New Year's resolution for Firefox: Grow

Published on December 27, 2004 By Black Xero In WinCustomize News

Forty-five days and some 13 million downloads after its official release, Mozilla's Firefox browser is showing undeniable momentum--but does it signal the beginning of the end to Microsoft's monopoly over the basic software used to access the Web?

Even as Firefox gathers steam, powerful brakes are poised to kick in that could limit its long-term growth: Interoperability has long dogged non-Microsoft browsers, which are often glitchy on some Web sites. Firefox claims some significant progress on this front, but a handful of sites, including Microsoft's Windows Update site, are still inaccessible.

In addition, Microsoft's deep hooks in corporate IT departments could make it impractical for many businesses to consider switching from Internet Explorer for the foreseeable future. Microsoft, for one, sees those hooks as a staunch bulwark against corporate defections, keeping its most profitable customers close to the fold.

Since its launch last month, Firefox has already nudged Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) browser below the 90 percent mark for the first time in years, according to one survey. Now the question is whether the Web browser can surmount thorny market dynamics to become more than just another niche player among the crowd of lilliputian rivals that have long stood in IE's shadow.

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With the success of Firefox in winning market share, Mozilla is finding Web authors more receptive to its message about standards and compatibility. The group is now fielding between 10 and 15 calls per week from individuals and organizations asking how to make their sites work with Firefox.

These are only exerpts from C|Net News. Read detailed article at Link

Comments (Page 2)

rkadowns

on Dec 28, 2004

Why does FireFox have to dominate? Why can't it be a niche player? What's so wrong with being Niche? As long as FireFox continues to be a quality product, people will use it.

Randahl

on Dec 28, 2004

I agree with all these comments here so far, IE is the top browser but has it's own quarks, Netscape was a top browser in it's time but it had quarks too! Mozilla, Opera, and Firefox are all part of this marketing scheme, "Our browser can do this, has that, and wipes your bottom too!" ideology

Standards are just that, standards. And Brandon, your analogy is good but falls short of the whole meaning behind the article. Being 100% standards compliant is the answer, it allows the user to access the code with a very minimal render no matter what device you are using! Remember, the reason for a standard is to allow all the user to drive what ever car they want to on what ever road their traveling on! (to continue your point).

Again, as a professional developer, we tested on a vast plethora of browsers and platforms to make sure the clients message was broadcast the same way each time; but to do this we had to resort to a lot of scripting, hacks, and plain old dirty work to get there! If all browsers complied to the standards 100% then we wouldn't have had to do this! [on a side note, if designers understood better what could and couldn't be done on the web, we woulda been happier too!

]

There will always be some sort of "Browser Wars" as this is all down to marketing the best browser and who wants to be number 2? But if the rendering of the sites was exactly the same from each browser without having to resort to tricks then the browsers could make the "extras" their selling points instead!

Sorry for the long comment! Had a lot to say!

PS, if you don't understand exactly what I mean by "render" then I suggest taking a look at the tables in this article at WebMonkey: (screen res, pixel size, ect!)

Link

Kobrano

on Dec 28, 2004

Newsflash: Firefox usage is up to 22% of the total browser market, and its gaining on IE to the tune of 2% every single month.. IE's dominance is shrinking RAPIDLY. Within 18 months, its estimated Firefox will overtake IE as the dominate browser.

Link

IE has a 66% range marketshare, and thats down about 18% in the last couple of years. The rate of decline is growing faster, and NOT slowing down..

xXvly

on Dec 29, 2004

this is my 2nd month using firefox...and i would like to say this to IE users

"SAY NO TO IE"

CerebroJD

on Dec 29, 2004

#14 by Brandon Paddock

If updating the roads to the new "standard" was as easy as painting new lines on the roads, then I'm sure they'd update. Thats all MS has to do: Make IE conform to industry standards. Take out all the extra leniancy and make it "normal".

Latin4567

on Dec 29, 2004

I just think its one more hassle for web developers

GCube

on Dec 29, 2004

as we discuss the so called wars, I have often times thought about switching but does firefox allow windowblinds (and all of its tools-progress animations, toolbars, etc) to work? I have been told it would not work...

just wondering..

