Firefox Gaining Ground Overseas

[HardOCP News]

According to a recent report from the web survey company XiTi, Firefox is gaining ground in Europe and other parts of the world. Support for the open source browser is extremely high in Australia with almost one in three people using it. The report was based on the traffic figures of 112,018 websites around the world.

Firefox is available for three operating systems – Windows, Mac OS X and Linux – while new versions of Internet Explorer are available for Windows only. XiTi reported that the overall number of surfers using the Mac OS and Linux operating systems increased slightly during 2007, but Windows remained dominant with 95 per cent.

 

[tacosareveryyummy]

I love it. Although the newest version of internet explorer is pretty good as well. I am glad to see that open source is picking up steam. I've found that for most of the basic needs Linux works great. The command line in itself is awesome but that maybe just me...

 

[Mr.Pickles]

IE is automatically on every windows machine but what is the percent of people actually using it? this excludes people with the browsers that just give it a shiny wrapping.

 

[pxc]

IE is automatically on every windows machine but what is the percent of people actually using it? this excludes people with the browsers that just give it a shiny wrapping.

http://www.xitimonitor.com/en-us/browsers-barometer/firefox-december-2007/index-1-2-3-117.html

It's not broken out for each geographic area, but in Europe where FF has an 28% share, IE has 66%. So a little under 75% of people who have IE installed use it to browse the Internet (assuming Windows has a 95% install base, which includes old and new computers connected to the Internet).

 

[Love-Man]

I like IE7, but its implementation of tabs browsing sucks. I have become totally dependant on this feature since I started using firefox. I use it for everything now.

What I found in IE7 tabs browsing that sucks:

-Huge pauses from opening multiple tabs that I don't get from firefox. My new home computer gets these huge pauses when opening multiple tabs and it has 4gb of ram. My office computer doesn't even slow down when opening multiple tabs in firefox and it has only 512MB.

-Tabs browsing doesn't work the same out of the gate in IE as firefox. Trying to get it working the same way was just confusing (hard to understand options screen). I have other things on my computer I'd rather spend hours optimising.

Maybe I'm so sort of IE7 noob, but I just don't get why tabs doesn't work well.

Back to the story, good for firefox. It's hard being the little guy in this battle (isn't that right, netscape?). It gives me hope that good software not made by m$ can still survive in this world. M$ needs competition.

 

[ICOM]

Aside from the convenience that IE affords, I see no other reason to use it after experiencing the superiority of Firefox. Point blank period. Firefox is the best browser. It's laughable to consider the matter open for debate.

Good to see they're catching on.

 

[EricSV]

It's good to have some competition out there. That way if either company actually comes out with something the least bit innovative the other will have to adapt. I just don't know what that could be.

I never understood the fasination with tabbed browsing. I have had "tabbed" browsing since I first got the internet. It's called Alt+Tab. I tried Firefox when people started praising tabbed browsing and I just didn't see any usefulness, so I stick with IE. I know it will work fine for any webpage out there, though that isn't really much of a problem these days.

 

[Xipher]

It's good to have some competition out there. That way if either company actually comes out with something the least bit innovative the other will have to adapt. I just don't know what that could be.

I never understood the fasination with tabbed browsing. I have had "tabbed" browsing since I first got the internet. It's called Alt+Tab. I tried Firefox when people started praising tabbed browsing and I just didn't see any usefulness, so I stick with IE. I know it will work fine for any webpage out there, though that isn't really much of a problem these days.

I prefer not to have 10 different windows open. At work I keep 2 windows open with 3 tabs each minimum, and those 6 windows would be a pain to dig through on the task bar.

 

[Manaknight]

the fact that with add ons every relatively intelligent internet person using the browser can personalize it to fit their browsing style. i have dealt with many computers and nearly every firefox installation that isn't brand new is different because of add ones. Heck...even my dad uses add ons...now that i got him off IE.

easy add ons make the browser awesome