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%. The July market share represents a massive 3.7% rise since a similar survey in March.
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Member since:2006-03-31
I don't think it's entirely personal choice in this case. Large organizations, like corporations and government agencies, are far more open to open source projects in Europe than in the US.
I'm not entirely sure why this is the case. I think European organizations have been willing to consider alternatives. You hear European governments warming up to open source more than US government organizations.
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-11-10
It's not as rosy as you paint it. Microsoft still have a strong stranglehold on corporations and the government here in the UK.
The difference is that Microsoft are portrayed as strongly American to worldwide audiences. Their adverts, their style of design, everything about them is, well,... cheesy. Apple on the other hand have setup a strong British image over here, being sure to localise their efforts in this country.
It doesn't go without saying that most Europeans think twice about how they do business with the Americans, what with you know, the total disregard for people's freedoms your government has.
I might be making a real dumb comment; but I'm betting that slowly and surely, Europe is trying to distance itself from America.
Member since:2006-03-23
why dont you just do as reasonable people do, and screw any browser support, make your "code" clean and according to w3c specifications, and if some browser chooses not to work, well so what? screw them, the reality of this though, is that with almost certainty, that it will work in khtml/opera/gecko.. as for IE? well, screw them.
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-07-06
It is entirely possible to write a page the perfectly complies with w3c specs and yet fails to render correctly in some way on every browser out there.
Coding to w3c spec is not in it self a silver bullet and not a valid excuse for your page not working. If I hired you to do a web page for me and it didn't render in correctly I'd demand you redo it, despite your claims that it follows w3c perfectly.
Edited 2007-07-15 20:16
Member since:2007-02-22
make your "code" clean and according to w3c specifications, and if some browser chooses not to work, well so what?
This could be the fastest way to get Microsoft to update IE, methinks (provided the W3C specifications used are well supported by the other browsers), but there are a few major caveats.
If enough sites don't render correctly in IE and that starts driving people away from it in droves, I see Microsoft completely rewriting Trident from scratch to be as standards-compliant as possible, or maybe even licensing or buying another rendering engine.
But the problem is actually getting the people to use something else because it's more standards-compliant. Joe Sixpack doesn't understand or care about web standards. And IE7 has most of the "killer features" Firefox and Opera have that would have sent Joe Sixpack looking at those browsers. Hell, an otherwise competent, computer-genius buddy of mine doesn't care--he thinks whoever has the most usage share should dictate 'standards'. He uses Opera, but the whole standards fiasco is a non-issue to him.
Another problem is you will lose a lot of visitors in the short-term, and profit-generating visitors are what drive a lot of the 'major' sites on the Internet.
Really, I don't care what browser people use, as long as the vast majority of 'em are using a reasonably standards-compliant one--even if that browser is an updated IE.
Edited 2007-07-15 21:37
Member since:2005-07-06
lol
well unfortunately the "screw them" attitude is exactly what Microsoft has been doing with Internet Explorer since they introduced it. being that I actually care that my web pages are displayed in a manner that resembles my specs I do very much care and I have paid for it every time I wanted to try something new with CSS.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
it's lack of support for standards that is driving users away?
I know that whenever I get on one of my relatives computers, the first thing I do is install Firefox, because as someone who writes web pages on occasion I have found that Firefox tends to follow standards a bit better even though it is not fully compliant either. If my web pages look better on it, and the interface is better, it gets installed. That said I absolutely hate the new interface on IE 7. I hate having to find basic options like the text menus and fight to turn them back on. I still have IE installed to trouble shoot my web pages but it is an absolute bitch to try to get a decent looking CSS to work in both and look the same.