

Firefox Share Slipped in July for the First Time 557
prostoalex writes "Between June and July of this year, Firefox lost 0.64% of the users, while Microsoft IE gained the same amount, leaving other browsers at their usual zero point something share. Could recent security problems and lack of stability, reported by some users, lead to the decline of the browser that just passed 80 million downloads?" I think the other thing to remember is that while ~8% seems a lot, there's a still a huge amount of ground to cover -- and a number change like this is statistical noise. I should point out that my issue with noise isn't the absolute numbers; it's the somewhat inadequate measurements tools for this.
Marketshare Stabilized (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Marketshare Stabilized (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Marketshare Stabilized (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless you're a web designer. In that case you'd want them to use anything but IE.
Re:Marketshare Stabilized (Score:3, Insightful)
While *I* prefer FireFox, I realize the majority of my audience is IE. Now I make my websites IE and FireFox compatible, but if I had to choose it would be IE. If FireFox wants to become my dominate choice - then it better be the dominate OS. This i
Re:Marketshare Stabilized (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, a web designer wants to keep his sanity. As someone who just finished a portal website for 2000 users, let me tell you this: The absolutely worst thing about IE is doing a code change, and never having any idea if it'll work or not without clickin
Re:Marketshare Stabilized (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Marketshare Stabilized (Score:5, Insightful)
In short, the browser other people choose does affect you.
Re:Marketshare Stabilized (Score:3, Insightful)
Browsers matter for a number of reasons. I'll start off with feature sets, then security, and end with why what browser you use or don't use matters to the future of the net.
Microsoft has basically decided that they won the browser wars years ago and have since then pretty much paid no attention at all to adding real features to IE. Here is a short list of some of the things you are missing if you
Several corrections... (Score:4, Insightful)
IE6 has a popup blocker as part of the browser, has for like a year now. So I don't know how old this cut and paste is, but it's seriously misinformed.
Really? It's in the View Objects list. Sort by cookie.
I'm not sure what you're trying to do, but this seems more of a case of inexperience than a feature. Mozilla's is a little bit easier to find, but it also provides less information and doesn't appear to let me easily view the contents of the cookie.
And of course there are none for Mozilla, because it's really super secure and you don't need to worry about patching or anything.
*snark*
Yep. Because they also sell a lot of server and development tools which make use of the internet. As such, they develop the browser to promote new technologies made available to developers...
But out of curiousity. Have you ever stopped to wonder why Mozilla has spent so much time and money on a product that they give away for free?
Is it to fight Microsoft, or is it to introduce new technology which makes the user and developer experience better? Frankly, I think it's the latter... Netscape tried the Former and failed.
What browser you use doesn't matter. Just like it doesn't matter what car you drive, or what golf club you want to use.
Re:Also missing from a legacy browser (Score:4, Informative)
For those that need a pointer in the right direction, it's call spellbound [sourceforge.net]. Don't forget to add the dictionary(s) like it instructs or spellbound will silently fail to catch any mistakes.
Re:Marketshare Stabilized (Score:5, Insightful)
pfffft (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Marketshare Stabilized (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Marketshare Stabilized (Score:3, Informative)
1: superlong page, I highlight some text, accidentally scroll down to bottom of page. System slows to a crawl while it highlights all that.
2: sometimes, inexplicably, highlighted text doesn't unhighlight. It just gets suck that way. If I highlight it again, then part of the stuck highlighting goes away.
Re:Marketshare Stabilized (Score:3, Informative)
- Copy/paste is flaky and very frustrating. Especially when trying to paste into other applications (seems to be better pasting to itself). Particularly when trying to copy/paste URLs in the address bar. It seems I have to click the address, then click again to get a blinking cursor. Then highlight the entire string, THEN I can successfully copy it.
