Firefox Rocks!
Posted on 12/22/2004 8:32:38 AM PST by holymoly
Remember those days back in 1995, when Netscape Navigator was synonymous with internet? That was the time when Microsoft’s Internet Explorer entered the market for a head-on collision with the Netscape Navigator. That was Browser War –I. Now the battle was reignited by the fire of FireFox, internet browser of Mozilla. This is the beginning of the Browser War –II. And it appears that this time Microsoft is losing it.
Internet Explorer is rapidly losing market share. OneStat.com a company in Amsterdam had conducted a worldwide survey in late November. The survey shows that Internet Explorer's share dropped to less than 89 percent, 5 percentage points less than in May. FireFox now has almost 5 percent of the market, and it is growing.
Net surfers are opting for FireFox to Internet Explorer due to security concerns. FireFox offers much more security from worms and viruses than IE. FireFox 1.0 was released for free on the web on Nov. 9. Within just one month 10 million copies of the browser were downloaded. It is an open source software which improves with time as bug-reporter and bug-fixer community grows.
Mozilla’s President Mitchell Baker is optimistic that FireFox will grab 10 percent market share and Mozilla's many technology parts will become an increasingly important application development platform.
She says that “the product is so nice that people love it when they try it. It is innovative and has new features, it makes the Web a more enjoyable experience, it makes people more comfortable, and it's fast. It's a set of things you would want in a browser if you sat down and really thought about it.” She added that people rarely realize that the quality your web experience is determined to a large extent by the kind of browser you use. Firefox gives them that wonderful browsing enjoyment.
Gary Schare, Microsoft's director of product management for Windows on the other hand feels that people will stick with IE when they consider all the things that made them to opt for IE in the first place. He said that Microsoft is developing a new version of browser but one will have to wait till 2006. Schare said that Microsoft goes to people and gets there feedback on what they want and what they don’t want in a product. It is not so easy to satisfy absolutely everyone.
To us however somehow the diminishing share of IE from the market says something else. It says that nowadays costumers have a new way of giving a feedback. They just switch to someone else.
Of course, I've been using Opera for a while, so I see little need to switch over to Firefox.
Another Firefox article
So, can you recommend this switch to us inertia-bound non-tech-savvy IE users?
More media hype? You decide...
If Mozilla ever makes POSTDATA scripting compatible to Firefox....I.E. is toast.
I have Netscape, Opera, IE, and Firefox on my computer. My Web Site looks better in IE, but I use Firefox to do my browsing. I love the tabs.
I still have to flip flop between I.E. and Firefox. I stay in firefox mainly now; but if I'm on a site that uses a postdata submit script, I have to launch I.E.
Yes. Download Firefox and try it. It is free and it is easy. You can leave IE on your computer as a backup, and after a little while, you will almost never use it.
I switched a few days ago. It's twice as fast as MSIE and it eliminates pop-ups entirely. I have not found any spyware either since I started using it
I've switched all of my home computers to firefox and am downloading it right now for my work computer.
The only negative is the lousy formatting of my mail responses in Hotmail. But what do you expect from an MS Centric mail system. It is a small price to pay.
I still have to use MSIE to access the company intranet (over VPN) and the occasional balky website, but that's the total extent I'll use it.
Firefox Rocks!
>So, can you recommend this switch to us inertia-bound
>non-tech-savvy IE users?
Absolutely. I've been using Mozilla Firefox for some time on my Windows XP machine and it's a great browser.
I'd recommend the following for any Windows machine:
- Install and keep Norton Antivirus updated
- Clean and immunize your system with Spybot
- Switch from IE to Mozilla's Firefox
My experience was the opposite. And I have friends that work at microsoft. There was this thread yesterday http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1299854/posts
which gives a bunch of links to speed up firefox for broad band users. It works great!
BTW, my wife instantly noticed the popups went away when we switched, and we both love the tabs.
So Microsoft is going to get even more authors of web sites to make their pages require Explorer?
Mo
xilla? Whats the big deal? I have tried it on my Windows XP based computer and found it riff with boo boos, and general hassels. I am not impressed.More media hype? You decide...
???? What is MoXilla???
I decided you haven't tried the Firebird browser at all. Most people have a good experience with Firebird. Or perhaps your machine has a ton of Spyware and crap that keeps anything from working as it should.
