In the past I’ve blogged a few times about Firefox’s continued rise in market share, and this week it was announced that the trend continues. I immediately compared the new statistics to previous blog posts and came to the conclusion that the information doesn’t always come from the same source, as the figures jump about a bit. The latest information shows that Internet Explorer has fallen to 59.9% while Firefox now boasts 24.5%. So this doesn’t tally with data from StatCounter but does follow the trend reported by NetApplications.

However, that’s a less than 1% rise for Firefox since October 2009, but a 5.8% decrease for Internet Explorer. So where has the market share gone? One would assume it’s gone to Google’s Chrome, but could it have jumped 5%?

From now on I’m just going to look in one place, and that’s here.  The figures tell us that since June 2009 Internet Explorer lost 8.37%, while Firefox gained 2.16%, Chrome gained 4.33% and Safari gained 0.93%.

What I find interesting is that both Microsoft and Google have thrown money at advertising their browsers, both free products. A few months ago there were some big Chrome posters in key positions in London – for Google it has to be about mind-share. At the moment, Microsoft are running adverts for Internet Explorer on television – is this to try to stem the market share leak? One of the adverts shows a generous man shopping on-line for gifts for his missus, and extols the benefits of private browsing. That’s something that Internet Explorer’s three big rivals can do too, so if they were trying to differentiate themselves Microsoft wasted a big pile of money on that one.

My frolleague Richard ‘Dickie’ Voaden (who I bumped into in Sweden last week) forwarded a link today, reminding me that the Grim Reaper of software will soon be coming to collect Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 and take it to the underworld (and it’ll have Netscape Navigator to keep it company). My reply  to Dickie was something along the lines of “good, and they can do us all a favour and bury Internet Explorer 7 and 8, and plans for any future versions, at the same time”. But you know what…? I actually don’t really care, because I’m very happy as a Firefox user – I’m most happy on the Mac, it’s as good on Windows as you can expect it to be, and it’s great on Linux. When I do use Internet Explorer, because certain applications deem that I do, I just use it and close it again.

A couple of weeks ago I tweeted about a story on the BBC News site which reported that:

Millions of European Internet Explorer (IE) users will have the option to choose an alternative browser from 1 March, Microsoft has announced.

Now, this came as a bit of a surprise because to my knowledge I already had an option, one which I exercised several years ago… and I chose Firefox. Safari is my second choice, followed by Google’s Chrome, and the only reason that Internet Explorer is my fourth choice is that there’s no other browser installed. I didn’t have to wait for Microsoft to tell me I had a choice.

However, I’m sure that the less computer-literate users stick with what’s installed with Windows (i.e. Internet Explorer), and this is what Europe’s Competition Commission are setting out to fix. In certain circumstances Windows will notify the user that they have a choice of browser and present the options to them.

I was amused by the last paragraph of the most recent article on this subject:

Some fear the browser choice system will confuse people. Already some who have been confronted with the choice screen have been worried that their machine has been taken over or fallen victim to a virus.

The irony is that if you switch away from Internet Explorer it’s less likely that your system will be taken over by a virus*.

* I have no proof that this statement is correct, so you may choose to disregard it.

On the day that news broke about a mobile version of Firefox (initially for the Nokia N900, with support for other devices to follow), I also spotted a ZDNet article stating that Firefox 3.5 is now the world’s most popular browser. Great news, but a bit of a surprise as not two months ago I reported that Firefox had gained market share but still had less than a third of the market share owned by Internet Explorer. Could Firefox really have accelerated in adoption so much in the space of a couple of months? The answer: unfortunately not.

As the saying goes, the devil is in the detail. Note that the title specifically states Firefox 3.5, and it’s compared against Internet Explorer versions 7 and 8. Firefox (according to the StatCounter survey) has 21.93% of the market, followed by Internet Explorer 7 with 21.2% and then Internet Explorer 8 with 20.33%. So, with Internet Explorer 6 holding 14.12%, the total Internet Explorer share is 55.65%. This compares to 32.42% for all versions of Firefox.

However, this does show growth for Firefox and shrinkage for Internet Explorer since September, although the fact that the figures come from two different sources make that statistic a little unreliable.

Back in January I blogged about the rise of Firefox coupled with the fall of Internet Explorer. At the time Firefox had risen to a very precise 21.34% while Internet Explorer continued to lead the ‘market’ with 68.15% (but was on the way down).

Ten months later the two haven’t waved at each other as they passed in opposite vertical directions, but the gap has closed a bit. According to The Register, Firefox now claims 23.75% while Internet Explorer has lost more ground and sits at 65.71%. Those of you who boast impressive mental arithmetic will see that Internet Explorer’s fall is only 0.03% larger than Firefox’s gain. Where that missing 0.03% went is anyone’s guess, but I’d put my money on Apple’s Safari. Or maybe Google’s Chrome.

To add to Mozilla’s chest-beating, their CEO John Lilly claimed that Firefox gained over 30 million unique users in a recent eight weeks period. Since then (if you haven’t heard), Windows 7 has been released – so it’ll be interesting to see whether the glacial-like erosion of Internet Explorer’s share continues to take place.

Over here at dadams.co.uk headquarters we’re big fans of Mozilla Firefox – everyone from the tea-boy, to the feature writers, right up to the editor-in-chief uses the much-loved web browser. And so there was a huge swell of anticipation today as the release of Firefox 3.5 drew ever nearer. As soon as it became available the whole team downloaded it and what follows are the first impressions. Well, I say first impressions, I’ve actually been using the beta for a couple of months. Anyway, here we go…

First let’s look at the performance. According to the what’s new page, 3.5 is more than twice as fast as 3. I actually think that measuring browser speed is pretty tricky – if you’re visiting lots of sites the connection speed, the amount of content, the page design and logic all contribute to very different experiences. If you’re accessing a web server which is perilously under-specced, swamped with traffic and connected to the Internet with a length of garden twine, the performance will suck. However, it does feel as if 3.5 is zipping along so I’m not going to doubt the performance claim. They also claim “smaller memory footprint” – with twelve tabs open and a handful plug-ins installed, this hungry fox is weighing in at 235 mb in memory. So much for the thin client.

