December 16, 2004
Firefox Up
Colby Cosh, who I will admit I hadn't read lately, makes note of the percentage of that law professor's readership who are using Firefox. It seems that my readers may be relatively savvy and Internet-immersed; I'm showing a 25% share for Firefox at the moment.
Udolpho reacts rather hostilely to the suggestion that Microsoft might actually be losing market share. He asserts that Firefox users were all already using Mozilla and are just upgrading, which is just silly based on the buzz I've seen. I'm seeing a 50% increase from the percentage of Mozilla users in April, the earliest month for which I have significant stats. I myself haven't used an alternate browser since Arachne, eight years ago.
Udolpho also asserts that the solitary change Microsoft would need to make in Explorer to make it competitive with Firefox is to incorporate a tabbed browsing feature. Again, silly. Popups are so rare in Firefox, at default settings, that my post about spotting one produced more comments than anything else I've written, including comments reporting that the problem has been noted and dealt with. Microsoft has known for years that browser users don't want to deal with popups, and, not perceiving any competition-driven need to improve, done zip squat nada about it. I love tabbed browsing, so much so that Explorer reduces my enjoyment of the OC-192 connection at work, but I never missed not having it. The effective unobtrusive elimination of popups is a selling point.
Posted by triticale at December 16, 2004 12:01 AMOver half of mine are Mozilla based and that's not how it was a couple months ago. I can't know if the people have changed or the same ones changed browsers.
IE w/google toolbar is comparable in features, a little better it seems to me, except for tabs, but its performance and vulnerabilities suck. Mozilla also seems to render sharper.
The google toolbar is the key for IE. It blocks popups and integrates nicely for find and highlight. If google had a toolbar for Firefox I'd install it in a minute.
Posted by: back40 at December 18, 2004 10:39 PMI have a huge sample this month due to an Instalanche, and this is what I get:
MS IE: 52.9 % (Raw - 34914)
Firefox: 26.4 % (Raw - 17477)
Mozilla: 6.2 % (Raw - 4097)
You would think that Microsoft would notice.
Posted by: David Boxenhorn at December 22, 2004 11:44 AM