OneStat.com today reported that Mozilla’s browsers have a total global usage share of 7.35 percent. The new Mozilla’s Firefox has a total usage share of 4.58. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer still dominates the global browser market with a global usage share of 88,90 percent which is 5 percent less as at the end of May.
Mozilla global usage share to 7.35% according to OneStat
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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.. but improving. 7.35% is a LOT better than 2.5%. 88.5% is a LOT worse than 95%.
I think if MS had not relesed IE 6 SP2 (which got popup blocking), then the number of convertiees would be higher.
I’d guess that more non-MS users are coming online and might eventually settle on FF or Moz. The really impressive stat is the slow but steady rise of IE6; MS is able to convince users to move to the most recent version for whatever the reason. This is the trend I think will continue when the next win is released. Unless alternative software ships OEM, there’s no “competitive” impact anyway.
“The really impressive stat is the slow but steady rise of IE6; MS is able to convince users to move to the most recent version for whatever the reason.”
Not really impressive at all: as nearly all new Windows PCs ship with XP, you get IE6 by default. No convincing necessary.
Your logic is very flawed. What is the % gain of Firefox 1.0 over Firefox .9 with respect to Firefox’s market share? 95%? Treating IE6 like it is a whole new browser gaining real market share is just crap. Any attempt to paint what is nothing more as people upgrading (which happens automatically for many people) as anything but a net loss for MS is complete MS fanboy BS and FUD.
I converted one more person to Firefox on Friday. It was a no-brainer because my co-worker’s computer was becoming unusable due to all the crap that IE let in. Getting Firefox on all our systems is simply good for productivity.
Microsoft still loses absolelty no money at all to Firefox or Mozilla. People will pretty much use what ever browser comes preloaded with their OS. I use and love Firefox, I use it so much that when I HAVE to use IE it feel so obsolete.
Problem is, if Firefox were to even get 50 percent market share it still means Microsoft makes a lot of money and Mozilla makes jack and people still have to code for free to make it better.
1. Install it. (How else will you have them use it at all…talk them into it? Bahahahah!) ^^
2. Ask them what sites they tend to go to the most.
3. Open up each of those sites in a new tab.
4. Bookmark the set of tabs.
5. Set the home page to that new bookmark.
6. Put easy to find links on the desktop. (Consider changing the icon to the IE one…depending on how confused the person is likely to be.)
7. Show them Firefox.
^^. Shocked? Here’s something to think about; You can never talk anyone into anything. Look at these forums, and if you disagree…convince me otherwise. ;}
Keep in mind that I am NOT advocating that you just go in and install software without the person knowing about it (unless you are an admin working as an admin at the time). OTOH if they ask you to fix a problem with IE…tell them that you will on the condition that you can install anything that will help proactively fix that and other problems in the future; patches and Firefox qualify. After all, you don’t want to fix the same @!@$!@#$ problem later if they continue to use IE, do you?
but developers are now keying on useless features like chat programs.
Make the browser faster by rewriting the code so that ‘back’ button is more responsive and doesn’t reload the damn page.
Thats why I still use Opera half the time.
By those numbers, close to 1/3 of all Mozilla users are using the suite. I think that the Mozilla project should at least acknowledge the existance of the suite and continue development if 1 out of 3 people are using it! Instead, Mozilla.org gives only a small link down in the corner for people to find it (this after many complaints when they removed the suite from the main page altogether), and pushes Firefox+Thunderbird. If you’re going to stop developing the suite, hurry up and tell us already and stop toying around.
<<<Microsoft still loses absolelty no money at all to Firefox or Mozilla>>>
Microsoft MSN loses money to Google or Amazon A9 or whatever other search engine sits in your Firefox or Mozilla browser.
The market is shifting. I would expect that Microsoft’s competitive response will be to have IE7 become much more overtly MSN-centric.
This is a very good news for all Mozilla supports, developers and users.
Glad to say that I am a part of it!
and yes I have also switch couple of my friends to use Firefox.
As for converting people to Firefox who come from background of IE
I think that since they are using IE they will find it hard to start using Tabbed browsing (Joe users) So the best way is to use the extension named Tab killer (It was on FF’s website around 0.9 don’t know now) and also SHOW THEM HOW TO INSTALL THEMES & EXTENSIONS & HOW TO CHANGE OPTIONS AND ALSO HOW TO REMOVE THEM
As far as eric martin is considered I think it doesn’t make any sence to rewrite whole code. But yes some optimizations can be done. You can also use Optimized build of FF for your Processor. And don’t forget to download Mozilla Optimizer.
Also you are forgetting one more thing that FF is mainly targeted towards avarage users & not towards geeks (as thats why FF checks for updates of web pages more often than Opera)
First off: I agree with you foo, also.
