
Firefox finally passes IE6 - newsit
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/11/october-2009-browser-stats-firefox-finally-passes-ie6.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss
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Perceval
This is an unfair comparison. No single version of Firefox has greater
marketshare than any single version of Internet Explorer. If you take all
version of Firefox together, yes they do beat the oldest version of Internet
Explorer still in wide usage, IE6, but that's comparing apples and oranges.

Web developers still have to target multiple versions of Firefox, and Firefox
2.x supports fewer things than Firefox 3.x. Likewise, developers still have to
target IE6 (23.3% share), which supports even fewer web standards than pretty
much every other version of every other major browser in wide usage.

Nevertheless, it's hard to understand how this comparison is valid or
significant.

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tumult
For the things Firefox supports between versions, it supports them infinitely
more consistently than IE. That matters.

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Perceval
I agree. There is certainly far less hassle going between Firefox 2.0 and
Firefox 3.5 than there is between IE6 and IE7 or IE8. That said, this is not
really the substance of the article or the article's headline. The headline
and the comparison don't really make much sense, unless you're basically
trying to promote Firefox. Don't get me wrong, I'm a Firefox user and
evangelist. But making flimsy comparisons isn't what got us here and it
doesn't really help us think about the state of the web.

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pbhjpbhj
Not a web developer by the sounds of it?

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Perceval
I was an amateur web developer back when I was hand-coding my proto-blog in
Notepad back in '99. Ah, those were the days of Netscape 4 and IE 4 & 5\.
Pretty much gave it up when my blogging withered away in '04. So I bowed out
before the Browser Reconquista began and have missed all the excitement of IE6
versus IE7&8 versus Gecko versus Webkit. I can't imagine how thrilling it
is...

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Locke1689
And my favorite Linux and Windows browser (Opera) continues its downward
descent. It seems a bit unfair to me -- Opera always responds like a lean and
mean browser with stability and a dearth of innovative features, but for some
reason it never gets any traction. Is Free Software/Open Source that much of
an attraction? Maybe it's just me but I have a huge respect for well thought
out and well written proprietary software.

Of course, I guess I'm a little bit of a hypocrite since I use Safari on my
Mac. At the same time though, no one can really compete with Mac Safari -- its
running profile is tiny and integrates with Mac better than any other browser.

~~~
glymor
_a dearth of innovative features_

I assume you don't mean dearth here as that would mean a lack of innovative
features.

Personally I found Opera to be too much of a walled garden, they never really
had a cohesive extensions story. Sure you could configure it to a very great
degree but you are still interfacing with it only at points and ways the
developers were able to foresee. Still I used it for years it's a good piece
of software.

I think my next browser will be one of the minimalist webkits uzbl or surf as
soon as they can support a decent vi mode.

~~~
Locke1689
Yup you're right; I meant plethora. I was doing that all day yesterday -- I
don't know what was up.

~~~
cma
How about "a lot?" Keep it simple.

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Osmose
That second graph is horrendously misleading. It does a pretty bad job of
comparing the numbers between browsers.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
All the graphs are hilariously bad for a site with tech-geek audience.

They only just stopped using a translucent 3D pie-chart. But it's still
tilted, drop-shadowed, single colored and, most importantly of all, a friggin
pie chart in which we need to eyeball differences between several items less
than 5%.

Just give us a table of figures and a bar chart for love of tufte. If you want
to be trendy make it sortable with javascript.

And it's the trends that actually count anyway! I truly dispair every month
when they wheel this out.

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electromagnetic
I like the arstechnica pie chart at the bottom. I'm guessing a large
percentage of their IE users are in fact tied in by office systems and such.

I suppose it's a credence to a tech site that its readers are overwhelmingly
tech-orientated compared to the widespread market.

~~~
InclinedPlane
There is an important lesson for web devs in that 2nd pie chart.

Browser usage is enormously variable depending on demographics. When you weigh
the cost/benefit tradeoffs of cross-browser compatibility for your site it is
critical that you understand the actual browser usage for your site, not just
the internet at large.

