Mozilla Winning Slashdot Browser PollThursday April 3rd, 2003Benman writes: "Over at Slashdot there is a poll about what browser you use. Except that this time, Mozilla is beating IE by 25%!" Like all good polls, it has a 'telnet to port 80' option. Sorry, couldn't resist :p While I happen to be a fan of Mozilla, in particular the Netscape and Phoenix(?) "brands", the poll on Slashdot is anything but objective or fair. It does not list an option for Opera at all, and I know there are many Opera fans out there on many Operating Systems, from Windows 2000 to Linux through OS X. Plus many who voted bemoan the non-presense of Lynx in the poll, though not many (in the greater scheme of things) use it. So I would take this Slashdot poll with a grain of salt, as it's practically worthless for all intents and purposes. Just pick "telnet to port 80," then. It's just as good. As a mere semi-geek (loves computers, can't program), could someone please explain what "telnet to port 80" means? try this: in a terminal window enter "telnet www.mozillazine.org 80" and press enter. Under Windows a window will pop up, write into that window, under linux & unix, just write in the same window: "GET http://www.mozillazine.org/" - Voila! The tcp port for http is 80. That means that when you browse your browser and the server are exchanging messages through port 80. If you are on a UNIX you can see all the protocols and the corresponding ports in the file /etc/services. Telnet is a tool which allows you to connect to any port and type the protocol commands directly. Thus telneting to port 80 means that you essentially do all the work of the browser yourself, in your head. Quite a geeky thing to do. If you want to try it out, do "telnet www.google.com 80" and in the telnet prompt do "GET / HTTP/1.0" and hit enter twice. You should see the html for the page "http://www.google.com" "This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane." I doubt if opera and lynx would have enough of a following to skew results much. However, I think there would be a skew in favor of mozilla and against MSIE, for obvious reasons. Looking at my server stats (I get several hundred hits per day from slashdot) I find mozilla slightly over half and MSIE 44%. My sample is probably too small and/or unrepresentative, but if everyone compares stats I think we should get a pretty good idea. can someone explain why 1. can't import ns4/ie bookmarks? 2. location bar history disappears when browser closes? 3. no search engines? Assuming your questions are serious: 1. Phoenix is not meant for end users yet; it's still being developed. Remember, Mozilla at version .5 was still very buggy 2. Check your prefrences, most likely an issue there, otherwise, see my response for 1. 3. ?? Any search engine listed in at http://mycroft.mozdev.org/ can be added to phoenix, just like mozilla If only this was an indication of Joe Public's browser of choice. It is an indication of Joe Public's browser of 'choice', once they realise they actually have a choice. Still, it shows Mozilla is doing something right. Being slashdot I'm surprised Konqueror didn't get a higher score (at the moment its on 8% with CowboyNeal on 5%). The thing is, Joe Public probably *does* realise they 'have a choice'. They just don't give a shit and the browser they've got works. Basically the only chance of getting Joe Public to change browser is popup ads :) but even then good old Joe may prefer to sit and bear popup ads rather than risking installing new software which is probably going to break his computer just like last time and he'll have to phone up that irritating, superior cousin of his who knows something about computers and probably buy the guy dinner or something just to get it fixed, if it even is fixed, or if it isn't then he'll just have to buy a new computer and that's money that was going towards the new car and... --sam If only this was an indication of Joe Public's browser of choice. this is an embarrassingly bad poll. We all know that internet polls are not representative of anything useful and ok, most of them are there for fun only. But you can make them bad or ... real bad. This poll is real bad. remember Neowin? Who would have thought, Mozilla winning over IE at Slashdot? They should have had a poll: what version of Mozilla or Mozilla derivative do you use? Or, how many copies of Mozilla do you have installed on all your Linux boxes combined? Maybe I'll suggest that... Seeing as /. has the Apache logs I viewed this poll as a liars test. Yest I know that browsers can lie about who they are but most don't. I am hoping that /. puts up a claimed vs from log when the poll closes. Hopefully most people are telling the truth in the poll but.... The poll is about the browser that you *most often* use, not the browser you visit /. with. The apache log is irrelevant and cannot be used to prove the poll results right or wrong. Slashdot and most of it's audience is vehemently anti-Microsoft, so it is no surprise. Actually the only surprising thing about that poll is that IE has almost 30%. How is this post newsworthy? |