- Sometimes it just kinda disappears. Meaning the taskbar icon. I've had it just di
Re:Marketshare Stabilized (Score:3, Informative)
Hmm. I've had the opposite experience. I've been using Mozilla since v1.2 or thereabouts, on both Win2K and XP, and it very rarely crashes - perhaps once a month. Less often than IE did when I was using IE. When it does crash, it's almost always related to a media plugin like WMP losing its mind. I haven't noticed the rendering problems
Firefox bugs cause CPU hogging. (Score:3, Informative)
Another difficulty with Firefox is CPU usage. When Firefox bugs occur, sometimes Firefox CPU use climbs to 10% and even to 98%, even with no pages loading. Then ALL operations on that computer are slow, verrrrrry slow.
The reason for the downturn. (Score:5, Insightful)
Could recent security problems and lack of stability, reported by some users, lead to the decline of the browser that just passed 80 million downloads?"
Actually, the decline is probably because everyone who wants it has it by now. ^_^
Re:The reason for the downturn. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The reason for the downturn. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's unfortunate, and arguably isn't the best thing the users can do, but as long as there's enough sites out there that require IE, users will switch to IE, even from "better" browsers.
Regards,
--
*Art
Re:The reason for the downturn. (Score:3, Insightful)
This may have been proposed before, but what if there was a standard way to deal with non standards compliant websites?
What if there was a simple feedback form as part of firefox? These would send error reports to a database at mozilla or somewhere. The reports can be gone over and a standard polite email can be sent to the webmaster informing them of the problems with their websites.
There would be quite a bit work involved I imagine. Who collects webmaster ema
Re:The reason for the downturn. (Score:3, Interesting)
How many sites ARE there that require IE and/or fail miserably in Firefox, though? I keep seeing people cite this as a major factor in IE's retention of so much browser market share, and yet outside of a few shameful intranet pages at work, I don't think I've encountered an IE-only page in the wild since I made the switch to Mozilla Phoenix, over two years ago.
Has anyone compiled a list of public
Re:The reason for the downturn. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The reason for the downturn. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The reason for the downturn. (Score:5, Insightful)
New computer purchases? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:New computer purchases? (Score:5, Insightful)
When it goes down/up 8+% over 100k sites then there's cause for news.
Hype! (Score:2)
Re:New computer purchases? (Score:2)
What?
None of the target market here have tried Firefox. Are we honestly going after people who are frustrated with IE (but need to be reminded of it by using it), aware of Firefox, but just forgot to get it?
Are you saying "More people using IE is good because they'll get frustrated with it and turn to Firefox?"
That's awfully silly.
Re:New computer purchases? (Score:4, Insightful)
They switched to Moz/FF because their old PCs were encrusted with spyware and IE became unusable. The "fix" for this problem by many is to buy a new PC (can't argue if consultant-paid OS install plus apps equals the cost of a new box).
The new PC has IE, IE works because there's no spyware, voila, FF "loses" marketshare.
Re:New computer purchases? (Score:5, Interesting)
Netscape didn't lost the browser war because of not being installed by default. It helped, but that was not the main reason: Ars Technica sits down with Scott Collins from Mozilla.org [arstechnica.com]:
"Ars: You mention mistakes made by Microsoft. What do you feel are mistakes that Mozilla has made in the past?"
One: There was a fundamental mistake made by Netscape management, twice, which cost us a release at the most inopportune time. I think we can attribute a great deal of our market share loss to this mistake that was pretty much based completely on lies from one executive, who has since left the company (and left very rich) and who was an impediment to everything that we did. He was an awful person, and it is completely on him that we missed a release. We had a "Netscape 5" that was within weeks of being ready to go, and this person said that we needed to ship something based on Gecko within 6 months instead. Every single engineer in the company told management "No, it will be two years at least before we ship something based on Gecko." Management agreed with the engineers in order to get 5.0 out.a
Three months later they came back and said "We've changed our mind, this other executive has convinced us, except now instead of six months, you need to do it in three months." Well, you can't put 50 pounds of [crap] in a ten pound bag, it took two years. And we didn't get out a 5.0, and that cost of us everything, it was the biggest mistake ever, and I put it all on the feet of this one individual, whom I will not name.