Next up is a rather fun feature known as ‘location-aware browsing’ which allows Firefox to tell applications where you are (subject to privacy and permissions). The demo application showed a blue circle hovering over Camberley, probably about half a mile in diameter, and Adams Towers sat just within it… so they got it right. I can see this being quite useful – imagine you want a pizza, the provider’s web site could show you the nearest outlet. Or a retailer could give you an instant answer for a delivery cost to your location.

Firefox 3.5 boasts an increased number of open standards, including the emerging Ogg Theora video standard – this will allow the browser to play embedded videos without the need for other plug-ins.

A neat new feature related to tabs – you can pick one up and drag outside of the browser to spawn the content in a new window.

Finally, the big new feature which is ‘private browsing’. This is described as the ability to browse but not leave any trace of what you’ve looked at. There isn’t any reference to it now, but there was a scenario put forward along the lines of “you could be shopping on-line for a gift and you don’t want a family member to see what you’ve been looking at”. Absolutely… I can’t think of any other scenario where you might want to cover up what you’ve been looking at on the Internet. Any ideas?

Stu Crump alerted me to this news story (thanks Stu) detailing the rise in Firefox’s market share. The study by netapplications.com states that Firefox’s market share has passed the 20% mark, while Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has fallen below 70%.

It’s also worth noting that the article was dated 1st December and refers to the November figures. Two weeks after this article, the big Internet Explorer security scare took place, and I’ll remind you that according to the BBC News Technology page, “security experts urge users of Microsoft’s  Internet Explorer to switch to another browser until a security flaw is fixed”.

Further navigation of the netapplications.com site finds a ‘live’ browser market share chart – and this shows that Firefox’s market share has continued to rise (20.78% in November up to 21.34%) and Internet Explorer’s share has continued to fall (69.77% down to 68.15%). The site also allows you to see the past year’s trend, and it tells the same story. Google’s Chrome has now topped 1%, but ignoring the spikes caused by a débutante browser the biggest success story seems to be Safari. I’m going to assume that this is because the figures include the iPhone’s built-in version.

The stats for dadams.co.uk have shown that Firefox’s share has grown and stabilised over the past two years, but I would have to say they’re skewed. I know that many hits on my site come from friends, family, colleagues and members of the Lotus-centric community who use Firefox – so 32.8% is not representative of the general public. The most-visited page is still the old version of the Family Fortunes answers, which is linked to from other sites and found via Google… so this is probably where the majority of the Internet Explorer hits come from.

It’ll be interesting to see how this particular market share war plays out as Chrome matures, and when Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3.1 are released. Watch this space…

Any time is a good time to download and install Mozilla Firefox. Now is an even better time. According to the BBC News Technology page, “security experts urge users of Microsoft’s  Internet Explorer to switch to another browser until a security flaw is fixed”. Oh dear. Thankfully I do all my financial transactions in Firefox… and while it’s probably not 100% perfect I don’t think security experts have ever warned of something like this.

So do yourself a favour – switch to Firefox and stick with it.

Thanks to Pete the Hampster for the link (yes, that’s how it’s supposed to be spelt in Pete’s world). And also thanks to Lewis Turek who posted the link in a comment (which was held for moderation, cos it had a link in it).

The nice people at Mozilla want to set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in 24 hours and are using the launch of Firefox 3 in a bid to achieve it. So this coming Tuesday, the 17th of June, is officially Download Day 2008.

I’ve already blogged about Firefox 3 here so I don’t need to do it again. Let’s assume that if you’re already a Firefox user you’re going to want the new version. At the Spread Firefox web site you can pledge to download version 3 on Tuesday and then see how the pledges are totting up worldwide. At the moment there are 52,955 pledges from the UK, but we’re trailing France, Italy and Germany (come on people, nothing like a bit of healthy competition to spur on us Brits). Poland is way ahead in Europe with 89,313 pledges, but of course the US of A is the worldwide leader with 215,355.

Mozilla need 1.6 downloads to set the record, currently the total pledges stand at just under 1.3 million. So what are you waiting for? If you do pledge, remember to actually do the download.

I’ve been trying out betas of Firefox 3 for a while, but yesterday I noted that Release Candidate 1 was available. That’s near-enough the final version, so it’s now installed and acting as my main browser.

Mozilla tells us that this new version provides more robust security, improved password management, better bookmark management, and improved reliability and performance. Personally I would highlight the following features:

• An address bar which not only fills in URL information but also finds words in web page titles that you’ve recently accessed – very useful if you can’t remember the URL but can remember the subject of the page
• Quick access to most-recently and most-frequently-used bookmarks
• Quick bookmarking and tagging – just click the star in the address bar

A couple of niggles though – the first will be sorted out in time… very few of my favourite plug-ins work at the moment, but I’d expect them all to support Firefox 3 very shortly. My favourite RSS reader NewsFox works so it’s no big deal.

The second is the new download manager. While it boasts some nice new features such as resumable downloads, the user interface is horrible – it looks like shareware and is a step backwards. However, this is a small gripe, and whether you go for RC1 or wait until the final 3.0 release I’d definately recommend Firefox 3 (especially if Internet Explorer is still your browser of choice).