OneStat today reported that Mozilla’s browsers have a total global usage share of 8.45%. The total usage share of Mozilla increased more than 1 percent since Novermber 2004. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer still dominates the global browser market with a global usage share of 87,28% which is 1.62% less as at the end of November 2004. Please note that OneStat seems to measure Mozilla’s and Firefox’s usage as one browser (however it differentiates Netscape and other Gecko browsers).
OneStat: Mozilla browsers at 8.45% of usage share
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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With every percentage point Mozilla increases, it makes the arguments businesses use to support IE-only policies look more and more misguided. So, now, if someone says they will put IE-only JavaScript into an on-line store, they are essentially saying they are willing to turn away over 8% of customers just for that stupid JavaScript. How many on-line businesses could ever afford to turn away 8% of their potential customer base? That would be suicide, IMO.
Because google seem to hate Opera and Safari/Konqueor
but Gecko does.
As Eugenia pointed out, they don’t include Netscape’s ~1% share in Mozilla’s/Firefox’s, so the actual share held by gecko-based browsers is closer to 9.5%. That’s beginning to look like something.
When Google launched maps.google.com, they noted that they didn’t yet support kjs (the javascript engine for khtml), but that support was planned. They have to have priorities, and if you go by market share, they made the right decision. Plus kjs seems to be very slow, which is especially noticable with heavily interactive sites.
Google Maps now supports Safari and Opera.
http://massless.org/?archive=2005/02/google-maps-is-available-for-s…
WebSideStory says that IE use is at 89.85% and Firefox is 5.69% and Mozilla is 2.47%. This one says that IE is more popular than the OneStat one does, but they’re very close. It’s nice to know that there is a consensus on Moz growth.
IE share is about 87% which means that IE-only web sites turn away 13% of their customers not 8%.
“…IE-only web sites turn away 13% of their customers not 8%.”
Even better news. It still amazes me how often I’ll click on a link and get nothing only to look at the link and find it to be an IE-only JavaScript function. Just how stupid are these web designers to continue to fall for Microsoft’s marketing tricks? 13%…that means fully one-eighth of visitors to their site could be using something other than their beloved IE!
That’s great! I’ve noticed more and more sites are tweaked (I should say _corrrected_) to render correctly in Gecko browsers. That’s all I want tbh. I don’t care if you can format in IE with a <span> tag, I just want designers to stick with and push forward the standard.
Well, either that or Mozilla’s quirks mode is improved
Hopefully, MSN’s recent (XHTML strict/CSS) redesign points out that Microsoft is working on making IE7 a more standard compliant browser. I sure hope so.
Though, these kinds of researches don’t impress me. No matter how much web sites they scan. Because these kinds of statistics depend on what types of web sites they are monitoring, in which country,…
What I would really like is Google putting back up their Zeitgeist that includes browser stats. That, I guess, would be a very reallyable statistic.
I read some time ago the Moz team was planning to have 10% market share by March 2005. They’ll get it!
I use Opera but I’ve set it to identify itself as IE. When it was set to identify itself as Opera many sites redirected me to pages to upgrade. Now it’s set as IE they don’t and they still work. Time for the webdesigners to wake up. This can’t be doing Operas rankings any favours if those website are logging those hits as IE hits.
http://news.com.com/Firefox+aims+for+10+percent+of+Web+surfers/2100…
not March 2005, end of 2005. Seem to be well on their way there
How about Opera?
Here we all use Opera.
If there is to believe this web site, then Opera usage (or more technically – number of Opera browsers identifying as Opera) has declined since last year; -> http://www.onestat.com/html/aboutus_pressbox34.html – November (1.29%) vs http://www.onestat.com/html/aboutus_pressbox36.html – February (1.09%).
As I said I doubt in this site’s statistics because Opera’s usage ‘should’ have risen in the past few months as they started to give away free copies for schools/universities. Also Opera 8 has caused a lot of web coverage, also the speed test posted on Slashdot (Opera the fastest, by far) etc… I _highly_ doubt this would cause it’s usage to drop.
Even I considered switching to Opera, but I’m just so damn used to Firefox and all these extentions right now
Opera’s usage may have dropped as a result of Firefox’s increase – it seems quite likely to me that a lot of users may have gotten sick of the ads (or having to pay to upgrade) and now Firefox is around as an alternative to IE they’re moving over.
Speed tests on Slashdot are fine, but I would expect the average Slashdot user to be somewhat less likely to swap browsers than the average computer user.
W3Schools stats are more optimistical.
February/2005
Firefox: 20.4%
Mozilla: 3.9%
IE 6: 64.8%
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
but I would expect the average Slashdot user to be somewhat less likely to swap browsers than the average computer user.
Don’t you mean more likely? Slashdot, that den of early adopters and compulsive tinkerers?
Moz-based browsers have support (in the way of toolbars etc) from major portals, and many sites have abandoned “IE only” site features. The fact that I get an awesome browser out of this is icing on the cake.