Re:New computer purchases? (Score:4, Insightful)
People see the computer as a tool, and don't often distinguish the software from the operating system. No other consumer device, and few other professional devices, maintain this distinction. Hence, the New P.C. factor very definitely is a factor, and this is why MS is keen to push Media Center and the like, and not keen on supporting older hardware because it derives New P.C. sales. Most people won't migrate old applications, only old data. The exception is migration of old devices, because poeple WILL install software bundled with their digital camera or scanner or whatnot, becuase they feel they need it to make it work. And even sometimes not this, because XP has quite a bit of native support for consumer peripherals. Hence, I now see people who used to use Canon's photo management software ZoomBrowser copying their Photo Albums folder into My Photos, and using XP's thumbnails, slideshows, print wizard and the like to manage their images.
The distinction between hardware, O.S. and application is not strong at the consumer level, and hence we DO see upgrade-displacement (which is why bundle agreements are attractive for software providers and I.S.P.s).
Ever since the user could action files directly with the mouse, rather than invoking a piece of software by mouse or C.L.I., the boundaries have blurred to the degree that the file is the data, and everything else is the single, albeit complex, tool that manipulates it.
It was me, sorry (Score:5, Funny)
Massive surge coming, just look (Score:5, Interesting)
So basically the kids using firefox at school stopped for the summer because some of them were using their parents computers that had IE. Now that the kids have gone back to school the ones that weren't using firefox are downloading it in huge numbers (probably mostly to be cool). Next set of statistics will probably show a 2% rise for firefox, imho due to this.
OMG M$ LOL (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:OMG M$ LOL (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:OMG M$ LOL (Score:2)
This got me thinking about IE7 and it's possibilities to sway the stats. Perhaps that margin of usage is people testing IE7 for compatibility and bugs. If early adopters and web developers are using IE7 then that would take away from FireFox's user base. It was the "average joe" part of the grandparent's post that threw me from this initially.
With that said, the description of the statistics is too vague to know if this is true. IE7 could even be at 1% during this month which wo
Re:OMG M$ LOL (Score:3, Interesting)
Pseudopod (Score:5, Interesting)
Then the spyware came back...
Re:Pseudopod (Score:3, Insightful)
And this will prompt the user: "Do you want to make IE your default browser?"
When I install firefox in someone's machine, the first thing I do is setting it as the default browser, then running IE to get that window prompt to me, and press
Re:Pseudopod (Score:3, Informative)
I reproduced this effect on a test system.
Re:Pseudopod (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Pseudopod (Score:4, Interesting)
I have had that happen several times. Not enough to consider it the norm, but I think the originating post serves a purpose to explain that there are plenty of users that hit one small point that requires effort to change something, and so they give up. Not everyone is like this and I've heard all too many tales of people teaching someone in their 80's to use Linux for everyday tasks, but that isn't the normal situation. The majority of users want something that works the way they are used to (the way it's been/IE) and when they have to think to change something, they just give up. Why bother when you can just ask your friend to clean out your spyware each month or so? I don't mean to Troll, but this is a growing trend that I see in many places.
Re:World-wide techsupport on line 2 (Score:2)
How? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:How? (Score:2)
What, you expected statistics on slashdot to actually MEAN something? It's just numbers, man, chill. This site is about politics, not truth. So what do YOU think about this latest outrage?
Re:How? (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple has something like a 2% to 4% share of the sales market (depending on who you ask) and something like a 5% to 8% share of active personal computers in use (depending on who you ask).
Given that nearly all current Apple systems are running OS X, and well over half of them are running Safari, how do they arrive at "Less than 0%" of users for all browsers other than IE and Firefox?
Even using the most anti-Apple zealotry numbers available, Safari use has gotta be at least 1%.
