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

[mrak and swepe]

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

Thanks for reading.

Why my Firefox is out of date...

[mikeisme77]

My Firefox is out of date because I switched to Opera when Beta 9 came out.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 Of course then there's the version of Firefox I'm using now at work (version 1.0.7) and that's pretty out of date...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...

Re:Work

[The MAZZTer]

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

Mythbusters, Firefox Edition!

[The MAZZTer]

• 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:OS/Distro/versions?

[linvir]

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

Re:OS/Distro/versions?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, thanks for making me have to do a killall -9 firefox-bin

I was stuck in an infinite loop of firefox asking me for the username and password for your site.

Portable Firefox

[bunratty]

we aren't allowed to install any additional programs

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

Re:Work

[pla]

So how exactly am I meant to use a thumb drive on NT 4?

You tell the BIOS to provide legacy support for USB drives, then NT sees it as just another HDD.

Of course, you can't hot-plug it if you do that, but assuming you shut your machines down at night, you can attach it in in the morning and take it home at night with you.

Firefox Slashdotter Extension

[cyclocommuter]

Another tip for Slashdot readers using Firefox... get the Firefox Slashdotter Extension [mozilla.org]. It expands hidden comments inline using AJAX, allows you to change skins, informs you via an icon on the status bar if you got mod points, displays links to Coral Cache, plus more.

Stagnating

[Otis2222222]

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:I prefer Mozilla, not Firefox

[Scarblac]

I simply hold ctrl and use the mouse wheel. Doesn't that work?

Update?

[Hyram Graff]

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

Well I'm using Debian stable and thought I should update myself to the latest version. Here's how that went.

# apt-get install mozilla-firefox
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
mozilla-firefox is already the newest version.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

My conclusion, I'm comletly up to date. Yes sir, "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050925 Firefox/1.0.4 (Debian package 1.0.4-2sarge5)" is the latest version. I don't know who these people are who need to upgrade Firefox but they really should go and do that now.

Re:I think not

[Supersonic1425]

1. NoScript [mozilla.org] works with all versions of Firefox now and is available from the Mozilla Add-ons site [mozilla.org].

AniDisable [brownhost.com] is available from the author's website [brownhost.com], and is apparently compatible with versions 0.9 - 1.5, although I've not personally confirmed this.

FlashBlock [mozilla.org] is also available on the Mozilla Add-ons site, and is apparently compatible with versions 1.41 - 1.6. Again, I haven't personally tried this extension, but I've seen no comments that lead me to believe that it isn't compatible with the latest final version of Firefox.

Tab Mix Plus [mozilla.org] is also available on the Mozilla Add-ons site, and is apparently compatible with versions 1.0 - 1.6. Once again, I haven't personally tried this extension.

2. Incremental search? Do you mean "Find As You Type?" If so, this isn't exactly a new feature, and it can easily be disabled in the Options menu (Advanced tab).

3. As for this so-called "Nullplugin" thing — I have no idea what you're on about. It's not a problem I've come accross. Tried uninstalling Firefox, removing your userdata (remember to back up your bookmarks!) and then installing the latest version?

Re:Safari Adventure Club

[BlueStraggler]

I've just added Safari to our to-be-supported browser list because I noticed that it does support design mode. If you're using Safari, see for yourself [exsitewebware.com].

It will tell you that your browser is unsupported, but follow the link to force the editor to load anyway. It's buggy as hell, because the software knows nothing about KHTML, but you can definitely edit (at least I can using Safari 1.3.2 on OSX 10.3.9). Although it works the first time when I load it, Safari will often crash if you load it again, so make sure you don't have any important pages open :-). Yes, it appears to be a highly unstable alpha feature, so it's no surprise that you haven't heard of it, but somebody is evidently working on the problem. Thanks, Apple!

Anyway, one of my developers now has an old iBook on his desk to add better support for this when he can find the time.

Re:Thank you ... Microsoft?

[forgotten_my_nick]

Microsoft didn't build IE to begin with.

They licensed the core code from SpyGlass after Netscape told them to get lost (when they tried to buy Netscape).

The contract went something like paying a minimal royality fee and a percentage of profit of every IE sold.

Then MS sold it for free which meant that spyglass got 0% profit from each IE and all thier other customers dumped them because they found they could just use MSIE which had the same codebase but they didn't have to pay.

It almost put spyglass out of business. They later sued microsoft and won $8 million. Small victory.

Re:I prefer Mozilla, not Firefox

[SpiritOfGrandeur]

Ctrl-Scroll Wheel

I find that rather easy... How is that to awkward?

Re:I wish I could use it at work

[HermanAB]

Here you go:
http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/browsers/por table_firefox [portableapps.com]

BTW, when I need Linux, I run Puppy Linux from a CDROM at work - friggen clueless IT folks in some places...

Re:Update?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the problem with Debian.

An update to new features takes EONS.

Re:What about Opera, Safari and Konq.

[Kelson]

Follow the trail of links!

Here's OneStat's press release [onestat.com], which cites these worldwide stats:

1. Microsoft IE 83.05%
2. Mozilla Firefox 12.93%
3. Apple Safari 1.84%
4. Opera 1.00%
5. Netscape 0.16%

Country-by country stats are at the link. Among the countries surveyed, Opera is most popular in Australia (4.69%) and Safari is most popular in the USA (3.28%).

It's not clear whether they lump Konqueror in with Safari or "other," which doesn't appear on the list.

Re:What about Opera, Safari and Konq.

[Just Some Guy]

Bookmarks are just _terrible_ in konquerer. Specifically the bookmark toolbar is just rediculous. I like to have just a few bookmarks in my toolbar and more in my Bookmarks menu... in Konquerer all bookmarks end up in the toolbar... which is just rediculous.

Umm, what? Go to Bookmarks -> Edit Bookmarks. Make a folder in there called "toolbar folder" or something similar. Select that folder. Go to Folder -> Set as Toolbar Folder. Voila: your toolbar now only shows bookmarks that are stored in that folder. I don't know why your distro made the root folder the toolbar folder, but that's their choice and not a KDE requirement.

Couple this with the fact that I have to use several computers and OS's all day long (between dual-booting my desktop, my laptop, my wife's laptop, my school computer, my lab computer) and it is nice to be able to use the _exact_ same browsing interface on all of them

Fair enough. I use KDE (on several differents OSes) at work and home so I avoid that problem, but I can see how it would be annoying.

The third reason is plugins. Are there even _any_ konquerer plugins?

I think you meant "extensions" because Konqueror can already use Mozilla plugins (Flash, etc.). Konqueror does have a few extensions floating around, but again, most of them are built into KDE or Konqueror already. For example, the KDE Control Center has a configurator for system-wide mouse gestures (Regional & Accessibility -> Input Actions). You could define gestures there that map to commands like the ones you've been using in Firefox. The biggest difference is that they work everyone and not just in one particular application.

Howto update firefox 1.5.x.y

[blackjackshellac]

Go to the Help menu, and select 'Check for updates ...'.

Re:Upgrade?

[k8to]

The outlined scenario by the grandparent clearly indicates his system has gone deeply into swap. Apparently your system has not.

The end.

Re:Update?

[Marin3]

try using etch or sid and that command will show a different output!