Tech Journalists and Analysts Discuss MozillaTuesday March 23rd, 2004Several readers have informed us of Mozilla-related musings from tech journalists and analysts over the last few days. Nigel L starts us off: "Dan Gillmor says Firefox is nice, but IE will remain entrenched because so many apps expect IE to be the default browser. He's also sad OS X isn't sweeping the world." Marvin Skorman noted that Rob Pegoraro of The Washington Post has recommended Mozilla Firefox to his readers, despite it being pre-1.0. washingtonpost.com recently started requiring its users to register to read articles online. tityre and Matt Moyer both referred us to an E-Commerce Times article about Internet Explorer's continuing dominance, which also discusses Mozilla. The article reports that IE's usage share has slipped slightly to 94.8%, according to OneStat.com. The Netherlands-based Internet statistics firm records Mozilla's usage share to be 1.8%, up from 1.6% last July. If you want higher numbers, guzzi333 notes that W3Schools currently has Mozilla on 9.6% for March. Finally, Matt Moyer (again) and Juha-Matti Laurio wrote in to tell us that radio commentator Kim Komando talked about Mozilla in an article on alternative browsers, while Rob Thomas informs us that Mozilla was mentioned in a recent Mercury News browser round-up. When I visit the washington post's website (http://www.washingtonpost.com) using 1.7b (20040316), the front page reloads as soon as it has loaded in, and doesn't stop this behavior. Anyone else notice this problem? WFM in the Firefox nightly two days more recent than that... Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7b) Gecko/20040318 Firefox/0.8.0+ I get the same behaviour with Firefox using the Phoenity Neo skin. Using the default skin the page behaves as it should. In phoenity's case it might be connected to that the reload icon resizes the meny bar... The E-commerce is a little bit conflicting, in one part of the article Dennis Barr says "Firefox 1.0 will be released this summer for Windows, Mac and Linux, and in the coming year we should expect to see it become the most popular browser". 'Most popular browser', that hardly sounds like IE's continuing dominance, does it? I think there is a happy middle ground and that FF and TB will definitely see much greater as they reach 1.0. I know I will feel much better setting up mom/grandma/uncle's computer with FF and TB once I know that Ben and Scott think they're ready. What's the point in repeatedly reporting w3schools numbers? Sure if you 'want higher numbers' that's an option but if you want higher numbers you should report the MozillaZine stats. I bet Gecko scores more than 9% here. I wish people would stop giving credence to OneStat, too, but I'm not going to criticise MZ for reporting on somebody *else* giving credence to OneStat... reporting w3schools numbers though is just silly. I wish you'd stop it, however many people send in pointers to the site. If you want credible higher numbers, look at Google's stats (sure you have to measure pixels on a graph to get them but it's not rocket science); approximately 5% for Gecko isn't bad. --sam You won't see higher numbers until Mozilla gets bundled with every PC sold or at least just someone big like Dell. Problem is there is zero incentive for any OEM to bundle Mozilla/Firefox. That's how MS got their market share and that's how they keep it. Without OEM bundling Mozilla/Firefox will always have single digit market penetration. Personally I don't care since I know how good Mozilla/Firefox is, its the rest of the world that is missing out on a great web browsing experience. I love Mozilla but without lots and lots of money and oem bundling don't expect things to change anytime soon. I wouldn't care if that was all there was too it, but... The more people using IE == less people using a browser that makes life easy for web developers, (eg. me) The more people using IE == the slower the newer technologies of the Internet (eg. CSS) can evolve I don't think so. Windows and MSIE is still THE major playing on the Internet, and that will stay like this for years to come. Most of the people at home, or work, won't have used the internet, without having MSIE installed, because that's what most of you used from the beginning. Kids these days grow up with fast computers and Microsoft Windows. All we had was this great C64 and a personal computer with 8088 processor (IBM), at least that was back in those days when nothing else was in reach for people at home. We used 300 baud modems, nothing compared to the speeds my kids (I have four kids) are used to these days. We played with sprites and write our own tools and software, now they learn to use MS Office and how to make their own website at school. Gosh man, I still have my own SCO UNIX OS with over 5 feet of documentation and now my son has his own notebook with Linux and plays with games and flight simulators (he goes to college, at age 12, to become the worlds youngest helicopter pilot) and has his docu available on-line, because we now have the speed we need for it. So No. I don't agree. There was no Internet like we have today, without the help of MSIE and fast computer systems. The more people using MSIE == less people that use Mac OSX/*nix. The more people using MSIE == the mozilla foundation failed. That's it, nothing else! Microsoft may have created the Internet like it is today initially, but now that they've gained dominace, they will leave it as it is and change nothing. Can we credit them with helping the initial evolution of the Internet? Oh yes. But they can also be charged with holding back any and all further evolution. Google stats are no more reliable than any other source. There is a long thread about this on the forums. My best suggestion for good usage statistics is a good old fashioned survey (and even then it would be *hard* to get good data). If you don't have the desire to do that then you have to accept that there may be factors of 3 or more error in any number you quote. Form the Mercury news article: "Last week, an AOL spokeswoman said there will be future versions of Netscape that are essentially repackaged upgrades of Mozilla." Wow that's surprising. I assume this means when the next baseline milestone replaces Moz 1.4 - then that will become Netscape 7.2? From what I understand, AOL is using the Netscape brand to refer to a new ISP service. It may be that they are releasing a branded version of Mozilla to their ISP customers. I hope they will add AIM/IMAP support, like they did before. This would enable me, and others, to check our Netscape webmail accounts like before ;) I have been hoping that they would do this. It would be great to have a version of Mozilla bundled with Java and Flash and stamped with a brand name that many more people recognize. (And I can imagine Bill Gates screaming "What?! 7.2!? Didn't we kill them?!") |