FireFox Burns Internet Explorer’s Market Share

Earthtimes.org ^ | 2004-12-22 | Giri. A

[wardaddy]

If Dirty Harry can fly one, I bet we could figure it out...lol

[finnigan2]

Before I heard of Firefox, I took a one year subscription to Stopzilla, which is advertized to block popup's which were driving me crazy. Stopzilla keeps a running count of blocks so you can review them before clearing. I just checked and it had effectively blocked 224 popups between December 7 and this morning, so it really does work.
I have been using Firefox only for the past two weeks and it's hard to really be sure of it's claims since many protection safeguards work in the background. It does seem to work faster than Netscape or IE but it takes me a click or two more to get to my e-mail. The Firefox "homepage" isn't very jazzy but, one of the reasons that I switched to them was that I was fed up with the Netscape "news" summary which seemed to me to be slightly left of center and anti Bush in tone. They can go preach to the converted - I've stopped buying.

[ShadowAce]

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?

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.

[Hank Rearden]

Does Microsoft make money off IE? If not, why do you expect them to care.

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.

[Salo]

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.

[1L]

What specific problems are you having? I've had a couple, but one or two have gone away.

[frog_jerk_2004]

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?

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.

[toadthesecond]

IE can allow access to parts of your operating system that third-party browsers do not

[frog_jerk_2004]

Get the adblock and spoofstick extensions and you should be in great shape.

The adblock extension makes the whole thing worth it!

[TheShaz]

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.

[ShadowAce]

...users will begin to wonder what other MS software they can think about dumping.

Like MS Office, perhaps?

[ordinaryguy]

I can just see the stockholder faces now!

The Mozilla Foundation is a California not-for-profit corporation. Nobody there is concerned with turning a profit - just making a better browser.

[holymoly]

AND what's to stop the "hacker" community from entering the fray?

Follow the link I posted:

An extended explanation on why Internet Explorer is insecure

Read it and you'll understand why Mozilla, Firefox & Opera will never be as vulnerable as MSIE.

[frog_jerk_2004]

IE can allow access to parts of your operating system that third-party browsers do not

Thank God for that! This one of the major issues with IE!

[holymoly]

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?

Read this:

An extended explanation on why Internet Explorer is insecure

It will answer your question(s).

[jammer]

As is the case 100% (almost) of the time, your comment is spot on. I was going to write the same thing myself, but couldn't say it as well. If it weren't so important, then the court battles over the IE integration wouldn't have occurred.

[zeugma]

WHat exactly do you mean by POSTDATA scripting? I know that programs like Curl will let you do pre-defined postdata for a page. I'd be interested in what you need from it.

[freedomcrusader]

Reading and posting with Firefox BUMP!

[frog_jerk_2004]

Sounds like a proxy using NTLM authentication or Firefox not using the default domain suffix...