before ie7 came out i was highly skeptical that firefox would break 15% market share. why?
i figured microsoft would simply look at firefox and copy everything good about it. they'd fold all the good pieces into ie7 and add one or two gratuitous extras. then they'd ship it as the default browser with vista which would be a monopoly's juggernaut and ... firefox would slip.
what i didn't see coming was microsoft's complete and total incompetence. billg's anger used to drive that company to, without any shame, copy whatever the flavour of the day was and add something useless to it. billg's money would market the hell out of it. and billg's growing monopoly would seal the deal. this would get microsoft through the first two or three horrible versions of anything microsoft brought out until it was good enough (or, rather, ok enough) to see them through.
today there is no anger. today there is no marketing pinache. today there there is no technical ability that gets past redmond's management.
and so firefox has continued to flourish and hit 25% market share. that is awesome. i'm very happy about that. and i'm not too big to admit publicly that i was wrong about the future of that browser.
what excites me most is that i was wrong because the heretofore "unbeatable" competition is faltering in ways that completely baffle me. we'll be happy to take advantage of that.
and to billg: good job on making something that can't continue beyond your own vitriol. the true sign of success is making something that continues after you are gone.
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17 comments:
25%? Since when? Maybe in certain places (Europe) but that's far more than any of the numbers I've seen. 15% is more like it, and that's optimistic.
You are not wrong. Unfortunately, you have fallen victim to a hoax that was picked up on the web and repeated at sites like Digg. Which just goes to show that it always pays to double check your sources and verify things that sound too good to be true.
Some sources:
http://www.e-janco.com/browser.htm
Firefox: 13.38%
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/07/11/firefox-surgest-to-15-market-share-in-us/
Firefox: 13%
http://www.xitimonitor.com/en-us/browsers-barometer/firefox-march-2007/index-1-2-3-77.html
11.8% to 23.4% depending on country
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=196901142
14%
This site says 32.9%
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
But that is from Firefox site.
Firefox has 14.83% market share in Europe and 11.78% market share in North America
http://www.spreadfirefox.com/node/17306
And yes! in Germany Firefox has 24.5%.
It's Great!
if i had choice i'd absolutely prefer IE over firefox. at least in windows i always use IE because firefox has become a resource-consuming beast.
if there was IE for linux i'd definitely use it.
just see how long it takes to start firefox on linux compared to any other browser (k, even opera)... but again, k is pretty much unusable. you can't even book a flight with lufthansa.de using konqueror.
That 25% is way too much — but others have dissected that before me.
What I don’t get is your reference to anger. Have you looked at the monkey yet? He’s way angrier than billg could ever become :)
"Have you looked at the monkey yet? He’s way angrier than billg could ever become"
hehe.. i'm not sure if that's anger or just misguided energy. sort of like the awkwardly uncool kid at the ghigh school dance who tries to do the robot to impress people ;)
I must say IE 7 is imho a pretty decent browser. On systems where IE 6 or earlier is installed, I won't do anything usefull unless I can install and use firefox - no tabbed browsing wastes like 10 times the time you need to do something. With IE7, I don't really feel the need to install firefox. I would probably install firefox if I was used to it, but I don't use it under linux (prefer konqi).
The exact marketshare isn't really the point. Firefox HAS become popular enough that companies like Google are building new services using FireFox as their solution to the cross-platform debacle. They can write a tool like Google Gears for Firefox, and make it work on three platforms, with "minimal" porting issues. FireFox is far and away the #1 browser on Linux, and is a strong #2 on Windows and Apple computers. This leads to an interesting question. FireFox's XUL interface uses GTK, not QT. How can KDE respond to the burgeoning suite of really interesting tools, like Google Gears, that are not available for browsers like Konqueror. As much as I like KDE and Konqi, I find myself attracted to the large landscape of utilities like Zotero and Google Documents that simply do not work on Konqueror. I am not complaining about a lack of QT integration, I am talking about the lack of Desktop integration. Right now FireFox apps (and the important metadata contained therein) are not getting indexed by strigi, tracker, or beagle. These apps can't take advantage of things like kio-slaves because they aren't running in konqueror. KDE 4 needs to figure out how to leverage the success of FireFox and make it a more "native" part of the desktop.
--andy [dot] choens [at] gmail
Now I'm looking on stats of my non-tech band web site stats and it looks like this:
36 % MS IE
34 % Firefox
16 % unknown - maybe bots?
10 % for Konqueror
2 % for Opera
1 % for Mozilla
Looks great for open source :)
"How can KDE respond to the burgeoning suite of really interesting tools"
this is why, imho, it is so absolutely important that qt/webkit gets into kde4.
that said, we're cleaning up in the embedded space. with a decent qt/webkit, things will be much easier for kde to stand in the web world.
A friend of mine tried to paste the other day a text using the edit -> paste menu. Because IE7 has this incredible stupid interface, he couldn't do it. (yes, he can do it via left click -> paste, but he didn't knew that!)
I've noticed a similar trend, but I don't think it's the result of the changing of the guard. Remember that Microsoft's method for destroying Netscape was to provide a suitably good product that was free when Netscape cost money. Winning a market by anti-competitive means works well when you're a large monopoly with economies of scale that can out price-drop the competition. The Mozilla foundation on the other hand isn't selling Firefox, instead they're employing some engineers, and taking advantage of a much larger pool of engineers happy to work on an awesome project.
Microsoft can pour tons of money into IE and maybe they can get IE to the point where it is taking back the market share, but why bother? It's easier for them to sell IIS and ASP.NET and even to support Firefox, because that's a market they can actually _sell_ a product in.
I don't like Firefox so much, it's a big no-no for my KDE desktop, where Konqueror reigns supreme, and on Windows I've just switched to Opera anyway.
And I agree with --andy, Firefox's success is not actually beneficial to the KDE desktop, which is the only piece of software I really care about on Linux.
@anonymous
IE (in Wine) has a comparable starting time to Firefox in KDE. Possibly Firefox would be faster in Gnome, since GTK+ would already be loaded. And maybe even more so if you're using Epiphany.
Konqi starts way faster. And I use it for all my browsing. Apart from the odd slightly oddly aligned page layout, I haven't had any real trouble with it since 3.5.6 (when the crash on Facebook was fixed).
Do not trust those metrics. One of the greatest levers is company use - what they use in enterprises in such. As Firefox plain sucks with providing kerberos (in windows/ad environments, as most of them are) for SSO, it simply can not used in many environments. Further problem is the lack of non-3rd-party MSI, which makes it virtually impossible to mass-distribute and maintain.
There are hobbyists, doing metrics in hobbyist sites or certain mainstream sites but those samples for real statistics are not really convincing.
In reality in overall of all browser usage on this planet firefox is likely to be under 5%, max.
> There are hobbyists, doing metrics in
> hobbyist sites or certain mainstream
> sites but those samples for real
> statistics are not really convincing.
>
> In reality in overall of all browser
> usage on this planet firefox is likely
> to be under 5%, max.
Very convincing. Instead of metrics you don't believe we should instead believe numbers that you made up. ROTFL!
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