Where does W3Schools put Safari? How can they detect 3% Mac users and 0% Safari?
I think that the number of Opera users is likely significantly higher than reported. Most Opera people I meet border on fanaticism where they would see no justification in Firefox. The real issue of the numbers is that many Opera users set it to register as IE to stop various sites from complaining. When I installed Opera out of curiosity I also noted that it defaulted as registering as IE.
It’s great that all these new users are using Firefox and Opera, but don’t forget that the vast majority of them still have IE installed on their machines as well.
Some posters may be overly optimistic that IE-only sites are going to disappear now because most users can still fire up IE for these sites whenever the need arises (like Windows Update/Office Update, for example). Microsoft’s update sites alone will ensure that nearly all Windows users will still have IE (plus the fact that you really can’t even uninstall IE from Windows if you wanted to, but anyway…).
ie 5.0 (i do not know how about 6.0) cant render this page
from msdn:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/vc…
firefox can
i mean try to scroll that hierarchy bitmap horizontal…
Hmmm…one has to wonder how AOL’s upcoming mixed-breed browser will affect the stats?
Microsoft’s .NET Framework is a lot more W3C standards compliant than IE is. It is designed to emit pure HTML 3.2 or 4.0 when it is used in ASP.NET webpages and the like.
That MSDN page is probably being generated by IIS 6.0 and ASP.NET (built using .NET Framework) and may very well include some obscure (but still W3C standard) HTML markup that IE 6.0 doesn’t like as a result (I didn’t verify this for myself).
Anyway, kind of interesting that the IE coders and .NET Framework coders operate around different assumptions regarding HTML standards compliance (at least until IE 7.0, maybe). Browser-neutrality is a very important tenet for the whole .NET Framework undertaking – maybe they did their jobs too well
Good to see more than just IE getting market share, especially for the Gecko based browsers. I myself have used Mozilla, Firefox, Galeon, Epiphany, and Konqueror. Still, nothing wrong with Opera, and it is true that it’s set to identify itself as IE by defauly, so that could be throwing off the stats a bit, as someone else already said.
>Microsoft’s .NET Framework is a lot more W3C standards
>compliant than IE is. It is designed to emit pure HTML 3.2 or
>4.0 when it is used in ASP.NET webpages and the like.
Actually you can not generate valid html 4.0 with ASP.NET. You can choose html 3.2 or IE 5.5. Almost no css support and even if you add css manually designer remove it automagically…
ie 5.0 (i do not know how about 6.0) cant render this page
from msdn:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/vc…..
firefox can
________________________________________________________________
It doesn’t quite look right in Mozilla. Here is an experiment.
1) Save the page in IE (html).
2) Open up in Mozilla.
You will note that you can view the page correctly after saving it in IE. This means that they are serving up different web pages to Mozilla users.
MSDN is famous for playing havoc with browsers that aren’t IE.
IE is installed on %100 percent of windows computers
by default. Mozilla/firefox isn’t.
It’s like calculating the lint market on clothes vs the semen stains (with or without lint) on clothes market.
How can they detect 3% Mac users and 0% Safari?
Because those Mac users are split between iCab, Opera, Camino, Mozilla Suite, Firefox, IE, Netscape, OmniWeb and yes, Safari?
My own site, which doesn’t pull awesome amounts of traffic but still.. from 1000 unique visitors I got over 25% Gecko-based and 70% IE. The site contains articles about DTP techniques, nothing to do with the browser war.. Seems like the graphics designers are ahead in their adoption of Moz/Firefox. Oh, and many of my visitors are NOT using Macs even though this would seem likely considering the target audience. I get about 95% Windows XP and 2000 combined, just 3% Mac, some Linux and even a single FreeBSD.
A year ago I was an Opera user, because my work PC was a 350MHz PII. Given enough memory, a machine like that can easily run a modern Linux distro. Mandrake 10.0 with KDE worked fine. At that speed, GTK did seem a bit sluggish. Opera was my browser of choice simply because it was noticeably faster. There were other annoying quirks with Opera but I learned to live with them.
Now I have a faster PC – a 500 MHz PIII – woo! and Firefox is easily fast enough.
Well done to the Firefox team. They have created a superb browser. If only there was a version using Qt instead of GTK I’d be totally happy.
Opera’s usage may have dropped as a result of Firefox’s increase – it seems quite likely to me that a lot of users may have gotten sick of the ads (or having to pay to upgrade)
Then these user don’t care at all about all Opera features. There’s no point using Opera in this case if you use it as if it were Firefox or IE.
W3Schools stats are more optimistical.
February/2005
Firefox: 20.4%
Mozilla: 3.9%
IE 6: 64.8%
You know very well that people who visit W3Schools are web designers, and they use Firefox more than joe user. These stats are obviously biased. The same way, several of our customers use Opera, we all use Opera in the office, and the stats last months reported 29% for Opera.