I also think Firefox use has got to be a bit higher than the 8% claimed here. Sure, IE is "what's there" on a new Windows installation, but I've yet to meet anybody who actually prefers IE. Sure, I could see some people jumping ship to it when the new version ships (if it even comes close to delivering current promises), but the current state of IE is that it is inferior in almost every way that matters to Firefox.
Re:How? (Score:3, Interesting)
Except one. Compliance with existing base of websites. I ran into problems with enough websites that were coded badly as to not like Firefox that I just plain switched back. When it was between one browser and 2, I chose a single browser. Put IE together with safe browsing habits, and some skill with Alt-Tab, and it is sufficient for my (admittedly non-taxing) browsing requirements.
I've grown out of the phase
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:"New kid in town"syndrome (Score:2)
Re:"New kid in town"syndrome (Score:3, Informative)
Distribution Model (Score:4, Insightful)
I tried (Score:5, Interesting)
firefox has gotten buggier, for me. (Score:2, Interesting)
I assumed it was just my machine, but then saw the same behavior on two other machines.
Re:firefox has gotten buggier, for me. (Score:2)
Share fluctuation (Score:3, Informative)
Is it statistical noise? (Score:3, Interesting)
This is why you should always give error bars for values obtained in a supposedly scientific way, then it would be obvious if it's noise or not.
You also shouldn't give values to inappropriate levels of precision. if you're going to say share went down by 0.64% and not give an error bar, then it's reasonable to assume your error was +/- 0.005%, in which case it is NOT statistical noise.
(I know I'm asking a lot for
Or it means that... (Score:2)
Hemos has it right (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hemos has it right (Score:2)
Re:Hemos has it right (Score:2)
Hemos has it right
There is no story here.
Then why exactly did Hemos post the alleged non-story in the first place?
Re:Hemos has it right (Score:2)
Who says this is statistical noise? Where is the analysis? Considering that the slip in market share of Firefox (.64% according to the article) is larger than the share of Mozilla suite (0.52%) and Opera (0.49%) it seems significant to me.
It may well be in the noise, but from the minimal amount of data in the article it doesn't look like it to. I need more proof than Hemos' off the cuff editorializing.
Re:Hemos has it right (Score:5, Insightful)
This is statistical noise, pure and simple. There is no story here.
I don't know about that. To really know if it's noise or not, you would have to understand the details of the sampling process, but even without that, it's noteworthy simply because it isn't an *increase*. Firefox has been increasing every month by an amount of roughly the same magnitude, which means that if Firefox usage is continuing to grow as it has been, and if this is merely a measurement error, then it's a really large measurement error (or else many measurements in the past have been very wrong -- I'm assuming that the measurements in July and in previous months were made the same way, BTW).
IMO, this is a pretty solid indicator that last month Firefox growth at least stagnated, and probably actually did decline. There may be reasons for it that don't reflect badly on Firefox, but it is news.
Firefox Frustration (Score:2)
Downloads do NOT equal users (Score:5, Insightful)
Should we start counting every copy of windows sold or bundled with a PC as a "new IE user"? I bought a cheap dell recently to use as a quick and dirty Linux box. It came with WinXP Home and IE, but I don't use it. But by the reasoning usually given for Firefox, because I have it, I should be counted as a user, as a part of the marketshare.
Please stop using download counts to prove your argument that Firefox is toppling IE. It's not yet... While it's doing better than any competitor since Netscape, it's not the killing blow to IE just yet.
Missing the point. (Score:4, Insightful)
Security and stability? B'ah! Honestly, nearly any issue that Firefox could run into seems rather paltry compared to what domintes the market share of web browsers (IE). What issues that do arise are usually fixed in relatively short order as well. If nothing else, Mozilla developers move at light speed when compared to Microsoft in the browser world.
I really honestly don't want to sound like a Troll, but I think bringing up topics like security and stability bugs to explain a loss of market share seems like a way out of pointing out the obvious: The majority of internet users are too lazy to install something when there's an alternative that's 'good enough' already.
