Comments on: Firefox 3 already rules the roost

By: PornoLab.TV

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By: Markcr

Markcr — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 09:27:48 +0000

Andb – you are comparing something free with something you have to buy. Of course something free will have a massive take up. You only buy something when you have a need to, but when something is free, the mere invitation is enough for almost everybody.

Put in the ‘be part of a world record’ and every Numpty on the planet will have a go.

I am not a follower of fashion, thus I didn’t rush in where angels fear to tread, and waited until this weekend to download FF3. To say I am under whelmed is an understatement.

Some of the sites I visit everyday don’t render as expected under FF3, text stretches and overlays incorrectly, where under FF2 it didn’t.

Of course, the same is true of some sites under IE8, but you come to expect things not to work under IE, whereas under FF you tend to think they will render more accurately.

As for Vista, well, I don’t like the GUI; the nipple buttons ruined it for me enough to only use it when I have to test my applications.

Necessity is the mother of invention. Where is the need for these upgrades?

By: Ravi Chhabra

Ravi Chhabra — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 16:12:49 +0000

It would be more interesting to see the IE 7 number filtered via Vista. That is how many were using IE 7 simply because it came with Vista, and how many upgraded *to* IE 7

By: Bill Pattillo

Bill Pattillo — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 14:32:12 +0000

The new version will not leave the addresses in the upper tool bar. The old version would leave the addresses in the tool bar and not delete them. Why the change?

By: Andb

Andb — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 11:45:59 +0000

I’d like to draw attention to the effectiveness of FF’s “stunt”. Look at how much MS had to invest in its Vista publicity “stunt” and yet how many people were eager to move over? The point here is that FF has succeeded in building community with its users – they are excited to be using FF and using the newest versions. It is very comparable to the Ubuntu phenomenon. Best of all, this is done at nearly no monetary cost. IE, and MS products in general, require million dollar campaigns (and these are indeed stunts too) but yet the vast majority of users are strongly hesitant to move to the newer versions (I can not say upgrade for obvious reasons).

More power to FF. It’s built a strong community of not just users, but supporters, by being open, honest and by valuing what its users need and want. When you have something great, the people will want it.

By: Ben Coman

Ben Coman — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 10:27:42 +0000

Whoops, further… the PCPRO site might have a higher concentration of techies and not be representative of the rest of the population, but who do you think the rest of the population look to when they need advice on the best software for their system?

By: Ben Coman

Ben Coman — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 10:18:18 +0000

Yeah, the FF3 download day was a stunt. But hey, it was still voluntary!!!! How do you compare that to Microsoft’s FORCED upgrade to IE7. That completely skews Microsoft’s results – good marketing trick for sure.

What I’m really curious about is that how are there still so many IE6 users? Why have those users gone to the considerable trouble to disable the forced IE7 upgrade. What does THAT say about IE7 popularity?

By: David Wright

David Wright — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 04:29:29 +0000

I think the figures for the PC Pro site are a relatively good representation of the technical community, although many people will be browsing from work, where they will probably not have a choice of browser.

As to switching to Betas. I switched my Mac over to RC3, the rest of my machines stayed with FF2 until release day, with a virtual machine on my work computer for testing.

The slow take-up of IE7 doesn’t bode well for IE8, and web developers. I hate developing web applications currently, because I have to write them so that they work with all other browsers than IE, and they validate fine. I then have to take the working code and go back and deliberately break it and make it non-compliant, just so that it will work in IE6 and IE7. I’m just glad that IE5.5 usage has dropped off the radar, that made things even worse!

Looking at the Beta of IE8, the sooner they fix the bugs on that and it becomes the most used version of IE, the better. That will make making websites much easier, while we only need a single, unbroken, version of the site!

By: Felipe

Felipe — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 04:18:35 +0000

Today, IE is the target browser for most of the malicious software.
For that reason, my choice is Firefox. It’s also faster and it supports MathML, SVG, etc.

By: Gregg

Gregg — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 22:20:13 +0000

I just checked the stats for the university alumni page I manage (we have 15,000 students and 100,000 alumni). My stats show Firefox 3 was 20% of Firefox users on release day and has been climbing a few percent each day. As of today it’s at 48%. So my stats are slightly lower than yours, but still in line with it.

The Firefox release day record also pushed overall Firefox usage up too. It was steadily increasing over the last year and reached 23% for May 2008. Since June 18 Firefox now has 25% usage. In the same period since June 18 IE had 68%, Safari had 5% and Opera had 0.3%.

We have a CS faculty, but the majority of our students would be in other disciples: sciences, arts, medical, etc. I think this would likely be a tech-friendly demographic, but not geeks.