Firefox Now Serious Threat to IE in Europe

Tookis writes "Mozilla's Firefox web browser has made dramatic gains on Microsoft's Internet Explorer throughout Europe in the past year with a marked upturn in FF use compared to IE over the past four months, according to French web monitoring service XiTiMonitor. A study of nearly 96,000 websites carried out during the week of July 2 to July 8 found that FF had 27.8% market share across Eastern and Western Europe, IE had 66.5%, with other browsers including Safari and Opera making up the remaining 5.7%. In some key European markets FF has already reached parity and is threatening to overtake IE as the market leading browser."

That's because

Europeans love foxes. Rawr!

Browser usage

CmdrTaco reports from the our-logs-show-nobody-using-ie-anyway dept. but this has got me interested: what are the percentages of usage of browsers for accessing Slashdot?

Re:Browser usage

Mod parent up, please share some details!

Re:Browser usage

Mod parent up, but can we also have a breakdown on weekday Vs weekend figures. During the week, a lot of people are accessing Slashdot from work, where they are not allowed to install non-IE browsers. At the weekend (hopefully) the percentage of Slashdot users at work will be lower. Just don't forget about time zones...

Great

Now I'm going to have to find something more obscure to avoid the attentions of the malware makres... what was the name of that other one... Icemeasles?

Re:Great

If you want to avoid malware, go for Lynx, I bet you there isn't even one threat that works under Lynx.

... the actual webpage might not work either, but that's just a minor detail :)

Re:Great

Ah, even lynx can be exploited (for example: http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-206-1 [ubuntu.com]) to make room for malwares.
I want to use wget, but it is also has a history of bugs that can be exploited [google.com].
I'll stick with telnet, and parse it with my eyes. Although it is a bit difficult for HTTPS sites.

IE 7

Once you've seen IE 7, you too will want to switch to any other browser.

Re:IE 7

You might be modded funny, but it's TRUE! I don't know what MS was thinking but IE7 is butt-ugly! It's turning in one of those christmas tree decoration interfaces like those media player skins. Out the window with consistent design etc, let's make it actually more difficult to use our products, maybe then the people will understand the added value of windows! No, really , I have NO idea why they're doing it, it just seems illogical.

Re:IE 7

Look again - closely. The effect is fairly subtle under the XP look but much more noticeable under Vista with the full Aero Glass effects enabled.

When you position the mouse cursor over a scrollbar, it's supposed to light up. Under Vista, this means going from a gray color to a blue color, making it fairly noticeable. Under XP's look, this means going from a light blue to an even lighter blue. If you're using the Classic look, there's nothing to see, since there is no mouse-over effect.

Vista's full Aero Glass additional has a fade-in effect where the button background on the arrows is supposed to appear. (Firefox fails to do this, just like IE7.) Likewise, there's a fade-out effect when the mouse leaves the scrollbar that both IE7 and Firefox fail to do. Of course, IE7 can't do it since it never did the original mouse-over effect.

Under IE7, this effect never happens. Mousing-over the scrollbar does nothing.

I've got a movie of it happening under Vista using FRAPS. Unfortunately I'll have to go hunting for something to change it into a useful format, since I doubt a lot of people have the FRAPS codec installed.

Keep in mind this only happens in the MSHTML control. All form controls inside of MSHTML are emulated. You can easily verify this by looking at a form button with a very large caption - IE6/IE7 stretch out the button background to the point it looks strange. Not to mention that all form controls in IE7 are missing Vista's Aero Glass fade-in/fade-out effects.

Wish for US

Well, I wish that were the case in the US. There are still *FAR* too many sites that have IE-only components. So, although the vast majority (90%+) of sites we use (at work) work for us (we use only FireFox), there are still a few important sites that cause a nightmare for us. Since we use Linux only, running IE is not an option. (And yes, I know about emulators and IES4Linux, which are nice, but don't work everywhere, don't work well for thin clients, and/or are difficult to maintain).

What is more irritating is that those few IE-only sites are about 95% working with Firefox. There are usually only a few parts of the site that don't work (but that is all it takes). With minimal correction/effort, those sites would work on any platform. But even after repeated begging (on one, for YEARS), a few such sites have still had no interest in "fixing" things. I do wish there was a version of Firefox/Mozilla that had an IE-compatibility mode... "FireIE Fox" or something, for use in such cases.

