
Opera No 651 0 %
Konqueror No 172 0 %
Firebird (Old Firefox) No 71 0 %
WebTV browser No 65 0 %

5%

As a mac user who's had compatibility complaints about some sites, the retort that I encountered was that the problematic site in question was designed for "95%" of the browsers going there, and if I wasn't in that 95% it just sucks to be me.

Now that it appears that FireFox is coming really close to squeezing on the 5% margin, my question is: will web designers really consider making their sites compatible with 92% of IE and 5% of FireFox? That could be a lot of work, depending on the site. Or are site designers just more likely to say "as long as we have 90% compatibility, that's good enough"? Turning away 10% of your customers seems like a lot, though, too.

Web designers in the biz care to comment? Are you guys seeing new compatibility standards? If so, that's good news for mac users. The faster ActiveX is obsoleted, the fewer problems Mac users are to face--even if the impetus for the compatibility change came from FireFox.

In the end, does it matter?

I've always wondered how much browser dominance really matters to Microsoft. IE comes bundled w/ their OS, so even if everyone runs Mozilla, they still have IE in their system, and all the other MS apps (and many others) still leverage IE's plugability into other client software. So in terms of lock-in to the platform, there's still all the web enabled client apps out there (like most MS products).

Re:-1, Redundant for me, please...

I think this is my problem with Opera.

Price.

Not that I mind paying for software. Hell, I've even bought boxed Linux distros. But, and it is a big but, most people pay for perceived value. For these people, which includes me, Opera does not provide $39 [opera.com] more value than Firefox.

Maybe I'm just cheap...

Re:-1, Redundant for me, please...

I pirate software, but I paid for Opera.

Why?

Simply because the people who wrote it aren't assholes. They don't have copy-protection to make my life difficult, and they compete on features rather than on marketing.

They offer a student discount, and want a letter from the registrar or a copy of your grades to prove your status. My university is run by trolls, so I wrote them and asked them if I could post a small note on my Uni webspace as proof that I was a student.

Six hours later the response came back: "Sure, that's fine. Greetings from Norway!"

I don't mind paying those guys.

Re:Marketing

The more marketshare Firefox gets, the less likely lazy web designers are to design "IE only" websites.

Of course, it also becomes more and more likely that advertisers will spend more and more resources trying to figure out new and exciting ways to get past Firefox's popup blocker and the Adblock extension, so it's a bit of a double edged sword.

Re:Marketing

I have seen sites which already use various pop-up-divs with javascript to close them, and as long as the images are proxied by the web server (to the ad server) so that the user agent doesn't know the difference, then they can't block those images.

A sliding div withing the content area is not a pop-up. It's not a pop-under. It is an annoyance and we're working a solution for it but pop-ups have an entirely differnt set of usability problems that are much worse than in-content advertising. I'll consider it a huge success if we've convinced the market to move away from pop-ups even if the alternative are these modal sliding divs that don't break out of the content area.

Also, as far as image blocking goes, while the stock Firefox build blocks images from specific domains (so you wouldn't want to block the ad if it came from the same server or proxy as the good images) a simple ad-on like AdBlock gives users the power to easily block ads without losing the legitimate page content.

--Asa

Re:-1, Redundant for me, please...

There is an ActiveX plugin [www.iol.ie] for Mozilla browsers.

Re:F*ing developers who build for IE only!

Say, that's a nice, clear-headed comment, and sure is insightful! Most people don't appreciate how much more insightful something is when it's also insulting. Also, I like how you've taken into account that some projects were kicked off years ago by VB-oriented programmers using early versions of that framework, and thus ActiveX ... way before other tools were even viable for some development teams. You may not like inertia, but it's there, and calling people who probably had an IT budget of one hour to throw together an interactive form for use on an private portal site that eventually became public, etc., is, well, assholish. I know... how about not using web sites you don't like? Nah... that's just good advice, and doesn't give me a good way to call someone an asshole. I'll have to think of another suggestion.

Re:F*ing developers who build for IE only!

That's exactly what I'm talking about! Change your freaking bank! That's like when there were some banks that had all-night ATMs, and others didn't (guess how old I am), or later, when only some banks waived fees if you used their own ATMs and others didn't. Or, when some banks had free telephone-based auto-banking, and others didn't. You choose a commidity institution (there are thousands of banks) based on how well they provide you with that commidity. My stupid bank has a great web site for their brokerage area, but the regular banking part sucks. A lot. I've bitched at them, and actually ended up talking to the manager of their web dev team, who was shocked to hear about JVM version problems (what a loser!). They're working on it.