Heck, I think it's pretty antiquated that most of the laymen internet users still use the term 'surf' when describing actions performed on the internet
Possibly due to win2k updates? (Score:4, Interesting)
Saw this at one of the ars.technica blogs: (Score:3, Informative)
Their view was that sampling errors were not discussed, and this affects the reliability of the numbers.
I must admit it's all my fault: I've been viewing Flash pages in IE because I haven't installed a Flash player to MoFo's Deer Park Alpha 2.
I don't see this as a logical conclusion (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, that would bring doubt into their business model so of course not - "the figures show it so it MUST be true."
Anyway, I think it's more than Firefox users have a better memory - so have less reason to revisit pages.
IE features (Score:2)
Yes, neither are particulary fantastic, but good enough to make it difficult to persuade people to move from something they already know.
We've discussed malware to dead and whilst it's a threat, the people I know don't go to sites which would try and do this sort of thing to. Which naturally means that they also have no need for the many (fantastic) extensions out there.
With IE now and the release of version 7
Re:IE features (Score:2)
There's also the IE wonder-fun of, when I turn off crap like java and flash, displaying endless "helpful" dialogs (and they are *MODAL* dialogs) that the page I'm viewing needs that piffle turned on, and it won't give me the "never bother me with this useless bullshit again, you evil pile of pig excrement OS" checkbox.
This Isn't a Blip (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a sp [w3schools.com]
That study shows not only a one-month loss, but a 3-month downtrend for the first time ever. For the first time going all the way back to 2002 even. And the actual Mozilla browser is showing the same downtrend as well.
It may be backlash for the security promises Firefox couldn't meet. It may be that its shinyness has worn off. It may be people are just sic
No crashes, but... (Score:2)
Which sort of makes it the ultimate WIndows application, I guess.
I still won't go back to IE, though. With IE these days I have to force quit hung browser windows on every fifth site.
Or, it could be bullshit (Score:3, Interesting)
Is my personal web traffic representative of the Internet as a whole? Certainly not. Does it rebut the cited article? No. Is it the only information in which I have any confidence at all? Yes. My advice to you? Look at your own web logs and react accordingly, in so much as it matters to do so.
Summer sales, kids at home? (Score:4, Insightful)
A small percentage shift for the visitors, etc. doesn't really mean much. No one really explains how these visitor numbers are calculated.
I know how it is at my mom's house. First off, during the school year, she's the primary user, but in the summer, there are kids visiting sites all day. So their usage and number of sites visited goes up, likely resulting in more hits on those sites tracked.
Second, my mom uses Firefox all year round, but she dumps the kids into AOL's browser, which, in her version, is really IE with AOL surfing blocking. So, yeah, there's more IE stuff.
Third, a bunch of people are buying computers for their kids over the summer and graduation and going to college presents (or required items). And gee, I bet those machines have IE preinstalled. Ding! Increase in numbers again.
Lastly, since I bet that those sites are using cookies to track users, a number of people who use spybot and/or ad-aware will be wiping out those cookies and getting counted multiple times. During the year, my mom runs it once every two weeks, but in the summer, with all the crap those kids try to download, she runs it about every two or three days, meaning that she's wiping the cookie 10 times a month.
Multiply that to many, many households, and you start to wonder how much the IE figure could actually be inflated.
It's not that there can't be a drop in Firefox and a rise in IE. But without stats, reports, real academic information with methodology, well, it means diddly.
Improve the developer experience. (Score:3, Insightful)
The existing documentation is either extremely out of date (ie. 2002 or earlier), or partially complete. Some of the documentation contains old names for various XPCOM interfaces. While the various embedding examples are a start, they are very poorly commented and as such are quite useless.
Now, I realize that Gecko is a very complex piece of software, but in order for it to become widely accepted there needs to be many pieces of software which use it. But as of this time it is quite difficult for a developer to quickly embed Gecko within an existing application. That may very well be because there is a complete lack of documentation describing how to do so.
