Firefox Usage Climbing

kbox writes "According to the Amsterdam analytics firm onestat The Firefox browser has jumped from a global market share of 8.7% to a whopping 13% since April 2005. The national usage of Firefox make some interesting reading, too, with Firefox making up 16% in the USA, 24% in Australia and a huge 39% in Germany." Unsurprisingly, on Slashdot we skew the averages somewhat, with Firefox weighing in at 65% of our traffic... but sadly 18% of our Firefox users need to upgrade to the latest version ;) Go do that now.

Firefox is yet another OSS victory!

Netscape was good, or at lest the best of the day. It ran on every obscure platform under the sun. It was like java before even java. Runs and is able to be debugged and crashed everywhere.

I've heard from Netscape developers that the highlight was when they realized they were _the_ browser for the web, and they were seeing web addresses (complete with the http:/// [http] part on them) on the side of trucks and all that. I also heard that the secretary is quite wealthy now due to stock options, the whole nine yards.

Well, they stagnated. And IE came and IMNSHO, ruined the web experience in the late 90s to early 00s. And during that time Netscape released their code into the Mozilla project. It then got worse. AOL bought Netscape, and Netscape is just a memory.

But then, guess what happened?

Because of the open code and open standards, we got the web back! My browser of choice is Safari. I really like it. It does almost 100% of what I think a browser should do. And it too is based on open standards and OSS (KHTML), and Apple has given patches back to the KHTML people.

And then Mozilla grew into Firefox, and things are getting better on the web again. I recently ran into two websites that required IE. One was for my taxes, and I told them that sure this time I can use IE on the Mac, but IE on the Mac is dead and if they want my business, they need to support standards. At work, there is one system that requires IE _on windows_, and we had to get a new computer, with windows just to view one website, and I had a word or two with them. And guess what? They told me that they are now targeting Firefox as the target browser, and for that to be cross platform.

Hey, as sucky as IE was, it did help the scene a little bit. It focused the other guys to care about security and for standards compliance, and today I have a number of good choices for browsing the web on a number of platforms, and its getting better every day.

Thank you Mozilla team, and thank you Microsoft.

One problem...

...One could also say that MS has gone *six years* without updating their browser, and Firefox is only at 16%. I mean, I'm as happy as anyone. I'm using it now. But I really see that market share getting cut in half within 2 years of IE7 coming out. MS just won't put up with this, and when you can put your product on every PC that's sold, and the competition can't, you don't have to be great to win.

Re:One problem...

...and the competition can't...

That's not true any more -- OEM manufacturers can build firefox (or any other software they want) into their windows builds without fearing retribution from MSFT. That's what the anti-trust thing was all about.

And the last time I was at MicroCenter (a large computer chain) in Boston, a local entrepeneur (kid had to be 14) was distributing for free a CD with FireFox, Open Office, SpyBot, Gimp and Trillian (I told him Trillian wasn't open) on it -- as well as html document that had a link in it to his Amazon donation page, where he was asking for $2.50 which seemed pretty reasonable to me. I asked him about his traffic, and he said he passes out about 200 CD's a day on Saturday and Sunday. Obviously he must have access to a multiple image burner to crank out volume like that (or he was pulling my leg), but seems like a good way to make a bit of $$$ for a kid, and at the same time help spread the love

Re:One problem...

Wow, that's a nice little gimmick.

When I get stuck doing tech support for family, the first thing I do is delete all the IE links, install FF, and import their bookmarks. Normally when I talk to them later, the first thing they mention is how few popups they see.

Re:One problem...

I did that once to my father. He insisted that IE was fine and he didn't want Mozilla, but hated popups & spyware - so he ran like 4 other programs to stop popups, find spyware and whatnot.

Anyhow, I installed firefox, then installed the firefoxie theme [firefoxie.net] that skins ff to look like IE, and changed the FF icon to the IE one. He didn't know the difference, except he thought his anti-popup software was working better than ever. When I told him he'd been using Mozilla he was surprised, pleased and stuck with FF (but ditched the IE theme).

Re:One problem...

I don't think it will drop in half. People are burnt out on the company, as it has lost its reputation and the trust of its users.

Aside from that, Microsoft isn't particuraly innovative anymore, and I doubt that their latest browser will shock and awe net users.

Re:One problem...

