“Internet Explorer is continuing to lose share to the open-source Firefox Web browser,” Matt Hicks reports for eWeek. “In the past month, use of Microsoft Corp.’s dominant browser fell another 1.5 percentage points to 90.3 percent. Meanwhile, the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox browser rose 0.9 percentage points to reach 5 percent, Web analytics provider WebSideStory Inc. confirmed Thursday.”
“The numbers reflect shifts that occurred between Dec. 3 and Jan. 14. WebSideStory samples more than 30 million daily Internet users from more than 200 countries to determine the browser-usage shares,” Hicks reports. “Remaining browsers, which largely are Opera Software ASA’s namesake browser and Apple Computer Inc.’s Safari browser, showed a gain of almost a full percentage point. They reached a 2.1 percent usage share, compared with 1.3 percent a month earlier, according to WebSideStory.”
Full article here.
Explorer what ?
Hmmm, I wonder what the breakdown is between Opera and Safari. Too bad he lumped them together. However, all these stats must be taken with a grain of salt – many people on safari Mask themselves as windows users for compatibility. I know I have done that in the past but now I stay in “safari mode” as much as possible to make sure I am counted correctly.
Any stats on operating systems available?
Does that equate to a jump in OS X users?
Proof positive that the word is getting out. When nazi web developers who create web applications that are designed around Internet Explorer are forced to realize that they should have always been designing around industry standards, I’ll feel like MLK….Free at last, free at last, free at last, thank God almighty we are free at last.
DUKE…DUDE…CHILL
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hey….
cmon…the duke is just expressing his expected elation if / when web standards rule the internet !!
Sure… it will be nice … when it happens …
I often hear about people running into websites which wont allow Safari .. or any Mac browsers, but I dont recall ever running into that situation…
If it ever happens… I just hit the back button.. and show that site my one finger salute !! (not necessarily in that order)
But it is nice to think that Exploader is finally losing marketshare… This tells me that even PeeCeers are getting fed up with using crap…
Today … IE …. Tomorrow …. MicroCrap, itself !!
(well, we can dream, cant we ?)
I think that Apple should make Safari for windows, too. That would really make the browser compatabile with many sites. And possibly bring others to the Mac.
Of course, there’s really no reason to even HAVE IE installed on a Mac anymore, what with Safari, Firefox, Opera, etc., etc…. I haven’t found a website yet that won’t work with at least one of those browsers.
I have an applciation at work entitled MDEIA BIN that only works with IE for full usage. YUou can get away with aome things in aSafari, but moving images, and downloading muliple images you have to use IE.
“many people on safari Mask themselves as windows users for compatibility”
How do you do that in Safari?
Enable the Debug menu in Safari using the following Terminal command:-
defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1
then set the User Agent to Windows MSIE 6.0.
And that’s it.
DaddySteve:
If Dave H’s way is a bit too geek for you, download Onyx or TinkerTool and use them to turn the debug menu on and off at will.
Personally, I prefer TinkerTool as Onyx (my version at least) seems to rely too much on being the machine’s admin.
Dave H: no disrespect intended.
Don’t worry MCCFR, I’m as geeky as they come. The highlight of my morning is going to be when the Huygen’s data gets released.
Sad, but true.
mithrendir
it must do, don’t think anyone would use ie:mac when they have safari available, do you?
Dave H:
Yep, definitely one of the most fascinating space missions of recent times – and notable so far for not getting feet and metres mixed up, or for not getting lost halfway down a crater.
I guess the next “mystery world” mission has to be Europa, which will probably be the first time I’ll get really excited since the days of Lunar Rover-based Apollo missions.
I know a website that doesn’t work in Safari, if anyone is interested in seing first hand what people are talking about when they say Safari doesn’t always work. Go to http://www.mynetscape.com. That page is customizable, so you can select what options appear on screen and where. With Safari, I have a very difficult job of getting the sections of the screen to move, and the drop-down boxes at the bottom don’t work, however, this all works fine Firefox. It’s not that I care about mynetscape, but where I work (electrical supply distributor) many of our vendors offer web based services for placing orders, checking inventory, and getting shipping info. Some of those can be very picky. I have had very good results with Firefox in every case, but I wish Safari worked as well, becuase that is what new Mac users will be using.
