OneStat today reported that Mozilla 1.0 has shown a fast adoptation rate with a global usage share of 0.4 percent in the first two weeks of its public launch. Netscape 7.0 has gotten off to a quick start in its first month of release. The global usage share of Netscape 7.0 is 0.3 percent. However, Microsoft’s Explorer 6.0 continues to rise with a global usage share of 1.7 percent since April 2002 and has a global usage share of 46.4 percent. Check out the complete statistics.
Mozilla 1.0 and Netscape 7.0 Show Promising Start
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I just wish Opera did not identify itself by default as Mozilla, but as Opera, so it would be looking better on such statistics. I suspect that a small part of the 1.2% of Netscape Navigator 4.x and IE 5 is Opera. For marketing reasons that would further help Opera make more business deals would be to identify themselves as Opera.
I was surprised that Opera didn’t have a higher percentage, didn’t think of the identify thing until you mentioned it. Anyways, Opera is definently faster than both Netscape, Mozilla , and Internet Explorer. I never get a slow down using Opera. All the other browsers mentioned get a little choppy when scrolling on a heavy webpage, ex. ESPN’s website. Opera might not be as compatible because of website developers not properly making websites, but it’s still the best. I just wish more people would try it. Also, the MDI is great, all windows opening under one interface makes it easier to open and close the program.
It looks like Onestart is analyzing and gathering information about the people who go to websites more than they are analyzing web sites themselves <g>. With NetBarrierX (for Mac OS X), I have the feature turned on that supposedly blocks the name of my browser and the last site I visited. I don’t blame companies for trying to get some general info about how their site is doing…I just don’t like that whole area of the internet – information gathering, etc.
The problem with this is there is no way to account for the same user using multiple browsers. When I’m at work, I’m in front of a Windows box, obviously I’m using IE. When I’m at home using Linux, I’m using either Mozilla or Konquerer. My “vote” using IE at work by necessity cancels out my “votes” for other browsers that I personally choose as a preference. Obviously, that skews the results in terms of indicating what browser I actually prefer. If we were tabulating actual browser preferences, rather than “hits”, I suspect the alternative browsers would fare a bit better.
Your use of IE at your work is a “vote” as you put it.
If you don’t like that then maybe you should find another work.
This isn’t statisics of the most popular brower
its the most used.
Unless you can’t or aren’t allowed to of course, but unless you are prohibited to do so, then mozilla exists for Windows and many other operating systems other than Unix/Linux/MacOSX.
What percentage of these sites have proprietary content that prevents standards-compliant browsers from accessing any more than one page on the site? It would be more accurate to exclude those, but then I wonder whether web developers really care.
Try this site with Opera: http://stuntman-game.com
Explorer 6.0 continues to rise with a global usage share of 1.7 percent since April 2002 and has a global usage share of 46.4 percent
Ummm.. if it had a ‘global usage share of 1.7%’, then it couldn’t have had a ‘global usage share of 46.4%’.
Surely they mean it ‘its global usage share increased 1.7%’
What makes a good web browser?
o Speed? Opera is fast because it uses parallel connections instead of persistent connections? I believe that the use of persistent connections is relatively faster than parallel connections and that the actual (network) retrieval times for web objects should be about the same for most of the web browsers. The key differences then lie in the speed or rather user-perceived latency, have to do to more with the horsepower of the rendering engine of the web browser and its caching mechanism (whether it do pre-fetching or keep history lists of fast mirrors).
o Features? What do you look for in terms of features? Integrated email/news reader or messaging client? Or just simply the web browser as a standalone. Sometimes having too many bells and whistles tend to clutter the performance and speed or haven’t you noticed? Of course, there are some features which makes web navigation so much easier such as tabbed browsing and shutting off banner pop-ups.
o Plug-in support? Mozilla 1.0 does not seem to come with support for java-vm? One has to download the required plug-in from Sun Microsystems. It’s rather a hassle. In addition, Mozilla 1.0 does not seem to have automatic plug-in download which I feel is a showstopper.
I have used Internet Explorer (IE), Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, Galeon, KConqueror, Lynx on either Microsoft(R) Windows or/and GMU/Linux and my present conclusion is that IE seems to be the only web browser that offer an easy, seamless and relatively fast web surfing experience.
William Ku
p/s: I am mostly a GNU/Linux user.