“Microsoft’s IE 6 is currently the leading browser on the web. Microsoft’s IE 6 global usage has increased with 11.65 percent from 69.3 percent to 80.95 percent since May 2004. ”
This is more of a result of patching they system. For instance, w2k comes with IE 5.5 by default. By patching the system I am up to something like 6.x.x. This is the so called benfit of intergration. The 98/98se/98me can only get up to 6.0.0, I think otherwise it may cause system instabilities. I could be wrong, it might be the high 5.x.x.
It has been stated before by Mozilla.org that they will be phasing out Suite & Start Pushing FF + Thunderbird combo.
IE is free to download and use. You only need to lease the operating system. What’s all the complaining about?
j/k
Make the browser faster by rewriting the code so that ‘back’ button is more responsive and doesn’t reload the damn page.
I am using FF 1.0 and it definitely does not reload the page. In the past it did, but no longer.
Using FFx 1.0 on a Win2k P3-700/768MB system, I can say that you are quite wrong. There haven’t been any notes on the Burning Edge about back performance hacking (which would be way too large of a change to land after 0.9) and I don’t see it on my system. Both IE and Opera are noticeably faster on my machine in back performance.
IE also still smokes gecko in dhtml performance, but I’ve heard that there’s been a nice dhtml speedup on the trunk since the aviary branched. Look forward to seeing that in 1.1.
Maybe I am wrong, but if so please tell me how I can do the following.
1. Load webpage which I developed.
2. Click a link on the site (loads a different page).
3. Make a change to the page I opened in point 1.
4. Upload the change to the webserver.
5. Click ‘Back’. Page loads instantly and is the old version. It makes no attempt to hit the webserver. Then press F5 and the page takes a little time to load i.e. the server gets hit.
Some notes. The Header does not contain any no-cache instructions. That should not be an issue buy maybe firefox remembers if a no-cache instruction is on the page. If so maybe it reloads the page. Opera may be setup to ignore that in the current session.
I have browsed many sites using Firefox and pressing back seems to almost always load the page for me instantly. So I cannot imagine how it could possibly be hitting the server. I am also on a very slow line so it cannot be a fast connection.
As far a DHTML goes, I only have my own anecdotal experience. When I use a javascript based WYSIWYG editor on some page I developed (TinyMCE) firefox seems slightly faster than IE.
When it comes to using CSS to create rollovers etc, IE can be very slow. I realise that CSS is not DHTML.
I bought Opera a couple of months ago, but since I got a new computer and Firefox 1.0 was released along with Thunderbird 0.9 I now love using those programs. They are very fast on my computer. Admittedly it is an Athlon 64 with 1 Gig RAM and a good 256 meg graphics card, but those two apps have made me a believer in XUL. I used to think XUL was a bad idea but now those apps just feel so solid to me.
Nice to see the Mozilla team scoring a few runs against Microsoft. I would just like to say that Firefox simply kicks butt. I’m actively trying to convert everybody I know. Count is now on 3.
E
I also *love* Firefox and always use it, even at work, but the one thing that bugs me is indeed the slow way you go back a page. Why does it have to reload the damn page? Opera at least does this better (very responsive), though I couldn’t live without Adblock and other extensions, so I stay with FF.
Apart from that, good to see these figures. I also did my bit converting friends and collegues to FF.
Complaining about “slow” Back button is typical example of tying to IE paradigm. Opera, FF, MozSuite users do it in more convinient way – opening links in new tabs and instead clicking on those Back buttons (and wasting TCP/IP traffic) they click instead at still open original page tab.
Instant.
Convinient.
But i have experience how to hard is to teach IE people to accustomize with using such things.
And this is why so lot of pages open additional windows from links with JS – to provide at least some convinience to those unfortunate IE users.
It’s good to see Mozilla/Firefox making progress.
The article is somewhat confusing, because the author is using ‘percentage’ to mean ‘percentage points’. Moving from 2.1 to 7.35% for Mozilla is an increase of 250%, and similarly, an increase for IE 6 from 69.3% to 80.95% is an increase of 16.8%, and not 5% and 11% respectively.
>> Complaining about “slow” Back button is typical example
>> of tying to IE paradigm
Don’t talk shit, the Back button is there for a reason, and tabs are there for another reason and not to serve as a ‘back button’.
Personally I hate it as well, and I hate how it needs to have disk access each time when pressing that darn button as well.
I still love the rest of my foxy though
“Don’t talk shit, the Back button is there for a reason, and tabs are there for another reason and not to serve as a ‘back button’.”
It’s not ‘shit’, its an argument. Its all a matter of browsing-style. I always opened multiple windows (and now since Opera, Mozilla, Mozilla-Firefox, Konqueror) i use tabs instead of multiple windows. I never made much use of back buttons and i *think* (but i don’t have statistics or something) that i use the ‘back button’ even less than i ever did. But hey, if it can be done better… anyone filed a bug-report instead of discussing here?
