Firefox Overtaking Internet Explorer
I was just going over the logs for my web site http://www.regular-expressions.info/. In the browser statistics, Firefox and Internet Explorer were tied at 48.5%. Firefox was just a few hundred page hits shy of overtaking Internet Explorer as the most used browser to access this web site.
This is very significant. While Firefox’s overall market share is still in the single digits, its take-up is considerably higher among more technical audiences. If you’re trying to sell shareware that appeals to technical people, you definitely need to make sure your web site is compatible with Firefox. Particularly web sites using Javascript are susceptible to compatibility problems.
A few days ago my ISP’s web site insisted that I hadn’t entered a phone number, even though I had. I noticed the error came from a Javascript alert. I closed Firefox and retried in IE 6.0, and the site accepted the same input just fine. If your order form pulls a stunt like that, you’re losing sales.
Firefox usage for my product web sites varies from 10% to 45%, with higher traffic sites getting relatively more Firefox traffic.
firefox became a hype so fast, it couldn’t reach the point where it could be rightfully compared to competing products; i think it’s failing badly; i would wait another year for downloading it; meanwhile Opera gives me the most comfortable user experience; maybe because it was started as an evil commercial product with regular QA and stuff like that.. don’t take me wrong, i love open source but many projects are only wouldbees and wannabees and don’t pass the next phase; unfortunately this characteristic shows up even in star projects as we see it with Firefox.
Comment by tee — Saturday, 24 December 2005 @ 0:14
@tee: I fear it’s merely a matter of time until Opera is discontinued. It was cheap, you could get cracks from everywhere, now it’s even free. They can’t make a living from selling some licenses for mobil devices.
Comment by chris — Monday, 9 January 2006 @ 18:49
chris:
they just changed their business model; they don’t make money selling the browser; it works the same way you don’t pay for a google search; the news for you: they’re even more prosperous than they’ve ever been; please understand I am not going into a flame-war over browser preferences – what I say is: opera fits for me end sentence.
Comment by tee — Saturday, 21 January 2006 @ 2:17