Rich Sharples' Blog » Firefox

Firefox Market Share

sharps — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 14:30:54 +0000

It’s great to see Firefox’s market share is up again this month (according to Net Applications) – over 20% for the first time. The results reveal something interesting – that Firefox is increasingly the browser of choice (ie. large residential user base) whereas IE is still the corporate standard.

Just as a reference point for myself I took a quick look at the page view stats from this site and Firefox (all versions) just edges out IE (all versions) – 43.4% vs 43.2% respectively. I assume some of the Gecko (4.4%) numbers may be Firefox as well but I’ve kept it separate.

Page views from Windows (all versions) is 60%, Linux (all distros) is 29% and OS/X is 8.1%.

It will be interesting to see how that changes over the next year.

Spread Firefox

sharps — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 18:45:35 +0000

Firefox has been my browser of choice since at least 1.5 (2004?) and it’s provided consistency across the various OS’s I’ve used during that time – Ubuntu, Windows 95, Mac OS/x and Fedora.

There are a number of reports that Firefox is seriously eating into Microsoft’s dominant market share – start here.

Mozilla are planning a big Firefox 3.0 launch to keep the momentum going and as part of that are organizing an attempt to break the world record for most downloaded software in 24 hours. More details here.

I’ve been using the various FF 3.0 betas for a while and continue to be impressed and I’ll be adding at least 5 downloads to the record attempt.

Firefox 3, Free and Open Java

sharps — Sun, 18 May 2008 11:26:50 +0000

Last week I installed Fedora 9 on my laptop and so far I like what I see – the desktop and visual effects are pretty nice without being to much of a distraction. Security is pretty solid with encrypted disk and SE Linux if you need it. All in all – everything seems to hang together. I’ve mainly used Ubuntu and OS/X over the last 4 years and this is the first time I’ve tried Fedora but everything seems pretty familiar. I’ve still got to iron out a few issues related to working with Red Hat’s IT infrastructure (how ironic is that) but all in all I think F9 is a keeper.

A couple of things stand out. First – the Fedora peeps took a little bit of a risk by including Firefox 3 (beta 5) but I think it paid off – Beta 5 seems pretty solid and Firefox just keeps getting better and better. There’s no specific feature of Firefox 3 I’m excited about but there a quite a few nice little touches that make a difference – eg. the ability to open all the bookmarks in a folder – I can now open all my work related apps with one key click – nice.

The second thing of interest is the inclusion of IcedTea – this is a completely free and open version of Sun’s OpenJDK and was developed by Red Hat. I’m personally pretty excited about Red Hat’s involvement in OpenJDK – I think we’ll see Linux in general become a much more important place for the Java platform now that it’s part of the ecosystem.