Firefox download day

22 comments on “Firefox download day ”

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1. Felix 1

   17 June 2008 at 11:46 am

   Go the ‘fox!

   Out of interest lprent, what do the browser stats show for readers of The Standard?
2. dave 2

   17 June 2008 at 11:52 am

   and if you dont like Firefox, use Flock.
3. all_your_base 3

   17 June 2008 at 12:21 pm

   Felix: Roughly 50/40/10 – IE/FF/Safari
4. lprent 4

   17 June 2008 at 12:22 pm

   The current running total from the apache logs (since Feb)
   MSIE 55%
   Firefox 28.6%
   Safari 9.3%

   So far this week (sun – mon)
   MSIE 48.8%
   Firefox 29.9%
   Safari 9.7%

   Last week (sun-sat)
   MSIE 48.0%
   Firefox 30.9%
   Safari 11.7%

   It moves around a bit. The IE6/IE7 usually split close to 50% because of the corporate IE6’s (noticeable in the working day)
5. lprent 5

   17 June 2008 at 12:27 pm

   Yeah a_y_b but GA because it depends on javascript, tends to overrepresent people who have javascript active. The logs display what is actually transmitted at the back end, so tends to be a bit different.

   I was just about to comment that there were differences between the different logging systems. I noticed significant differences between what I saw on different logging systems
6. lprent 6

   17 June 2008 at 12:33 pm

   The biggest single browser is now firefox 2 because of the IE6/IE7 split. In the first few months after the site started in august last year it was 70% IE, 20% FF and 5% Safari. There has been a hell of a change in the last 9 months.

   I can understand why as a programmer. Who wants to program for the quirks of IE7 let alone IE6
7. Patrick 7

   17 June 2008 at 1:13 pm

   Yeah, I totally agree Lynn. I’m doing some CSS work at the moment, and it all looks beautiful in Firefox, Safari and Opera, but boy, getting it to render in IE6 is getting so painful I’m seriously considering not supporting it at all.
8. lprent 8

   17 June 2008 at 2:04 pm

   I don’t develop for IE6 at all – but if I do http stuff it is always webapps rather than sites. If people want support for IE6 then they can do that in post development.

   I barely support IE7. I develop in firefox, run tests in safari and opera. That gets me every modern browser apart from one or two obscure ones that are non-compliant in linux (mainly the KDE one).

   Then I swear angrily when the same code running under strict doesn’t work in IE7 and a hack a bad looking kludge for IE7.

   As far as I’m concerned keeping to standards is the basic requirement of vendors, and I hate kludging around their foulups. It is enough of a hassle to avoid my own.
9. illuminatedtiger 9

   17 June 2008 at 2:16 pm

   I’ve been using FF3 for a good month now (The BETA version). In fact I’ve taken the open source thing further and have been using Linux (Ubuntu 8.04). While I’ve still got Windows on here I have found I’m not booting into it as often as I am Linux – seems it really grows on you.

   For those who don’t know Linux is a free, open source operating system that is getting increasingly popular for desktop users. It often comes bundled with Firefox, an Office Suite (I’ve got Open Office on this), a graphics application that from my perspective is rivaling photoshop, music and video players, text editors, IM clients, development tools (C, C++, Java, .NET, Prolog take your pick!) and more card games than one can shake a stick at – all free, all open source. Only issue is support for the latest games which can still be run under Linux albeit through a buggy compatibility layer.

   Check it out: http://www.ubuntu.com/

   Can you give us an OS stats lprent?
10. infused 10

    17 June 2008 at 2:50 pm

    There are some very easy ways to get around IE6/7’s css problems. Infact I have a css script to do it.

    Firefox is good, but only because of one reason. Extensions. IE still out does FF if you don’t split versions.

    If you don’t design for IE that’s just bad design, considering it still has 55% market share.

    IE8 is much better with CSS.

    Also, FF generally has more Vulnerabilities than IE every month.

    So in conclusion what a lot of people say about FF is wrong. It isn’t the fastest, nor the most secure. It is however, the most flexible and extendable.
11. lprent 11

    17 June 2008 at 3:02 pm

    infused: Sure I have as well. But I find that if offends my sense of aesthetics to keep putting the non-standard “if IE” comments throughout otherwise clean HTML.

    So I don’t do it.