P.S. In a mostly unrelated issue, I also have a very difficult time completely ditching my PC at work, which I currently use via RDC. I often hear people comment about why Macs have a hard time getting in the business sector, and I know of one good reason why. In my business (at least) our vendors, sales agencies, and manufactures all offer custom software that do a lot of important things like lighting layouts, project bidding, panelboard lay-outs and drawings, etc., that are always Windows only. I think these applications will start to shift toward web browse bases applications to that can be use on site and remotely, accross all plateforms, but I hope these developers don’t write the next generation of these apps for Internet explorer only. That will defeat the purpose.
To The Duke:
As an application developer I can tell you that some applications will never work that well through a web-based medium.
What developers of small, industry specific software should be encourage towards is using a cross-platform development environment. Since a lot of the class of application you are referring uses VB as it’s development environment – try suggesting to any developers you might have contact with to look at RealBasic. It won’t be a big relearning curve, and they have the Mac and Linux as two new available markets.
Of course there are cross-platform development environments for other languages as well. QT for C/C++ for example. Or Eclipse/Java. Or many others. It’s just that RealBasic is very VB developer friendly (especially if they don’t want to have .Net forced down their throat).
And any VB developers reading this – make sure you check out the healthy plugin market for RB before dismissing it as lacking a crucial feature. Of course you can still use OCX’s and DLL’s with RB but only on a Windows environment.
A good language for cross-platform compatability is Python. Forget Java. Its too complex and time consuming. We whip out Python apps in far less time than it ever took to write them in Java. And now with the PyObjC project, writing OS X apps with Python is much easier.
Camino, iCab [now in 3.0beta too], Safari, Shiira, Firefox in that order here. Exploder only launches when software includes a document with its creator code. I shut it within a second and change the creator code. Wonder why I haven’t trashed it though.
As a site designer, IE is STILL a must just for seeing how sites look. There is no way we can dismiss 90%. I still use safari the most but having tested Firefox, find that it actually is much faster than safari most of the time. Many of my un-tech-literate staffers use IE by default no matter how often I suggest otherwise, many just feel confortable with that Biig ‘E’
brought to you by the word “steps”
as in baby steps, we are growing slowly but surely
i agree… i use firefox on the mac and the pc. haven’t touched explorer or safari for months.
MilwaukeeMacOPhile,
Thanks for your commentary from a developer’s perspective.
Our medium sized company has an internal web application that shows real-time graphs/charts of constantly changing datas — it is hosted on Windows servers, and is only viewable with Windows OS machines running IE — because it is written using Active-X’s screen presentation functions.
Hypothetically speaking, what open standard toolsets will allow the same level of real-time graphs/charts within a non-IE browser, running on non-Windows computers? Someone mentioned Java and Swing in a conversation I had recently, someone else mentioned that they thought that the Mozilla/Firefox presentation engine API would be capable of showing/generating real-time graphs/charts, based upon live, incoming data streams.
Comments?
Daddy-O
To Mac Dood: Want a website that doesn’t work with Safari? http://launch.yahoo.com/ The home page will of course load, now go try to get a video to play. <–Have fun and please follow all the instructions it gives you.
To Dave H: No, masking your browser usingb the Debug menu doesn’t work and isn’t permanent.
To Dado: How “live” is live? If I go to NFL.com’s play-by-play during a game, and it’s web-standards technology is fully compatible with all browsers. If you need something more live than that a Java app will work brilliantly.
To Jeff: Dunno about Python, that’s kinda new kid on the block. How easy is it to make that Python app work in a web browser on all platforms?
Buffy: You must physically remove IE’s icons from people’s machines. Sane IT managers will do so if your users don’t require IE6 for an ActiveX app.