1. Yeah, firefox has come out of thin air, seemingly as a result of the pop-up ads. I think that was why people got into it, so quick. A need was created, for more peace & quiet, while surfing. A more aero-dynamic browser, for smooth surfing without interuptions. By word of mouth... it seemed to spread, that if you used it, you would not get pop-up ads.

Posted at 4:54AM on Dec 19th 2005 by John Francis Long

2. "Like may people I hate IE For about five years I used Opera for 80% of my surfing, and like many I gave started using Firefox this year." So beautifully post-modern! ;P

An interesting article about the rise of Firefox, and a possible explanation is at: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/a07/12/ie_bugs_benefit_mozilla/

Posted at 4:54AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Yves

3. I cann't say that I agree with the arguement
presented since I suspect that the survey is
not very representative of the general population. Looking at the results I see that 11% used safari which only runs on macs. As
macs have only a 2% market share and yet represent 11% of the visitors to the site the
results are going to be very skewed against microsoft.

Posted at 4:54AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Neil Broderick

4. Encouraging trend, indeed. In case anyone's interested, I wrote an essay about the return of the browser wars: http://www.allpeers.com/blog/essays/browserwars.htm. To me the question is not so much are the browser wars back, but rather: if they are, what does this mean, what side are we on and what further steps should we take to maximize the chance of victory?

Matt

Posted at 4:54AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Matthew Gertner

5. Firefox didn't exactly come out of thin air. I've been using it for years in the form of Netscape 7.x and Mozilla. It did just recently become a standalone browser though.

Posted at 4:54AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Don

6. While it is an interesting trend, you said it yourself; it's an extremely tech-savvy audience. A more important measure would be people visiting, say, cnn.com, or the Weather Channel's website; non-techies, using whatever browser they always use. Personally, I use Konqueror for media, because it integrates well, Opera for most things because it's fast, and Mozilla when I can't use one of the others. But most of the people in my office use Netscape (because they've always used it) or IE, because it's there.

Posted at 4:54AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Alex

7. I think it is no wonder why Firefox is gaining popularity so quickly. Just compare IE and Firefox and you will quickly see why this is so. Firefox is just so much faster and has more nice features that you can't leave without thesedays. And on top of that it is also much more secure. I just can't stop asking myself how could I even browse with this old and archaic and insecure IE just a few months ago. Luckily a friend told me about Firefox and I switched immidiately. I guess Firefox would be even more popular if more people would know about it. So don't forget to tell your friends and coworkers about Firefox. You will do them a big favour.

Posted at 4:54AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Jure Repinc

8. MS drove Netscape out of the market by leveraging their platform and integrating IE into Windows. This was technically the wrong thing to do but it gave them the ability to push the market almost completely over to IE. Then they sat back and left the thing alone for the following five years. This is proof if ever it was needed that a monopoly is bad.

Mozilla has most of the features people are raving about that are in Firefox but it is a bit big. Firefox I think is getting so big because it adds some must have features (Adblock extension) and is very fast and standards compliant. I have been switching people to it as quick as I can and they all love it. I don't know how far down IE will have to get before MS does something, the mods in XP SP2 are pretty basic and many sites are now working around the popup blocker which is why the adblock extension of firefox is so great.

I suspect MS has its eye on too many things at the moment and as long as IE is still there on the platform by default many people will continue to use it. However, even 20% of the market using something other than IE is great because that is far too many users to ignore. Much better than the days when it was only 5%.

Posted at 4:54AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Shane

9. Most browsers have an option to "pretend" other browsers. This can impact any survey in favour of IE (not much, but still...). Coz mostly it's IE your browser will pretend (my Opera does this most of the time). And I agree with Neil Broderick, theese stats don't seem to be representative.

Posted at 4:54AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Peter

10. Popups are annoying I grant you, but the things that really sell firfox for me are the adblock, and "text link" extensions. Tabs and tab session savers are great too, and once you get used to tabs you can never go back, but adblock alone is worth it. Espcially on dialup, where the amount of junk you block, speeds up browsing no end. This is over and above the speed advantage of the base browser itself.

Posted at 4:54AM on Dec 19th 2005 by John

11. It seems that these sites are mainly visited by advanced users, therefore, showing that advanced users are dumping IE at a fast rate (it's about time). While most sites in general are visited by inexperienced and regular users (which is climbing every day), and they seem to use IE, or MSN, or AOL, which in reality is MSIE, and that's why the number for IE users is still high.

Posted at 4:54AM on Dec 19th 2005 by DANIEL

12. I used IE for many years due to Netscape sucking so bad -- although the one feature Netscape had was 'Composer' which I used a lot to create presentations instead of Power Point...when I upgraded to OSX I tried Safari but it didn't hold a candle to IE...so I switched to Mozilla which allows me to surf, create html and has a neat little chat client which I use to communicate with family while I'm on the road...I am very pleased with Mozilla and can easily see why Firefox is grabbing market share...finally, a 21st C browser for the masses...very cool...

Posted at 4:54AM on Dec 19th 2005 by anechoic

13. ? I wonder if some of the IE stats are really Konqueror sending the IE id?

Posted at 4:54AM on Dec 19th 2005 by R S Prigan

14. At my Gecko Statistics you can also see an increase:
http://gemal.dk/mozilla/geckostats.html

Posted at 4:54AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Henrik Gemal

15. Here is my site's result, quite interesting:

http://www.geeking.org/awstats/cgi-bin/awstats.pl

Posted at 4:54AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Livid Torvalds

16. We run quite a few auto dealer sites.. and I have not yet seen any jump in FireFox.. it still lags behind Safari.. Obviously not counting other Gecko based browsers..

Posted at 4:54AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Umer Farooq

17. Maybe on this niche site they are, but on the whole, 85%+ are still on IE. Firefox is 18% here but not anywhere else I can see.

BTW, your site is hosted on a MS IIS server:
http://www.whois.sc/weblogsinc.com

Making the same conceptual jump you could make a headline that says "MS Servers are #1!" which we know is not the case.

Using a single site's stats on anything is a poor judge of the internet as a whole.

Posted at 4:54AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Cluster P.

18. macintosh & safari kick microsoft's security hole ass

Posted at 4:54AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Micah

19. I have used IE since first beta and am a comitted user. I dumped netscape when the incompatible site issues started making me mad. The world moved to IE and pages started being consistent. Then again I didn't have a bug up my butt about MS.

I downloaded Mozilla then dumped for firefox because it was smaller, faster etc etc. I use both because firefox has some wierd page handling issues MS handles better. BUT.. Firefox is faster.. less mysterious add ins and bits and pieces that scare me.. :)

I recommend it to family members..

Posted at 4:54AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Rob Gagnon

20. Engadget is a techie site, though, so I imagine the number of FireFox users would be higher. I think we have a little while before most people start using it. Things are going to get *real* interesting when Google launches their browser, imho...

Posted at 4:54AM on Dec 19th 2005 by kpaul