It’s great that all these new users are using Firefox and Opera, but don’t forget that the vast majority of them still have IE installed on their machines as well.
What’s your point? I can’t uninstall IE from my computer because it’s part of the system. I almost never use it, and when I use Opera, it identifies itself as Opera (I tweaked it). Have IE on one’s computer unused doesn’t add to the stats at all.
Axord: Do you really think Safari would be far lower then the Mac OS Score?
I’d say at least 80% of mac users use only Safari.
So, it should be showing up in the stats.
“Where does W3Schools put Safari? How can they detect 3% Mac users and 0% Safari?”
1) They might be using IE
2) They could have changed the “user string agent” with in Safari (via Debug mode).
_____________________________________________________________
“If there is to believe this web site, then Opera usage (or more technically – number of Opera browsers identifying as Opera) has declined since last year; ->”
Once again, they could have changed the user string agent (USR). The sites in question could have an influx of more users than normal and potentially combined with a change in USR can though off the results.
There has to be more info released with these percentages. Such as the number of Users per day per site (w/trending). In addition to verifying the USR and OS.
And for the record, I am not an Opera user, just a Moz user.
One last thing to keep in mind with respect to the USR. Most sites just grab the USR and run with it. There is no checking to verify that this is the correct USR or Operating system.
I think there’s much IE impersonation out there than people think. Even my website ripper (teleport pro) impersonates IE.
Whenever I need to download something from the vole, I use IE impersonation, never IE itself.
And as someone else pointed out, mac has 3% but 0% safari??? No way! No one I know uses IE one mac any more, nobody.
There would be plenty of average users switching to firefox if they only knew about it. At first they’re dubious and even hostile to the possibility but once they try it they love it.
I wouldn’t be surprized if IE had 10% less marketshare. Just the fact that IE copies my history to half a dozen places on my hard drives precludes me from using it. I know where all the data is with firefox and can easily delete it. I haven’t even started IE in about 2 years, and with XP sp1 have removed it from my system. Not only that, but I only use xp less than half the time, xandros gets used more and more. At least I don’t have to worry about spyware and viruses so much.
“…We’re using ASP.NET and targetting HTML 4.01 and CSS…”
“…That forces ASP.NET to render HTML 4.0 always, regardless of the browser. This was the right choice for us, but might not be for everybody; if you want to be selective about it, you could write a more elaborate browserCaps section which detects only Netscape 6.x or 7 or Mozilla 1.0 or whatever you’re after, and tell it just to use HTML 4.0 for that…”
http://dotnetguy.techieswithcats.com/archives/002097.shtml
Does anyone know if it’s possible to get Firefox to impersonate as IE, like Opera can, to access those sites that tell you “you must upgrade to IE”?
“Does anyone know if it’s possible to get Firefox to impersonate as IE, like Opera can, to access those sites that tell you “you must upgrade to IE?”
Probably there is, but why would you do that? By just going to another website if you can, you send out a clear signal about how every website. If everyone just keeps changing their user ID, then the impasse we are (well, were) in will just continue to exist. After all, what right do they have to tell YOU what browser to use? I say just take your business elsewhere. That’s the most effective way and a way that is beneficial to all of us in the long term. Well, all of us who are not a monopoly that is.
Looks LIke Apple has got an User-Agent: Set-Automatically option set as the default value:
Turn on the Debug menu:
1) Quit Safari
2) Start Terminal and type:
defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1
Start Safari and Enjoy your New DEBUG menu.
Check out the: User Agent menu item: it’s set to “Set Automatically”
and can look like:
Mozilla, Netscape, Mac IE, WinIE, Konqueror 3
Apple Doc:
http://developer.apple.com/internet/safari/faq.html#anchor2
So, it looks like Safari Stats are buried under one of these other browsers.
Would be nice if Apple explained how Safari determines what it’s going to tell a website what type of browser it is? Possibly, if the site says it accepts only IE, then Safari LIES and says it’s IE?
Looks like IE Stats are Exaggerated….
Does anyone know if it’s possible to get Firefox to impersonate as IE, like Opera can, to access those sites that tell you “you must upgrade to IE”?
Just download User Agent Switcher extension, and you can impersonate the Browser you want, whenever you want.
Joe User said:
Then these user don’t care at all about all Opera features. There’s no point using Opera in this case if you use it as if it were Firefox or IE.
Or perhaps they simply care about screen real-estate more then a certain feature, or that they’ve discovered Firefox extensions that give them features they can’t get from Opera. Both statements are true for me, at least.
You know very well that people who visit W3Schools are web designers, and they use Firefox more than joe user. These stats are obviously biased.
Is anyone saying that the stats from one site are representative of the greater browsing public? I must have missed that.
DreamCaster: Hey, looks like you were right! For whatever reason, I was thinking of OS X users as being more early-adopter-ish then they probably are on average.
I use opera as my main browser.. mostly because its much faster than FF on my 366 laptop
Once I get my 1ghz pc back up and running im not sure what Browser I’ll use