In the meantime, it's just not that big a deal to change banks, or just to fire up IE for minute. Oh... I'm guessing you run on Linux. Alas. Your bank will come around on their own, or they'll get tired of fielding the complaints. Market pressure works - banks are service companies, and believe me, they do listen to compaints - mostly in the cummulative, but they do listen.

Re:Too bad my school won't use Ff

I don't care what my school uses, I've intalled Portable Firefox to a flash drive that I use as well as to my student directory on the school's network. So now, no matter which computer I'm on I can use Firefox (I have the OSX version on my flash drive as well). It's really the only way, the school administration will never listen.

Re:F*ing developers who build for IE only!

While the parent comment has some truth in it (the ActiveX legacy) I think it's unfair to a lot of good, professional developers who had no choice other than to use ActiveX because a particular component (a grid, graphing tool, whatever) was actully required in the project specification.

I'm thinking of sites/apps for internal, corporate intranets - not the Internet in general.

What were these guys supposed to do exactly? Resign on a point of principle?

Get real!

Re:F*ing developers who build for IE only!

i've only run into 3 websites that *REQUIRE* IE for windows (granded i havn't been looking hard either)

MLS - Multiple Listing Service for Real Estate. this website alone has prevented meny a Windows -> Mac switch for me alone, now multiply this acnticidote by 1000. but this one doesn't count because only realters are locked into the system, not the general public.

Seibol - a stupid, slow, and crapy internal system used at the techshop that i work for dealing assets, and time management. This system is probably the single biggest time waster at our shop. uhg. but this one doesn't count because only techs who work at the same company i work for are locked into the system, not the general public.

Pop Cap Games - some of the newer online games are activeX controls. it ticks me off because i got addicted to one of the activeX games while bored at school (and on windows) and i can't play at home because i refuse to use that pile of horse excreesion that Microsoft calls Internet Explorer.

So in reality, popcap are the only ones holding back the FireFox monopoly.

me on the other hand, i just developed a CSS based website that looks great in FireFox, and in Safari, and in Opera. but when i tried it in IE, i confirmed what everyone theorized - IE's CSS sucks the big one. i had to use PHP to spit out code that uses an entirely different stylesheed, and gifs rather than pngs - not to mention that i still needed IE7 [edwards.name].

Re:F*ing developers who build for IE only!

Often people like you don't realize that Microsoft does provides a huge, extensive, and powerful set of interconnected development tools. Ever pick up a single MSDN binder?

If you don't care about anything non-Microsoft, it makes sense to just use the tools in front of you. Despite your anti-Microsoft frothing, those tools usually work and get the job done, and their use is intended for use on Microsoft's platform.

I don't see anything wrong with that -- if the customer has different needs and the developer cannot provide them, the developer/provider has lost a customer.

The real thing you should be complaining about is when IE breaks or adds things to HTML standards that won't work on Firefox. That's just bad, because it's a web standard, not Microsoft's own platform.

Re:F*ing developers who build for IE only!

That must be amongst the rudest AC comments ever to reach +5, Insightful on /., and it well and truly deserves the honour.
Congratulations, and I'm sorry that my own mod points timed out a few hours ago.

I guess the fact that this AC didn't get modded -1, Troll like anyone else talking like that shows that we are, almost unanimously, really, really pissed off at the state of the web.


From MSN groups:
MSN Chat is not currently compatible with your Internet browser and/or computer operating system. [...] We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause. We hope you'll be joining the fun on MSN Chat soon!

(This is the result of writing things in ActiveX when they would work in Java. IANAL, but isn't breaking websites on competing OSs anticompetitive?)


Ignite the web!

Re:Not just yet - unfair moderation!

This is rediculous. The parent poster posted a dissenting view and he was modded down. Granted, the majority of /.ers obviously feel that Firefox is better (I'm a Safari user myself), but that's no reason to mod this post TROLL!

I hope this mod pops up in meta-moderation, and somebody wakes up. Firefox could start supporting scrollbar colors, because maybe that means something to somebody.

Sheesh, usually the Slashdot moderation system works, but sometimes it's just a big let down.