In 2 years XP will still be the the majority of Windows installations. You'd have to wait longer than that for Vista and IE7 to have a real impact on Firefox. And we don't really know how the security of Vista + IE7 will pan out. I'd say it is too early to tell when IE7 will do to Firefox.

-matthew

Re:One problem...

IE7 is a major improvement on IE6, but it isn't anything like as integrated into the OS. Secondly, if you chose Firefox as your default browser, then all your other MS progs will respect that decision and use it.

Pretty much all the MS websites out there now support Firefox, including their ajax enabled sites such as live.com. The only site that doesn't as as far as I'm aware, is windowsupdate, and Vista won't be using that, as it has its own program for doing updates.

This all gives firefox a major opportunity to take market share from ie.

Thank you ... Microsoft?

It's easy to forget that not too long ago I was waiting for the latest upgrade to IE, downloading and installing it manually, because it was the best browser out there. I appreciate the efforts of the developers, too.

But I can't thank Microsoft. Because they quit trying to be the best and tried instead to lock out and eliminate competition, through means familiar enough to everybody here that I'm not going to repeat them.

And I don't think I'm just saying "what have they done for me lately" - Microsoft's war on the competition went some way towards undoing the good things that came from their competition with Netscape.

I agree with you, otherwise (for whatever that's worth). Just a thought

Safari Adventure Club

Safari pisses me off though because lack of design mode [google.com] is a major flaw, but one that is obviously fixable. I'm an ardent mac supporter, but the long and slow response to this makes me feel like Apple is sticking it to us (the mac faithful) because they can -- they know they've got a captive audience.

I've taken the Writely path now -- we (my company) no longer support Safari on our web applications -- we just can't. And I don't see us ever going back to that when we can code to one standard -- Firefox -- and have it work everywhere.

So I agree with you -- thanks Mozilla, and thanks OSS for having projects in which the developers are responsive to the customers needs. If I need something I can sponser someone to make an extension or tweak. We've done that several times with Thunderbird, we have some custom work we paid for in a few other OSS projects that went back to the community.

So I'm in the weird position of being a mac lover and an apple hater. Which is weird, but I think some people will know what I'm saying. Apple has contributed back where they've been required, but with the promotion of DRMs, ITunes, etc, they're not really an ally of Open Source, except in that they see OSS as an ally of convenience against MSFT. If there were now Microsoft, Apple would be doing exactly the same things MSFT has done.

Re:Safari Adventure Club

when we can code to one standard -- Firefox -- and have it work everywhere.
You've got that backwards that should be "when we can code to one standard -- W3C compliance -- and have it work everywhere. At the very least that should be your startingpoint. Having everyone code for firefox isn't really that much better to having everyone code to IE

Re:Safari Adventure Club

Speaking of Apple and browsers. What I find truly amazing is that on my iMac I have _five_ different browsers installed (none of which is IE). Now mind you some of them share quite a bit of code (camino, firefox) but still the amount of activity and innovation going on with browsers is amazing. Amazing everywhere that is except at Microsoft. IE exists and has always existed for the sole purpose of locking people into Microsoft products. It was Microsoft's best reaponse to regain control after the world wide web broke out.

You always have to remember that when the web became big, it wasn't where MS wanted the fuure to be. In fact the delays on the way to IE7 are all about MS not wanting the web to be the future either. Microsoft fears open standards and systems like the plague. Embrace, extend, extinguish exist soley for the purpose of trying to defeat open standards.

Its good to see MS losing ground on this battle in the browser space and hopefully ODF will help them lose it in the document space.

You always have to remember that if in the 90's Microsoft could have in any way caused the web to not exist they would have done anything to make it so. But the best they could do was try to monopolize the market with _their_ browser.

Go Firefox!

Re:Safari Adventure Club

Safari pisses me off though because lack of design mode is a major flaw, but one that is obviously fixable.

I don't have a bathtub in my kitchen. It would be very easy to hire a plumber to have one installed, but I won't. Why not? Because a bathtub does not belong in a kitchen.

Apple doesn't seem to be of the opinion that it's appropriate for a web BROWSING application to incorporate the features of a web AUTHORING tool. I find this to be a reasonable design decision, even if I don't particularly agree with it.

Stagnating

Well, they stagnated. And IE came and IMNSHO, ruined the web experience in the late 90s to early 00s. And during that time Netscape released their code into the Mozilla project. It then got worse. AOL bought Netscape, and Netscape is just a memory.

