Browser wars
I noticed an interesting statistic today. For the first time FireFox pulled ahead of Internet Explorer, accessing these pages.
FireFox - 48.5 %
MS Internet Explorer - 47.8 %
And the numbers are lying a bit as well. I almost exclusively use IE, when adding content, and my accesses, by far, heavily skew the numbers in IE’s favour. Removing my numbers would shift the numbers, putting FireFox well into the lead.
The browsers wars, is one thing that I absolutely never get into. Now, I know what most of you are thinking. You’re thinking; NakedPaul, of course you don’t get into browser bickering, it’s just not in your personality to be argumentative and adversarial.
I guess that’s it.
Although, I use IE, almost exclusively, I really don’t care anymore, which browser is which. I find both IE and FF do a fine job, most of the time. I’m just glad, there is more than one browser.
I’m also left wondering, where the hell were all the FF guys in the early 2000s, when IE and Netscape Navigator were duking it out. Back then, once IE dominated, I thought for sure Microsoft was going to monopolise the browser market.
Looks like that’s never going to happen. That’s a good thing.
I remember years ago, installing a Windows NT server. This was long before Microsoft Update existed, hot-fixes and service packs had to be downloaded and installed manually. I had finished installing the server, and ran IE 2.0, it shipped on this NT distribution, to start patching.
As soon as I hit Microsoft.com, I got an error message, telling me my browser was to old, and to upgrade. Of course, it didn’t direct me to a page to download a later version. I was stuck.
Luckily, I was able to browse to Netscape.com, download the latest Navigator, install it, use it to go back to Microsoft.com, download the latest IE, install it, and continue patching the server. That was long before fat bandwidth was all over the place. It took a while.
Didn’t matter to me, I was getting double time.
I’ve always loved sitting there, watching slow downloads, or Microsoft Servers rebooting themselves every time you changed a configuration setting when you’re getting double time.
June 18th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
It doesn’t make a difference to me, although I usually, just by habit, use FF.
June 18th, 2008 at 7:04 pm
Oddly enough, this coincides almost perfectly with the official release of Firefox 3. Now with 9,500,000 downloads (the world record for software downloaded in one day, I believe).
http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/
June 19th, 2008 at 10:35 am
My blog stats are a bit different, but that may be due to the fact that I use Firefox almost exclusively to update my blog.
Firefox 62.4 %
MS Internet Explorer 24.5 %
Opera 5.6 %
Unknown 3 %
Safari 2.3 %
Netscape 1.3 %
Mozilla 0.5 %
June 20th, 2008 at 5:54 am
Web wide, IE still has a very big lead (about 74%) but FF is catching up: about 18% now… and growing.
I suppose as long as Windows machines come pre-loaded with IE, it will keep its lead. Most casual web users (i.e., your Aunt Martha) just use the browser they were given.
What’s interesting to me is that a tool that’s *free* to consumers can generate so much revenue for third parties. All other consumer products I can think of generate income by consumer purchase. Not so with browsers. Their profit comes from usage (ad clicking, searching, etc.)
June 21st, 2008 at 5:54 am
The stats off my site goes as follows (last 500 pageloads):
318 63.60% MSIE 6.0
88 17.60% Firefox 2.0.0
63 12.60% MSIE 7.0
14 2.80% Firefox 3.0
13 2.60% Safari 1.2
4 0.80% Opera 4.1.1
It’s interesting to see that IE6 is still the main browser despite its successor having been out for a while now. It certainly seems to support the ‘people stick with what they’re given’ theory and it’s something to bear in mind for web developers.
September 20th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
in the old day i used to use IE then i started to get a lot of spyware all the time. so much so i would need to do it weekly.
http://www.safer-networking.org/
After switching to firefox i found i was not getting any spyware and things were loading faster.
I also played this one game called FFXI which is one of the top MMORPGs on the market. The site had a bunch of fansites dedicated to giving information to the players in order to play the game better. One of these sites had an advertisment on it that opened a I-frame over IE that was invisible and when someone tried to log into their FFXI account it would keylog their account.
Someone then would go in steal all your stuff and then they would sell off the stuff on a website for people who wanted to purchase them.
All this could of been avoided if they used Firefox.