    My main code is in c++. Code I write works on virtually every platform using standards that were defined long ago. Until firefox started conforming to the standards, http protocol systems were just a total pain because they were platform dependent. That could have something to do with why IE’s market share is dying.

    But I don’t write stuff for the general market of websites. I write http code that runs like a GUI app to provide access to data and backend algorithms. IE just gets in the way.
12. infused 12

    17 June 2008 at 3:11 pm

    I come from the same background and currently program in .net although I don’t do web apps.

    IE has to be used in some environments because of group policy. Maybe if Firefox had an adm to customise it with group policy it would grab a whole lot more market share… but probably not.

    Also, most microsoft web apps only work with ie well (Sharepoint, Exchange Web etc) so it has to be used.

    Like I said, IE8 is suppose to totally conform to the standards.
13. lprent 13

    17 June 2008 at 3:25 pm

    These days I write code and systems for export. Usually where there is little control of the target systems and designed for networked control.

    It definitely isn’t a corporate style environment.

    So code is written close to standards, usually close to API’s, usually cross-platform, and with minimal installations.

    .net is getting better, but isn’t that easy to write code for if you don’t control the target system. There are a lot of variants and I’ve had a couple of systems where the .net installations have caused me to reformat the dev system and restart after conflicted betas have been installed.

    It is pretty hard to write a clean shrink-wrapped system, which is what I need. Currently I’m targeting code at linux systems because they’re easier to install.

    HTML/js/css are a good cross-platform GUI. I use c++ and/or php to drive it. In my current embedded project I simply built a parser/render in xlib following a html tag model. Relatively simple, but only because the browser overhead wasn’t wanted.

    Difference in target markets changes the perceptions I guess.
14. lprent 14

    17 June 2008 at 3:44 pm

    From what I’ve heard IE8 is what I’d consider to be conformant to the standards. I haven’t tossed it on a system to play with it. I got quite frustrated with the ever more remote IE7 release dates in 2006, so I’m not planning on looking at it until they actually release it this time.

    Firefox is very much a browser and with limited tools for deployment. There is an ability to make it quite easy to group configure by playing with the soft packages (can’t remember their name) at the bottom end. I did some playing with it in the current project.

    It was quite fun writing a minimal ‘lprent’ browser using firefox as a start point. For instance limiting the DNS access and subnets as well as the front-end widgets. But it’d take a bit of work as the docs are not very clear and full of outdated references. Mind you I sometimes find that when on msdn as well.
15. Felix 15

    17 June 2008 at 4:58 pm

    lprent and a-y-b, thanks for sharing the stats.

    About what I expected for FF, quite high for Safari. Interesting.
16. pohutukawa kid 16

    17 June 2008 at 5:00 pm

    Have a look at Opera 9.5 (opera.com) released this week. I’ve used Firefox but find Opera better. As for IE …………. if you like self flagellation that’s your problem
17. lprent 17

    17 June 2008 at 5:20 pm

    Darn I forgot to get back on the OS’es. I don’t have it on this system and my WinXP if recovering from a MFT failure (ie copy off reformat and rebuild).

    But is was what you’d expect mostly XP, a few Vista, some OS/X, surprising numbers of win2k, and the odd linix version – like my OpenSUSE laptop that I’m doing this on.

    Thankfully win9x has run its dash, and there were some old Mac’s showing as well.
18. lprent 18

    17 June 2008 at 5:23 pm

    Safari is my favourite play browser at present both on windows and the old mac mini. The nice thing is that it is as standards compliant as firefox but looks a lot better.
19. Chris S 19

    17 June 2008 at 8:50 pm

    You might be interested to know that Webkit (Safari’s rendering engine) is based of KHTML, Konqueror’s (KDE browsers) engine. Apple contributes back code and fixes to KHTML.
20. lprent 20

    18 June 2008 at 12:42 am

    I’ve played with KHTML. It is a lot of fun integrating in with a standard xlib window, but getting quite out of date in some areas. It is one of the few browsers that chokes on The Standard css and js. It works fine until you post a comment, then it crashes somewhere in the render of a DOM update by js.

    I gather that the ‘discussion’ between KDE and apple is resulting in some of the code from WebKit being diff’ed back into KHTML, so it will hopefully speed up its modernization.
21. Swampy 21

    19 June 2008 at 6:13 pm

    Nice, now how about a Captcha that supports Internet Explorer?
22. lprent 22

    19 June 2008 at 6:23 pm

    It should. It does on my IE7…

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