Fortunately, another few broken sites finally "saw the light", probably due to complaints from people like us, and fixed things.

Re:Wish for US

I was reading a few weeks ago that, in Europe, the impetus to change web sites that only supported IE was significantly increased by showing how large a market share they were missing out by tying their site to proprietary software 'standards'. I am trying to find the professional journal in which I read the article and, when I find it, I will try to find if there is an electronic link that I can post here for others to read. The usage of Firefox, Opera et al in Europe is much higher than in the States and so our businesses have much more to lose but the principle is the same wherever you are, particularly in these days of globalisation.

There is no need for a IE-Compatibility mode in Firefox/Mozilla, simply get MSIE to use the accepted standards and the problem is solved.

Re:Wish for US

Now look, I didn't say the Microsoft isn't stupid, but changing the rest of the world to suit MS is not the way I choose to go. Why should we modify everything else to suit one company?

But the solution is easier still. MSIE doesn't have to change, if people just stop designing websites that use MS-specific extensions. It can be done, you know. MSIE can accept whatever it wants but if no-one is using MS specific extensions then it will still work.

Methodology

While the article doesn't mention how, a previous study [xitimonitor.com] on XiTiMonitor's site shows that they're using share of visits by each browser type to the sites in question.

Where do the stats come from?

From the largest site i have access to - a medical online shop, in fact: last 30 days: IE: 78,26% of visitors Firefos: 16,33% of visitors Gets funnier if you look at the revenue: IE: 85,9% of revenue Firefox: 9,46% of revenue. I can not really see "great advances". Firefox is a respectable and solid nr 2, but that basically is it.

Re:Where do the stats come from?

From the largest site i have access to - a medical online shop

Ah, it's you! Stop sending me email. :P

Re:Where do the stats come from?

So you're saying that your sample is indicative of the trend, while a much larger sample consisting of 90k websites - isn't?

Not what we're seeing

This is not at all what we're seeing with a UK based employment site with ~40,000 hits per month. What we see is 55% IE 6, 25% IE 7, 12% FireFox, 4% safari, and all other browsers below 1% (every browser from opera to lynx (!!)).

IE7 WGA?

I wonder if this has anything to do with Microsoft refusing IE7 upgrades to non-genuine Windows installations. Everyone I know who has a pirated copy of Windows (mostly self-made boxes) uses Firefox, while nearly everyone I know who has a genuine copy of Windows (mostly laptops) uses IE7.

I'm not sure why they refuse it to non-genuine users anyway. I can understand security patches, but this? No one is going to go out and buy Windows just to use IE7.

It seems everything Microsoft does to curb piracy these days hurts its monopoly.

Popularity Contests

FOSS should not be obsessed with the popularity contest of userbase size. It will only come back to haunt you in the end. Like the man said, "The majority are always wrong"

Market Share Matters

Browser market share matters. As long as IE had all the market share, Web developers tended to ignore Web standards and build sites that only worked in IE --- it's a simple economic decision on their part. Wherever Firefox has major market share, they can't do that anymore. They are forced to build sites that at least work in Firefox too. That has the nice side effect that those sites are now usable by Linux and Mac users, and they're also much more likely to work in other browsers. Everybody wins --- except Microsoft.

This is why it's not enough for us to just believe in freedom and build free software. We have to make sure it succeeds in the market, or we'll lose the ability to communicate with the non-free world and ultimately our free software will be useless.

The figures are misleading

There are many Firefox users who select MSIE as their User Agent string in order to get sites to even allow them access, banks being one particular group that springs to mind, but I am sure that there are others. I cannot imagine that any MSIE users would need to select Firefox as the User Agent. In which case the figures will be conservative for Firefox usage and optimistic for MSIE usage. What we don't know, or at least I don't know, is how much this skews the figures.

Re:The figures are misleading

Well changing the UA string with my UK bank's website makes the difference between 'Your browser is not supported' to a fully functioning web page which obviously doesn'trequire anything in IE to make it work. Mock all you want, I have to do this all the time - and I have just checked again to make sure that I am correct.

Whee! Monopoly Exploit Time

In some key European markets FF has already reached parity is threatening to overtake IE as the market leading browser.

Suddenly monopolies don't sound so bad. OK, how do we abuse this new power?

