With yesterday's release of Firefox 1.0, the browser is finally available in a non-beta release. Furthermore, Firefox seems to be gaining in popularity as Internet Explorer is becoming less popular. According to these stats posted from Engadget's logfiles, IE has dropped to 57% of all browsers used to visit their site, while Firefox is up to 18%. And while these usage statistics are hardly representative of internet users as a whole, it is certainly promising. Less than two years ago, 95% of users browsed with Internet Explorer.
I updated to Firefox 1.0 yesterday, and I currently have extensions installed for Mouse Gestures, to open new links on tabs rather than in a new window, and a bunch of developer tools.
Me likey.
At the outset, MSIE was such a piece of crud that it wasn't difficult for Navigator to own the browser market. There was a real game of leapfrog going on for awhile and many of us got quite adept at writing code that could figure out which browser was being used so the site would render correctly. Since MSIE came from Mosaic, early versions didn't support frames or tables, so Navigator became the browser of choice. When MS decided to fix their browser and give it away, then The Lawyers got into it.
I believe Microsoft's security problems, the love-hate feeling a lot of users have for Microsoft and media hype will result is a slow but steady move away from MSIE. Microsoft's reluctance to add features like pop-up blockers and functional toolbars (even now available only to WinXP users via SP2) simply fuels the fires of discontent already burning.
MS has proven the veracity of Steve Jobs' statement, "The Establishment never knows where the next wave is coming from . . . [and] if you stay in business long enough you become the Establishment."
A series of charts illustrating browser trends, as well as OS preferences, display resolutions and color settings can be found at www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp.
While MS Internet Explorer still has around 75% of the market, that number represents a marked decline from the 86% MSIE commanded a year ago. Mozilla has moved up to almost 18% and will probably move higher soon, now that Firefox is out of Beta. Increased security concerns have both end users and businesses searching for more secure methods of transacting business on the Web.
It doesn't seem like so very long ago that the original Mozilla -- Netscape Navigator -- was the king of the hill, but AOL has seen fit to let a once terrific product languish at the bottom of the heap.
Lest we forget the early efforts (some of which are still around), there's a list at livinginternet.com/w/wi_browse.htm.
I tried the old Navigator for a while - I forget what version. Terrible. Took forever to start up, and a big ole chunk of memory. Not to mention the way you had to code for <layer>s.