By Robert Lemos, 16 September 2004 08:40
NEWS Open-source browsers Mozilla and Firefox have won over a significant number of defectors from Microsoft's Internet Explorer in the past nine months, website metrics suggest.
The gains for Firefox, which was released in a version 1.0 preview on Tuesday, and for Mozilla are most noticeable at websites popular with tech-savvy early adopters where almost a fifth of users are on Mozilla.
Among readers of silicon.com sister site News.com, site visitors with the Firefox and Mozilla browsers jumped to 18 per cent for the first two weeks of September - up from eight per cent in January.
The Mozilla Foundation, which develops both the Mozilla and Firefox browsers and their underlying Gecko browsing engine, has noted that downloads of the Firefox browser have doubled from three million for version 0.8 to six million for version 0.9. The group said almost 160,000 people have downloaded the latest version of Firefox, the 1.0 release candidate.
A spokesman for Mozilla said: "Obviously, there was a big spike in interest back in July when there were concerns with Internet Explorer security. You worry that such things are just a blip, but that momentum has seemed to continue for us."
Mainstream users have not shown the same gung-ho enthusiasm for the non-Microsoft browser but have increasingly adopted Firefox, according to web analytics firm WebSideStory.
The percentage of visitors to ecommerce and corporate sites that used Firefox or another Mozilla browser grew to 5.2 per cent in September, from 3.5 per cent in June 2004. Meanwhile, Microsoft's share of the users shrank from 95.5 per cent in June to 93.7 per cent in September, according to the company.
Robert Lemos writes for News.com
Comments
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1. Richard
Firefox is great but some UK Govt. sites still work only with MS Internet Explorer.
Learndirect.co.uk, the UK government funded organisation offering on-line training seems wedded to Microsoft and to providing training only on Microsoft products.
My recent LearnDirect courses which were delivered by NetG running on JAVA would only work with MS Internet Explorer. When I tried to use Firefox or Netscape 7.2, the courses ignored vital keys on my PC's keyboard and other features failed.
LearnDirect claims that their customers only want or use Microsoft products, and apparently have the latest (consumer) versions running on high-spec PCs!
Strangely, these courses were set and fixed for a screen resolution of 800 x 600, so appeared very small on a normal modern display. The active part of the courses appeared to occupy about 640 x 480, so appeared even smaller.
2. Theodore Odeluga
The real question is would Firefox have succeeded so well if Microsoft were actually bothered about IE?
3. Clem
I'm using Firefox since January and it has been an incredible improvement for browsing all over the web... I can only advice everyone to do so (3 friends of mine have already forsaken IE) because it means honestly load of fun and cool stuff (Got the Noia package, rss readers... And right now I wouldn't be able to surf on the internet without those tabs)
It's merely safer (hackers aren't well known to plot evil attacks on non-microsoft software), quicker and cooler... no 6 inches tall toolbar either with loads of useless tools and less pop up...
French official website have not though included firefox browsing... for me the only drawback of this awesome browser