Re:Whee! Monopoly Exploit Time

Firefox's goal is to make the web use standards, so that you could select what browser you want to use. How many websites you have seen that work only with Firefox? And how many that work only with IE? That is they key difference.

So once Firefox has majority of the global market share, the web has already been converted to work with any browser and we (users, companies, developers, anyone except Microsoft) have won.

I'm forced to use IE 8+ hours a day

...and pretty much most of US office workers. The Internet Explorer is corporate choice. Although I have local admin account, the "remove firefox" script runs daily. There's not much workaround it, most of corporate intranets do not work with anything but Internet Explorer - mostly because authentication issues.

So this should be taken into consideration, IE share at home might be lower than statistics show.

If Firefox passed up IE

the worst that would happen to MS is that they would be better protected against future antitrust cases. Web sites built using ASP.NET 2.0 work as well on Firefox as they do on IE, so it wouldn't impact the server side.

Leaving 5.7% to the other browsers....

...like Opera and Safari.

That makes Steve Jobs' recent presentation using a diagram with just I.E. (ca. 75%) and Safari (supposedly ca. 25%) shares shown for some time in the future an even more ridiculous event... :-)

Just to confirm these stats I checked our site

and found that IE gets 67%, FF gets 22% Opera is at 4.4% and everything else is less than 0-5% (probably our geeky staff using obscure browsers!) So I am guessing that the last time I actually looked at those stats, FF was a lot lower.

Think that's bad?

Where I work, one of the systems has us completely locked in to using Netscape 4.0. I can't see any reason for it in terms of what the system does, but it refuses to even give you access with any other browser. Netscape is installed on every PC so they can access this system, and because management hope to "eventually" get rid of the system entirely, they refuse to update it to work on any other browser.

So, when you are cracking up because of idiot webmasters locking you in to using IE7 to view their sites, just know you don't have the absolute worst of it :)

Windows next?

Perhaps Windows will share a similar fate? One can hope.

I'd like to know...

What the % of IE developers use FF.

IE still had some + points

Can I just first I'm a huge FireFox fan, and am indeed writing this very message from it.

That said, IE is the only browser where you can easily configure it enterprise wide, extremely easily. Want to lock down specific websites to text & images only for thousands of machines remotely? It's as easy as doing it in "Internet Options" in Windows. Want to switch off JavaScript internet-wide for specific departments/offices in your enterprise? Same again - just set the group policy option.

Basically, ALL of the IE options are over-ridable at a Group Policy level, built into every AD system since Windows 2000 Server. IE is the only browser that makes this possible. That, folks is quite often why IE is the corporate browser of choice - it's the only one that can be centrally managed like that.

Re:IE still had some + points

That said, IE is the only browser where you can easily configure it enterprise wide, extremely easily. Want to lock down specific websites to text & images only for thousands of machines remotely?

I would argue that this isn't the sort of thing that a browser should be doing. If you want to strip Javascript out of particular sites or something similar, you should set up a transparent proxy at your router to do that to all outbound traffic. Why modify software on hundreds of computers when you could just do it on one instead? Not to mention that in that case, you don't have to worry about anybody installing an alternative browser or plugging an unauthorized computer into the network. They'll still get filtered, too.

Re:IE still had some + points

That's doable for Firefox as well:

http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox:2.0_Institutional_ Deployment [mozilla.org]

and inparticular:

http://homepages.ed.ac.uk/mcs/FirefoxADM/Readme.ht m [ed.ac.uk]

It's FX, not FF!

Bloody hell, it's people like you who spread a false abbreviation. FX is Firefox. FF is Final Fantasy. Check the spreadfirefox website for FX. They ask people to stop calling them FF. DO IT.

OT, but still...

In TFA there was a Flash ad about biblical prophesies concerning the Middle East. What the heck? "YOU need to understand what is prophesied yet to happen in the MIDDLE EAST." Yeah, right. And this is related to IT in ..what way?

I wonder about OS X

As far as I can tell, there is no IE for OS X (I looked because a local radio station can stream only to IE for some weird reason).

Since there is no IE, and there have been some goodly (for random value of goodly) Macs upgraded to OS X, plus some switchers, perhaps this has helped?

Also, there is also the fact (where fact = my opinion) that IE is FF's whipping boy.....

