p2pnet - rss feed: Firefox breaks IE stranglehold
p2pnet.net News:- Is Firefox incinerating IE? That’s what ZDNet Australia is asking on news that the Mozilla browser has taken a substantial bite out of Microsoft’s IE market share.
"Nielsen Netratings this week said more than 2.6 million people (US home and work alone) visited the Firefox download site in March," it says. "The number represents a sharp rise from 1.6 million in February and 795,000 in June last year."
And, "Rubbing salt into the wound, Time Magazine has bestowed a high honour on Mitchell Baker, head of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation that developed Firefox," it says. "It awarded her membership of the Time 100 most influential people, with a comment from browser wars veteran Marc Andreessen that ‘Firefox is chipping away at [IE’s] stranglehold, but more important, it is showing that a loose collection of volunteer contributors from around the world can deliver software that can compete with any commercial effort’."
Equally significantly, IBM plans to develop Firefox extensions to integrate the open-source browser into its server software, says PC Pro, and putting it into perspective, "Traffic to Firefox website grows 237 percent," says the Tom’s Hardware headline.
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See:-
ZDNet Australia - Is Firefox incinerating IE?, April 15, 2005
PC Pro - IBM to bring Firefox inside, April 15, 2005
April 15th, 2005 at 2:56 pm
The thing is every PC sold with a windows OS (which is 99.9999%) of them, has a copy of IE on it which wipes out the firefox download figures immediately.
April 15th, 2005 at 3:15 pm
Actually the opposite is true.
Yes more people have IE, but given the fact that a growing number of them are taking the trouble to find and install another product anyway indicates a growing dissatisfaction with MS’s moribund product.
April 15th, 2005 at 3:21 pm
Yes, but that simply means that some people do not like IE, no product is universally liked.
if 2 million people download firefox a month, this figure is dwarfed by the PC sales which come preloaded with IE, so IE’s share of the market actually goes up!.
Also you have to figure in that downloading firefox does not mean keeping firefox. A better stattistic would be to analise the browser type hits to popular sites worldwide sites like google or yahoo or BBC news to find out a more acurate guage of the populaity of firefox.
April 15th, 2005 at 4:42 pm
PC manufacturers should include a CD that contains free software like Mozilla, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, LimeWire, and other quality software. PC manufacturers and retailers would have a great value added item at very little cost.
April 16th, 2005 at 6:09 am
Yes, of course more people everyday are getting IE b/c it comes on Windows. They have made it where IE is an esential part of Windows. As more and more people become aware that they need to take steps to protect thier computers from viruses they will realize as many of us have that IE is like swiss cheese, full of holes. I just decided to do a search on google. I typed in “safest browser” in my google seach box built into the FireFox browser and the first result was a review on the browsers that was saying as of right now FireFox is the safest browser avaiable. In my opinion the more people who actually care about what goes on thier computers will find out about FireFox some way.
April 17th, 2005 at 2:46 am
IE is NOT essential to windows. You can totally remove it — and with it many vulnerabilities. Windows update and some features go away, to be sure… but I’m amazed that the HTML integration that IE provides hasn’t been replaced by the much faster gecko engine.
I remember a LONG time ago, someone on the Netscape team saying their ultimate goal was to replace the Windows Shell…
I for one, would welcome such a move. I’d also love to see KDE for windows, Gnome, etc, etc. Litestep, stardock, and a few others have made very little headway in the “shell replacement” market, and mostly they just co-exist with windows.