@ Ben: good point, relatively there’s more perspectives than the World Domination statistic…
http://www.onestat.com/html/aboutus_pressbox34.html
It’s very very odd they didn’t mention Netscape 6 or 7. That alone should take at least 1%, shouldn’t it? Why not include it? Or is that counted under Mozilla 1.x? The total adds up to 97.43%.
Onestat look like they’re trying to get some PR for their services by giving just one-sided Mozilla fan stats (to be linked on all Mozilla fanpages), to build on the hype of Firefox 1.0’s release.
Some of us would like to see Netscape market share in there, too. How about the whole pie, OneStat?
.. this is just great news. We’ve all heard all the “but Microsoft includes their browser in the OS! John Doe will never download Firefox!”-complaints before.
Let’s just keep on convincing people who are Yet To See The Light to switch to The Better Alternative. The product you’re advocating is superior to its competitor and it’s free. Winning combination, wouldn’t you say?
So, i think this is great news. Not amazing numbers, but Mozilla is gaining, steadily.
How come John Doe will never download FireFOx, but will download all manner of “helpful apllications” (Bonzi Buddy, Precision TIme), screen savers, utility apps etc? Every time people talk about the problems with IE and spyware, it is mentioned that users “choose to download all manner of cr@p” but when a good application is mentioned, people say “no-one will download it”. Can anyone explain?
It’s very very odd they didn’t mention Netscape 6 or 7. That alone should take at least 1%, shouldn’t it? Why not include it?
It’s grouped together with the “other” browsers that are not on the list.
How come John Doe will never download FireFOx, but will download all manner of “helpful apllications” (Bonzi Buddy, Precision TIme),
Because those “helpful applications” are pushed down their throats by using Activex when they visit some crap site. John Doe just learned that by clicking “Yes” or “Ok” to everything that pops in front of his nose will make it go away (it could click on “No” or “Cancel”, but c’mon, it’s John Doe!).
You must explicitly visit the Mozilla site, download the Firefox installer and launch it. That’s why they don’t seem to “automatically” download and install it.
I guess there should be Firefox-supporting sites that show a message sort of “Your browser is old and insecure. Would you like to upgrade now? (Yes/No)” and bam! Firefox gets installed (alright, alright, it’s a very bad idea!! It’s a joke!).
Anyways, I use Firefox everyday, and I don’t miss IE at all.
[i]
4. Mozilla Firefox 0.1 2.79%
6. Mozilla Firefox 1.0 1.79%
OneStat.com is the number one provider of real-time web site analytics in the world. Our superior technology powers more than 50,000 websites in 100 countries.[i]
It’s nice for them that they are the number one supplier of powerful advanced marketing speech nonsense buzzword combinations, but isn’t it a shame that that “superior technology” is unable to recognize the difference between 0.1 und 0.10?
forgot to close the italics tag.
Microsoft still loses absolelty no money at all to Firefox or Mozilla.
Well, Microsoft is potentially using money. Mozilla isn’t making all the money that Microsoft is losing, but Mozilla is a problem for Microsoft. Let’s ignore the fact that Microsoft makes money off of advertising for their search engine as bookmark placement…
The fact is, where Microsoft makes most of their money is from Windows and Office. What is there, technologically, that keeps most people on Windows? Now I’m talking about the secretary at my work and my grandparents and such, who really only check e-mail and type up letters and browse the web and such… What keeps them on Windows? Office and IE. Mostly, anyway, it’s that they need to be able to read Word Documents, and some web pages are still “IE only”. So, if Mozilla picks up a good market share, and developers are forced to support it, then it’s really only Office that’s a concern.
Now, imagine all the people who use their computers for e-mail, web browsing, and an office suite. Imagine that these Windows users are using Thunderbird, Firebird, and OpenOffice. Now, what’s keeping them from moving over to Linux?
Face it, the growth of Firebird and OpenOffice are probably the two biggest threats to Microsoft’s strangle-hold on the computer industry.
Mozilla has been pretty clear for some time that they intend to push a combination independant applications (i.e. Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, and whatever else– chat program? composer?) instead of the old Mozilla Suite (aka seamonkey). Firefox is a better product with more advanced features, and represents a better development process, so that’s where the attention is going.
However, due to the fact that, as you say, 1/3 of the Mozilla installations are the old suite, they have chosen to continue to maintain the suite, meaning you get some patches and bug-fixes and such, but it’s really not being actively developed. It’s being replaced, and so it’s being slowly phased out.