It's true

At work the number of times a user has phoned up for administration help or regular support and they are using Firefox has doubled over the past few months and it's still growing especially when browsing is far more easier in Firefox. People are also tagging onto the idea of extensions like IEtab where some sites only work in IE so people use IEtab in Firefox. It's awesome.

True

The stats on my own little site (thousands page hits a day) shows a clear incremnent in Firefox usage on those last 6 months, I am not sure about being an european only trend.

My stats for my website...

say this: (browser, hits, ):
MSIE 6 - 5,380 - 37.61%
MSIE 7 - 3,733 - 26.10%
Firefox 2 - 2,526 - 17.66%
Firefox 1.5 - 829 - 5.80%

All other MSIE/Firefox contributions are less than 1&. So far, Win + Safari have made NO contribution to the stats.

I hate IE 6

I am forced to use IE6 all day because McAfee deletes firefox as a security threat (fair enough) and my corporate lan won't let me Windows Update.

To be expected...

Just my opinion, don't take any of this seriously. Think of it like a brainstorming session where there are different variables offered up on the table in a variety of ways. Neat things come from it sometimes.

We'll see this more and more overseas, especially in developing countries who wish to find their place within the current IP related markets. It's just a sign that an acceleration towards a shift has already started. Funny thing about this is that MS just outsourced a research lab to another country to remain competitive.(Needs to be cited or have clarification) Unfortunately, it's a catch 22 when it comes to globalization. Companies need to be competitive as much as any other company needs to be. While we have a certain advantage, we might have to take some losses due to new competitive forces on the horizon. While I only support Microsoft insomuch as to keep a certain level of wealth within the states, it sucks to see that the market might marginalize the company to obscurity. It will take a lot to get there but you never know. Given any opportunity for certain developing countries to succeed, something might pop up here and there which would give us a run for the money. I would hate the world to be homogenized but with the amount of diversity in resources for each area, it shouldn't be too much of a problem. I hate the concept of interdependence but it's been that way for quite a while and I doubt that will change any time soon.

Well, with IBM, Novell, Sun, and Red Hat being US companies, there is a certain technical advantage that will help the US over time in terms of *n(i/u)x related IP. Who knows what OpenSuSE (Germany), Ubuntu (Britain/Isle of Man), Mandriva (France) might come up with over time. I would like to mention a Chinese distribution of Linux but I can't seem to find one yet. If India ever gets a sense of entitlement outside of their dependency on MS outsourcing, I wonder where they will put their interest towards. Swaraj can be a double edge sword sometimes.

Don't mean to sounds ominous but I think its time to bring this conversation to the table in an open manner. We see very little of it because when someone talks about globalization they come off as wearing a tin foil hat. Somethings happening, don't really know what but I do think there should be a certain invested interest in certain things that are currently going on in the market. At least have some reasonable argument to pacify certain concerns. Spreading democracy is one thing but spreading capitalism is another. Not that I necessarily disagree (double negative, I know) with what's going on, my main concern is what's keeping it together. Simple answers bind truths further than any excuse or reason.

So now...

Firefox is the new IE.

Opera is the new Firefox.

IE is (will be) the new... Netscape?

Eventually, Opera will get the attention it deserves. Hooray!

Funny...

This article is featured in the "Internet Explorer" category, and has a big blue IE logo next to it.

It's an odd way to celebrate Firefox and Mozilla's success.

--
Toro

Re:Hoo-ray

Junk (I.E.) is being replaced with more junk (Firefox). Yes, it's better junk, but junk none the less.

At least it isn't proprietary junk that doesn't follow standards and tries to shut out the competition. It's a step forward.

Re:Hoo-ray

I think the success Firefox is having at the moment will drive its development further. Because it's not a commercial product we're not going to get the IE experience where the lazy bastards never fix anything and just add features that are broken. There is a genuine drive to innovate and make something that withstands the scrutiny of the community.

Maybe it will pave the way for some proper competition like Opera and others, which are bound to win more market share as the firefox using public start to hear about other alternatives.

Personally though, I've found Firefox to have gotten better and better with time. It's gotten very stable and has plug ins which run well and reliably. It's definitely ready for prime time.

Re:Hoo-ray

And AT LAST, Internet Explorer is back to where it belongs: A nice tool to download Firefox. ;-)

Re:Hoo-ray

I'm with you on tool, nice on the other hand... :-)