Yeah, Netscape definitely stagnated back around version 4 or 5 - when the browser was a bloated mess and was in danger of collapsing under its own weight. When IE 4 came out it was quite simply a better browser. It rendered pages faster and had a much better user interface. I think it's a bit of an exaggeration to say that IE "ruined the web experience in the late 90s". They were the best game in town back then.

I made the move to Firefox a few years ago when pop-ups were a huge problem, and discovered that Firefox was about a LOT more than just blocking popups. IE had started to stagnate bigtime. IE5 and IE6 offered no meaningful improvements (although a pop up blocker appeared way late in the game). People knew that IE sucked but the word hadn't spread about Firefox yet. The momentum is clearly shifting towards Firefox now.

I just hope that they don't start to stagnate or bloat up with unneeded features too much. Fortunately they let extensions take care of any "bloat" that a user may want, which I think is good. Just keep a small core set of features and let people add enhancements on as they see fit. So far the history of web browsing has shown that through many generations of innovation come long periods of stagnation. From Mosaic to Netscape to IE to Firefox to ???

Re:Firefox is yet another OSS victory!

Actually, what make Firefox pretty good is that the vast majority of web sites render correctly under this browser, which was not true of many previous non-IE web browsers. That plus the fact the basic download is only around 4.5 MB helps, too.

What about Opera, Safari and Konq.

Would Taco like to furnish us with those stats? :P

Here are some

These are my percentages for June, with spiders and wget-type things stripped out. Nearly two thirds of my hits are referrals from Slashdot.

Firefox - 69
MSIE - 10
Konq - 5
Opera - 4
Safari - 3
Mozilla - 3
Camino - .4
Galeon - .3
Epiphany - .1
Links - 0
Firebird - 0
Omniweb - 0
Dillo - 0
WebCollage - 0
K-Meleon - 0
Multizilla - 0
Lynx - 0
Shiira - 0
Motorola - 0
w3m - 0
GetRight - 0

Re:OS/Distro/versions?

Full browser stats [linuxvirus.net]
Full OS stats [linuxvirus.net]

The World Is Seeing the Light?

"Slow but sure, to win the race", says the quietly confident tortoise...

Work

That number might be higher (for /. users), but some may do a bit of viewing while at work. Some employers do not allow Firefox for some reason.

Re:Work

Indeed. I'm a summer student working on an internship right now.

At the orientation, they had a woman from IT give us the rundown on how to log into our computers blahblahblah. A student asked if they had Firefox. The IT staffer said that they don't allow instant messanger software on the computers...

Ya... switch to Firefox was one of the smartest computer choices I ever made.

Re:Work

And most probably don't know about USB thumb drives. Put those two together and hey! You got Portable Firefox! :)

I'm doing my part

Here at my office, Firefox is the default encouraged officially sanctioned browser of choice. After all those javascript/buffer overflow/remote code execution errors we gave the heave ho to IE and made sure that everyone had a copy of FF installed. So, put me down for 0.000000000000001% of those users!

Portable Firefox

we aren't allowed to install any additional programs

No problem. Just run Firefox directly from a USB drive [portableapps.com].

Firefox

It's 'Firefox'. Not 'FireFox'.

Thanks for reading.

More Data

Well, this is one firm's results and we all know how sometimes findings can be biased. If you want the full report from onestat, it is here [onestat.com] with all browsers covered.

Interestingly, Adtech [adtech.info] found similar results (~12% in Europe [adtech.info]) while The Counter [thecounter.com] put Firefox at more around ~9-10% for those months. Net Applications [hitslink.com] placed Firefox at around 10% also. Of course, Wikipiedia [wikipedia.org] has a decent article on this with combined data at the bottom.

I guess 13% seems like kind of a stretch and 10% seems a bit more realistic. I don't know what makes any one source more reliable than the other though as none of them really talk about their strategy for attaining these statistics.

The big question shouldn't be "where is Firefox's percentage" but instead "how do we make Firefox more appealing to non-technical users?" Because it's clear that the technically savvy people have adopted Firefox but you'll never make it past 15% of the population with that attitude. I hate to say it, but introducing some functionality that Internet Explorer doesn't have might be the only way to accomplish that. And when you do that, you lose the stability and security that made it so popular in the first place. Solution? Perhaps a MySpace plug-in in light of recent news? :)

Extensions

We need a Windows version with some of the extensions pre-bundled. Set up the AdBlock and Spell Checking, and dispatch that version. That way it consists of Download -> Install -> Doubleclick -> Browsing!!