The path to more users is more products. The path to more products is easier development. And easier development is often due to accessible, correct and descriptive documentation. So please, if there is someone reading this who has the knowledge, write us developers a decent guide on embedding Gecko.
I can see why (Score:3, Informative)
But I have to say, while it's better than the other browsers, it's not that good of a browser either. It's still far more bloated and slow than a browser should be. I find its GUI toolkit doesn't integrate well with the desktop and its redraw logic sucks, in particular under X11. I have a hard time finding my way through its mess of configuration files, many of them in inconsistent formats. And occasionally it crashes, and I have lost my bookmarks a few times.
Overall, I still recommend switching to Firefox, despite its problems. But I certainly can see why IE or Safari users wouldn't want to bother switching, in particular if they aren't aware of all the great plugins. And unless the Firefox team improves their quality, I think Firefox will increasingly face serious problems.
standards (Score:3, Insightful)
As long as that's the case, I can run my browser on linux, and I'll have access to the web.
I think that people tend to downplay the value that open source products have as disciplining forces for prorprietary companies.
Firefox is forcing IE to improve on features and security, and by all accounts the next version is going to be much better on standards. That's the victory.
Misleading (Score:5, Informative)
The main problem as I see it (Score:5, Informative)
That being said, 95% of the time I use Firefox.
I'd like to see IE go away but it just isn't going to happen anytime soon. But remember, IE was once a marginal and buggy browser too.
Re:The main problem as I see it (Score:3, Funny)
Because you can't remove IE?
Re:Noise my ass (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Noise my ass (Score:2)
Do the math. It's a
Re:Noise my ass (Score:2)
Re:Noise my ass (Score:2)
Re:Noise my ass (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Noise my ass (Score:5, Insightful)
Simply looking at market share doesn't tell you anything except for relative adoption with respect to the overall market, and that may or may not even be a useful measurement. It depends on if you care about relative share or absolute adoption, really.
Re:Noise my ass (Score:3, Interesting)
It started at 8.71%
0.64/8.71 = A loss of ~7.3%
So it looks like nobody knows what they are talking about.
PS: Did not RTFA.
Re:Insightful my ass (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Fascism (Score:2)
Re:Fascism (Score:2)
You mean you actually go back and re-browse to negate your IE'ness? Sheesh what a waste of bandwith! That's like saying you will go on your bicycle to the supermarket to make up for the polution your car left behind after you did your shopping!
I hope you didn't do what I think you did.. that would really be silly.
Re:SysAdmins to the Rescue! (Score:2)
I've done my part.
Re:Stability Issues For Me (Score:2)
Well if Windows has stability issues, I could see why you use Safari instead, but I don't see why you couldn't download the OS X version of FireFox.
Re:Stability Issues For Me (Score:2)
Re:a dodgy idea, but... (Score:2)
Be sure to factor in a stay in a federal "pound-you-in-the-ass" prison for whoever writes the worm as one of the "means."
Re:a dodgy idea, but... (Score:2)
You're obviously an above-average tech savvy guy; why don't you create it?
Re:I'll still take Firefox over IE... (Score:3, Interesting)
The extensions are one of the biggest advantages for folks with no life or no job, and one of the biggest frustrations for busy peo
Re:I'll still take Firefox over IE... (Score:2)
Given that a crash is a security hole there's no difference.
A crash will always loose information, i.e.. a malicious web site or plugin could crash Firefox causin loss of data.
A crash can potentially be exploited to execute arbitrary code and take over the machine, I believe the way many exploits are found is by trying to exploit crashes in applications.
Re:OT: Block Flash Popups in Firefox! (Score:2)
Thanks for the link, offtopic though it may be.
Very informative and useful.
Re:the-sky-is-falling-the-sky-is-falling (Score:3, Insightful)
Editorial fairness, perhaps? When the market share goes up by 0.64% everyone decries the editors for not publishing the other side of the coin. When they publish the bad news about our beloved products we should a