Firefox bubble bursting?
March 1, 2005 by Mike Wendland
While 27 million downloads is impressive, anaylists apparently don’t think it’s an IE killer anymore. Has FireFox’s Rally Stalled?
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3 Responses to “Firefox bubble bursting?”
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It’s so iffy anyway– how do they assemble these stats of “market share” anyway? Does anyone know? Weblogs of hits? On which sites?
There was one company who published ‘market share’ stats a few years ago and digging deeper I found that it was just based on hits on their own web site, and they sold software for Windows, so how representative of the whole Internet was that?
In addition, the stats could be skewed by the fact that Firefox will win over big corporate very slowly if at all– extensive testing of apps will have to take place first, and since Firefox doesn’t support ActiveX (thank God), it will not have a chance in corporate America.
So, the millions of users who surf throughout the day at work HAVE to use IE, but it under-counts the maybe hour or two they might spend at home surfing with their preferred browser Firefox (or others).
It ALL depends on which web sites are tracked to get this “market share” and how the numbers are counted (how many hits, or how many unique visits, or by IP address, etc…)
TOO MANY UNKNOWNS! T
I am still struck by the irony of “marketshare” being used in reference to two items available to the end user at no cost (in reference to Firefox) or no additional cost (in reference to Internet Explorer).
Corporation IT departments have to see the value in Firefox with the low security risk. The browser has repaired or fixed a couple of issues regarding security very quickly as well.
Look at the current environment with IE - you code to IE standards and no other browser can play. Seems like you might be setting up a company to be dominated by MS IT vision.
Taking this a step further, the MS Plan with Longhorn changes the workings of a browser even more than IE today. Sure there are dangers about holes in the browser downloading extra code. Sure there are issues with Active X elements. IE is often not standard code. MS has changed too many of the rules for me to be comfortable look at J++, TCP/IP, and other MS changes that make it better for MS not really their clients.