Black Xero

on Dec 29, 2004

s we discuss the so called wars, I have often times thought about switching but does firefox allow windowblinds (and all of its tools-progress animations, toolbars, etc) to work? I have been told it would not work...

I am using Fire Fox since long as well as WB .... Never had any problem ....

I think you were told wrong

GCube

on Dec 29, 2004

but does it actually "skin" the firefox browser like IE does with everything working?
I know that it would work with all the windows applications.

Jononono

on Dec 29, 2004

I use Firefox, AND IT RULES! Like the article says, there are some MS sites that dont wrok, such as zone.com....i am forced to used IE , which is lame.

rodrigoperu

on Dec 29, 2004

I use FireFox, and it rules!! I use IE, and it rules!! I use MSN Explorer, and it also rules!! lol,

I find it so funny when people say that this or that product rules...
I have firefox 1.0, and let me tell you, it's as quirky as MSN or IE. I actually think MSN explorer has the best all-around look and feel of the 3. IE is just too sqarish and kind of slow for me now, and Firefox has actually become more unstable for me since upgrading from 0.9 to the official 1.0 release. A LOT of pages will not display correctly or without all their options in Firefox, though its autocomplete features are more advanced than MSN's. Pity that the MSN software doesn't come for free, but with subscription a-la AOL. MSN is strong on the pop-up and spyware blocking front as well, just as firefox is. I use both because MSN will display ALL PAGES with no problems, and Firefox will keep a lot of passwords that MSN will not save, simple as that. Firefox is more streamlined, but I actually don't see any differences in the speed in which any of the 2 browsers will display webpages, they are on par. MSN will display ALL pages with ALL their features, while with Firefox sometimes I miss some buttons, graphics, clickable links and so on, and no, IT'S NOT BECAUSE THE WEBSITE IS NOT "FIREFOX OPTIMIZED" because the same will happen with IE. that being said, it's annoying having to switch browsers now and then to see a a page in its entirety or to have a form pre-filled, but until one of the 2 browsers I use gives me all the features I want, the both will have a place in my PC.

wombatDK

on Dec 29, 2004

personally i don't like firefox, and i don't like IE either. Why? As far as browsers go they haven't evolved all that much. I use firefox for some pages (where tabbed browsing is convenient) and IE for others. At work I opted to use Konqueror because I chose to run Linux on my workstation - in that environment, Linux gets my work done faster and more reliably. At home however I use Windows.

What am I getting to? There's a place for pretty much every program. Competition is good, and maybe it encourages some evolution for the web in general. I wish Firefox the best, but I don't see why people are zealous about it. To each their own.

WindowNinja

on Dec 30, 2004

Firefox rocks my box.

BluesStringer

on Dec 30, 2004

I started using Firefox about 6 or 8 months ago. Wasn't real impressed with the pre-release, but the full release is working much better.

I'm not a developer so maybe I'm sticking my nose in where it doesn't belong, but I found this easy tip on a political forum that I frequent and am just wondering if anyone thinks IE is anywhere near as simple to tweak for the common user. In any case, I made these changes and it works very well, especially on sites like WC where graphics is King! Here ya go:

[quote="MikeB"]If you really want to speed up Firefox try this.

Here's something for broadband people that will really speed Firefox up:

1.Type "about:config" into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:

network.http.pipelining network.http.proxy.pipelining network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.

2. Alter the entries as follows:

Set "network.http.pipelining" to "true"

Set "network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "true"

Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" and set its value to "0". This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.

If you're using a broadband connection you'll load pages MUCH faster now!

From [url]http://forevergeek.com/open_source/make_firefox_faster.php[/url]

Cynos

on Dec 30, 2004

As several users noted above, IE is the standard whether you like it or not. And for a great many corporations (and users), it's not going away anytime soon.

IE's dominance can be easily contributed to it's free/previous compulsory bundling with a popular OS.

For what it's worth, the government department I work for, which represents 20% of our government's total spending, has recently instituted the Mozilla suite as standard browser/email client. We have IE, but it's only used internally for ActiveX/VBScript applications, it's very definitely ring-fenced away from the big bad web.

The times they are achangin' - Firefox's growing market share shows exactly why you need a standard that is non-partisan.
The net is supposed to be robust - coding for one specific application is not robust at all, as you can't rely on that application always being available or usable, as certain security flaws have shown.

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