I can just see the stockholder faces now! We took over a percent of a Microsoft free internet explorer with our free browser... how much did we make?
So am I the only Netscape user?
I believe firefox arose from the ashes of the netscape code.
You may want to try it out
Firefox is lightweight, highly configurable, and most of all subject to peer code review.
I used to use it, and it was my favorite. But here in Seattle, every company I contracted at used IE as their default browser. I eventually made the switch even though I preferred Netscape.
BTW, Just before I typed this,I successfully accessed my companies intranet with firefox. I'm done with IE.
I am not sure it's all media hype. In Jan 2004, 95% of the visitors to my own web site were using IE as a browser. The percentage of IE users visiting the site now is down around 65%, which prompted me to rewrite a bunch of javascript so that it would work with Firefox.
I too am wondering what the big deal is. Does Microsoft make money off IE? If not, why do you expect them to care. I bet Bill Gates is laughing now that Firefox is doing all the work on browsers he can pull some employees out of the IE room.
It is good for the consumer and the economy when real product competition drives technology advances and product improvements.
Congratulations!
I use Netscape v7.2 on all my machines, with FireFox as a back-up, if needed. Their GUIs are very similar.
BUMP to study later...
I believe most users stopped using Netscape after the AOL deal that left AOL so tied into the Netscape code and limited other development of the browser. That spurred Mozilla, based on the opensource codebase of Netscape. Mozilla is an awsome browser in itself.
Looks like I responded too fast. Normally, if I need to use my work computer to go outside the intranet, the first time I try, I have to enter a password. When I use firefox,it simply says it cannot find the site. There is no password connection.
I can ONLY use firefox at work to access the intranet.
Not so fast. See my post 33.
Kewl jet!
AND what's to stop the "hacker" community from entering the fray? It seems to me if you want total safety, turn off the computer and move to a mountain top.
| I bet Bill Gates is laughing now that Firefox is doing all the work on browsers he can pull some employees out of the IE room.
This is like having the blocking back fall down just as the play gets underway. If Firefox hits 20% share, no one doing business with consumers will dare rely on proprietary features of IE on their web sites. The days of, "it works on IE, screw the Netscape users" are over. Developers will have to test on both. This is a big deal. |
What do you think will happen if Firefox goes from 5% to 20% of market share, and the A-Holes who write and distribute adware, malware, viruses, and security threats now have the incentive to turn their attention from IE to FF?
Maybe this is because Microsoft bundling Internet Explorer with Windows really wasn't keeping Netscape from competing. Netscape just wasn't a better product than Explorer.
Now it is, and it's rapidly gaining market share.
Once again, the only ones who really gained from the government intervening in the market were the lawyers.
Entering what fray? People don't just pile on code willy-nilly. Patches and improvements are submitted to a few core people. They test it out and examine the code before entering it into the codebase.
If Dirty Harry can fly one, I bet we could figure it out...lol
What will happen is that any single piece of mal-ware will not damage as much of the installed user base as it does now. Variety is a good thing.
Because the switch is so easy, so effective and makes their browsing so much better, that users will begin to wonder what other MS software they can think about dumping.
FireFox is excellent. It loads slowly, but once loaded is very fast. It's more secure than IE. Get the adblock and spoofstick extensions and you should be in great shape.
What specific problems are you having? I've had a couple, but one or two have gone away.
Of course that will most likely happen as the bigger you are the bigger target you become. But, with peer code review, (Which Micro$oft does not have), it will most likely be less of an issue.
In any event, I want to use the best product available that fits my needs right now, which in my opinion, is Firefox.
IE can allow access to parts of your operating system that third-party browsers do not
The adblock extension makes the whole thing worth it!
This might allow Uncle Sam (but I doubt anything BIG will come of it) to go after Bill Gates & Microsoft again for forcing a wbe browser to be part of the CORE of the operating system, this is the key reason IE is so vunerable to hacks.
One reason Microsoft might begin to worry if more & more users switch to 3rd party web browers. ADVERTISING & MERCHANDISING. Yes eh browsers are free but what are the bigest headaches in IE ? ? ? POPUPS and what are POPUPS but ADVERTISING. I always thought that MS got a kickback for allowing popups to become so easy to do in IE.
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Not true. Gates used Windows to ram IE onto all the desktops, and he's been trying to use the fact that IE was on all the desktops to ram .NET into the server middleware market... and with it Windows Server and SQL Server.