Upgrade?

but sadly 18% of our firefox users need to upgrade to the latest version ;) Go do that now.

Do you mean version 2? But I just remember reading a story on slashdot that was tagged "donotdownlad" and there was a highly moded comment stating that Mozilla did not wanted us to download that version...

I am running 1.5.0.4 (now that I see it, it is funny the quantity of digits in that version number, what does the .0 is suppose mean?)

Is it the latest version? according to the Help/update it is :) yay!

Mythbusters, Firefox Edition!

• Dragging bookmarks works fine for me in 1.5
• The interface is only as sloppy as you make it, thanks to the right click | customize menu option.
• Extensions can be used to tweak the interface further if you wish. Stylish can be used to apply styles to the interface (although I ran into problems when trying to limit the height of the toolbars, but I probably wasn't doing it right).
• I don't see a "move up" button anywhere anyways. But then again I'm using 2.0 at the moment.
• If Firefox seems screwy, disable all extensions using Safe-Mode and see if the problem goes away. If it does, you have a bad extension somewhere. Not Firefox's fault. This also applies to memory usage (although a large part is still due to Firefox's memory cache... which people like to refer to as a leak, despite the fact they take no steps to limit the memory cache size using about:config) and overall load time and stability.

Re:Upgrade?

I think they're referring to people like me who still run 1.0.7 and need to upgrade to 1.5.0.4.

The results are probably skewed by people like me who use the version of Firefox that came with their distro. I'm using Debian Stable with Firefox 1.0.4

TechGranny dons tinfoil hat.

I was reading Tacos journal, and read about the new widgets being prepared.

Tim has been working on an improved control widget which hopefully will make a lot more sense then the terrible UI we kludged together to get things started. We're going to start buy giving access to the system from a random sampling of users. There are bugs in various browsers that will need to be worked out, and the UI will need to be refined, but I think everyone will be happy with how it works. It's definitely becoming very clear where the performance problems in different browsers are. It's a pain.

Hmm.......

Checks version number.... ;)

Operating systems?

I assume the majority of that growth must be on Windows, but I'm wondering if Firefox usage is growing at the same rate on different OSs, since they have different alternatives. Mac and *nix users have some pretty decent non-Firefox browsers that arent available to Windows users. Just curious, anyone got relevant stats?

Why my Firefox is out of date...

My Firefox is out of date because I switched to Opera when Beta 9 came out. I still use Firefox on occassion for testing my web site and for the ocassional page that just refuses to play nicely with Opera (or when I need to use the IE tab for one of the few pages that STILL refuses to work in anything except for IE). So I just don't bother to stay current on the latest updates. Of course then there's the version of Firefox I'm using now at work (version 1.0.7) and that's pretty out of date... but I'm not the person who originally installed Firefox (and this is a multi-user computer) so I don't know if they need the older version of Firefox for some reason...

I wonder...

If by coming out of the obscure browser category to the significant market share browser category will increase the amount of exploits used by hackers, spammers and adware people out there. It would seem that much of the IE security breaches result from, aside from it's crappiness, its ubiquitous presence on the web. I wonder if Firefox will start to see more security breaches as it gains market share... We will see!

BBC doesn't require WMP

From the article:

It's to be expected that a coding or Linux forum would have a higher number of users using FireFox than a more general website such as BBC (which requires WMP to play media) or myspace.

Not so, the BBC offers vid/audio content in either Real format or offers a choice between Real and WMP.

Link to the One Stat statistics mentioned [onestat.com].

Fire who?

That's pretty good numbers considering the vast majority of web users have never heard of Firefox. All my IT/tech-head friends are on Firefox and have been for some time but pretty much all the 'normal' users, mums, dads, people at work etc. have never heard of it and even when shown it simply don't understand why they would want to change from IEx. Web standards? Reliability? Safety? They just don't care. They fire up their PC and get browsing with IEx. It works for them, that's all they're interested in. They might care more if people like me didn't keep doing a free clean of their machine to remove all the muck they have downloaded every few months.

So, if you want Firefox to flourish, stop fixing friends PCs for free :-)