On a mass-appeal website that pulls in a wide cross-section of worldwide
internet users IE may be the majority browser, dominating everything else by a
3:1 margin, with IE6 as popular as firefox. For such a site it probably pays
off to make sure your site not only works but works well and looks good in IE,
even IE6. However, if you have a more tech focused site then things are
dramatically different, likely firefox will be the overwhelmingly dominant
browser, with IE a distant 2nd, 3rd, or 4th and IE6 usage just a tiny slice.
In that scenario the excessive costs of making IE (let alone IE6)
compatibility a first tier design priority become completely unjustified and
you should probably care about how well your site works in IE6 about as much
as you care about it working in Opera (which is probably not much).

~~~
adamc
I agree but would add that, in my experience, getting your site to work in
Opera is easy, so sites usually do work there. Getting a modern site to work
in IE6 takes a lot of testing and hackery.

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raintrees
I'm looking at that first chart and noticing Chrome creep up on Safari...
Anyone know if this got a leg up when Chrome started being offered by the Java
updater?

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ankeshk
Umm - this link shows that IE6 just has 10.6% market share. Not 23%...

<http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp>

~~~
treyp
that's for the visitors of w3schools, which are more technical people. my mom,
who would use IE if it wasn't for me tricking her into using firefox, would
never be a w3schools visitor.

from the bottom of the page: W3Schools is a website for people with an
interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using
alternative browsers than the average user. The average user tends to use
Internet Explorer, since it comes preinstalled with Windows. Most do not seek
out other browsers.

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DanielBMarkham
Just to be clear...

Firefox passed _IE6_. It did not pass IE in general, which enjoys a huge
advantage.

Or did I read something wrong? Because at first blush, the version number "6"
didn't seem that important in the headline. I'm a little confused, though. Why
is every version of FF compared to just one version of IE?

~~~
wtallis
Because every version of FF is more standards-compliant than IE6. This is an
important milestone in the adoption of web standards.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I must be dense, because I'm still not following.

So the point is: whether its IE7 or FF, the fact that all of FF is greater
than IE6 means that the goal of standards adoption has progressed?

Why wouldn't the main story just be that the rollout of IE7 is finally showing
some signs of eliminating IE6 users? And if it's a web standards story, why
the FF head?

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eli_s
i switched to chrome a couple of months ago and have not looked back.

Firefox was starting to feel seriously bloated.

Chrome starts up quickly, runs much faster than FF let alone IE.

The only reason I fire up FF is to use firebug as the web developer tools in
chrome are still a bit buggy.

I'm surprised that more tech people don't use chrome.

~~~
known
due to lack of adblock in chrome.

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andyking
I agree - I really like Chrome (and Opera, for what it's worth) and I can
generally cope with the normal ads on most sane web sites these days.

But some sites go over the top and a few minutes of looking at flashing,
flickering, CPU-hogging dross like one British forum I regularly visit (two
large Flash banners at the top of the page, one down the side and one large
square Flash ad, often an auto-playing video, in the first post of each page)
is enough to send me scuttling back to Firefox. If someone developed a
Chromium add-on that did the same thing as Adblock, I wouldn't look back.

(I normally unblock the ads on sites I use regularly and value - provided they
don't abuse my eyes with videos and those flashing "YOU'VE WON A CAR!"
images.)

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pbhjpbhj
_I normally unblock the ads on sites I use regularly_

Ditto, but I had to use Vista yesterday and tried out IE8 (again) and was so
suprised to find 2 popups on the dilbert website. I don't disable popup
blocking for anyone. I thought IE8 had it enabled so it was a little strange
... first unwanted popups in years. Blah blah blah, ... as you were.

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geuis
This is such bs. Firefox outstripped IE6 a LONG TIME AGO. To back up my
argument, we get hundreds of thousands of hits a day, spread around the world.
IE6 gets about 3% of our total traffic of about 20 million per month.
Firefox(overall, mainly 3.5 and less than half of that 3.0) are at 33%.
IE(overall) is about 48%.

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bretthoerner
... and what kind of site do you run? I think this means averaged over the
web. If you're running anything remotely technical you have a very different
userbase than, say, Yahoo!.

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andyking
Visitors yesterday to the website I edit (for a mainstream local radio
station, so likely to be one of the least "techie" audiences out there):

IE8: 28%; IE7: 27%; IE6: 19%; FF3.5: 16%; FF3: 7%; Others: 3%

~~~
pbhjpbhj
What's your demographic though? You can mention what station it is.