I understand that these figures aim to cover all users of all age-groups, tastes and backgrounds, and so they may well be accurate, but I’ve seen much higher Mozilla gains in the music oriented sites I administrate that more closely reflect the stats found at w3schools.com.
For these sites with a user age range between 16 and 40 (I’m guessing the age profile), I’m seeing Mozilla usage of 18.7% against combined IE usage of 72.3 % for November, with a jump of 3% in favour of Mozilla in the last 3 weeks.
<<Mixed case, missing tags, incomplete things, non-standard HTML, the use of tables instead of divs,>>
Jeez, could it be that Older Browsers don’t do CSS? That there are enough users coming in to OS News on non CSS browsers that Eugenia feels it worth her time to table and not div the site?
The table tag is not depreciated. It’s perfectly valid to use it. It plays well on all browsers.
(And I’ve not had any problems getting OS news to render on Opera 5,6,7, Netscape 4&6, Safari, iCab, or Camino.)
And, Eugenia, thanks for working hard to try and make OS News play well with as many browsers as possible.
Mozilla Suite 2.0
will [likely] be
Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla ThunderBird
Mozilla Sunbird
Chatzilla
NVU
And some sord of Jabberzilla IM with support for other protocols
All will be Standalone
Look at the modded down comments.
Tables may not be deprecated but their intended use is not for layout anymore. In the past that was all we could use, but now it is truly for table like data.
Having said that tables are stll practical for layout sometimes. The effort it takes to get complex layouts working for many different borwsers seems stupid when tables will do the trick easily by providing the basic structure. Having to apply a multitude of ugly hacks to make divs work for the different versions of IE is painful.
Personally I don’t care if someone happens to use mixed case. Looking at the source I was surprised to see inline CSS and javascript. I would have thought it could have been included. Maybe that has something to do with old browsers. I don’t know.
I’m trying to understand the complaint about the back button is. Is the complaint that Firefox reloads the page with a network roundtrip?
It would seem to me that this is probably the intended behavior, since you are navigating to a URL and want the state of the resource at that location at that time, not when you last navigated to it, which may have been hours before. I agree with the folks who have pointed out that if what you want is to keep a copy of the resource as it was at an earlier time, it would make more sense to fork a tab and come back later rather than expecting the back button to return to the cached copy.
You and I are referring to different definitions of “reload”. It is true that Firefox caches page results. This has been the case for virutally every web browser that I’ve used (Starting with NS3). This can be circumvented with a pragma no-cache meta tag in the html. Generally the browser provides options whether to hit the server again every time the page is loaded, once per session (the Fx default, I think), and only once. Forcing a server check (shift+reload) invalidates the cache and hits the server.
When I talk about reloading the page, I’m referring to saving the in-memory state of the page when it was last displayed in browser. When loading a visited page, gecko re-parses the document out of the cache and re-runs the scripts on the page. There is special code to re-insert the contents of forms. On an A64 with a new HDD (your memory and graphics card aren’t that important here), this looks instantaneous and the difference between browsers is negligable, but on my machine this takes somewhere around 500-700 ms. Not annoying, but noticeable. IE and Opera must save the final page state, as hitting the back button is instantaneous (<100 ms) in both browsers here.
I haven’t looked at gecko internals nor have I been reading moz architecture docs in the last 8 months, so I could be wrong, but my eyes tell me otherwise.
”
When I talk about reloading the page, I’m referring to saving the in-memory state of the page when it was last displayed in browser. When loading a visited page, gecko re-parses the document out of the cache and re-runs the scripts on the page.”
this isnt true but the algorithm uses to parse such code in gecko needs improvement which was checked into the aviary branch targetted for mozilla 1.8 and firefox 1.1. expect a new release within next march
A bunch of comments have been modded down, but if you have the smallest regard for people with disabilities, you would take the time to code proper strict xhtml.
It is shameful that you don’t because it shows a complete disregard for those with disabilities. May you never find yourself blind or deaf and unable to use a computer, because on that day my words may come to haunt you.
Finally, stop moderating comments simply because they are critical. Act like all grown-ups do and thank your readers for their comments.
The number one seller I use to get friends on FireFox:
Porn without pop-ups!
Damn Sweet!!!
One thing I always wish these surveys listed is how many people are using alternative IE browsers. IE-extensions like Slimbrowser are pretty popular from my anecdotal sampling, it’d be interesting to see how many people really use them. Not sure if this is possible, though, as I think they all identify themselves as plain IE.
Other stats of interest that show a slightly different trend…
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
IE6 usage peaked in May. It has been dropping ever since.
IE5 is dropping faster, though, so even by those stats, Microsoft is moving its users from IE5 to IE6. Those again are stats produced by a non-typical userbase (compared to the internet as a whole), and w3schools don’t pretend otherwise. The trend confirms all the other surveys we’ve seen, though.