Reply to post <Standards COmpliant Websites> Opera is rejected when you identify as Opera, but when you identify as IE5, you can access the site. That is a classic example of web-masters which deserve a boot-to-the-head. With steel capped boots, preferably.
the rendering engine of the web browser and its caching mechanism
Many talk about Gecko as a good one. It is. It renders the images fast, smothly and progressively. I would add that the browser part (not the rendering) has yet many work to do on the important task that is the layout (disposition,placement)of objects -text&graphics, tables, etc. This is more evident with sliced graphics where it creates a kind of small spacement (<img> vspace=1 hspace=1) seems like it follows the “browser default”(1 ?) or something.
The rendering engine of IE seems to be more CPU intensive (since the GPU helps itself by using the CPU) than Gecko/Mozilla, which is a good signal for IE, normally, because IE needs more calculations/instructions than Mozilla/gecko.
Mozilla is getting acceptable but it can’t beat the more polished IE 5/6 for now and most internet users only heard of IE anyway :-). The trick is to follow more the IE way of doing things (proprietary) than to follow w3c standards, in my opinion.
I must admit that in the short run following the IE way for compliance might pay off, but if you plan on any long run, you better stick with the standard, otherwise you are just giving the lead to IE.
I say primarily stick with W3C standards, make it work as good as possible, improve the UI, the options offered for control over browser behaviour, automatic plugin download. If more ppl start to use your browser more ppl are going to care making sites that work well with it.
Don’t follow the leader, take him off.
Yeah, identifiying as IE 5 lets you into the site, and as far as I can tell, everything works perfectly. The only difference in rendering with IE is that the index’s dropdown menu is yellow. That webmaster is quite the purist.
I use it
Try signing into eBay UK Auctions using Microsoft passport with opera identifying as itself. you get a message saying the Passport login server is down. Set it as IE5 and Passport comes back up again.
Packard-Bell website just redirects Opera users to download MSIE or Nav. Which may be a good thing though – keeping people with decent PC’s away from their junk!
At present, the only practical way to use Opera is in MSIE identification mode.
It is indentified as MSIE most of the time; it is a hassle to change it all the time. Well, sorry :-).
Maybe Opera should look at ways of only identifying itself as IE when absolutely necessary.
have you ever used one of these? ..i used to use FlashGet.. it identifies itself as IE4.x i think, but that’s not the point. They can retrieve one file from 10 places in the file at a time.. obviously skewing results even further..
Maybe Opera should look at ways of only identifying itself as IE when absolutely necessary.
Actually, I send a suggestion to Opera regarding this when 6.01 was release. Maybe we would find it in the next major release. (The usual reply came back; thank your for your feedback, blah blah blah, please wait as our feedback team takes 3 years to process these information).
You wouldn’t have thought it would be that difficult… even if it can’t automatically detect whether a website requires the browser to be IE, you could at least have a button ‘reload as IE’ or something and have a list of urls that Opera should identify itself as IE when browsing.
If only it wasn’t closed source, eh?
I would completely split between interface and rendering engine. That’s probably because I’m used to Gecko and KHTML and both are just rendering engines, running under a plethora of different interfaces. There are also uncountable different interfaces for the IE rendering component, really. So let’s take out the interface for a moment. What is a good rendering engine? IMO:
– Speed only a little bit. Sure, NS4 was slooooow but today all the “big ones” are fast enough, who cares if one is 10ms faster in rendering 500kb websites. You can always get a faster processing by removing features.
So I don’t really care about speed anymore as long as it doesn’t become considerably slower.
– Supporting standards: Very important. People who are no webdesigners or self-proclaimed webdesigners usually don’t see the point, but beeing a (good) webdesigner was a pain when we had non-standards compliant browsers so this is very important for me. In supporting HTML and CSS standards, I see Mozilla and KHTML leading, closely followed by IE6. In supporting DOM standards, I see IE6 and Mozilla leading.
– Image quality: This is often overlooked but also very important in my book. IMO this is the biggest strength of IE6, closely followed by Mozilla (form elements and some table borders are bad, but mostly good).
– Plugins: This depends, personally I don’t like plugins in webpages and usually turn Java off. But I agree that it should be there… Mozilla isn’t for enduse though, you should rather look at Beonex. I just surfed a Java site with Beonex 0.8 for Windows and it had automatic Java installation and worked (could win a game of chess at Yahoo). Funny thing though was that the default option at Java installation was to only use it with IE.
Flash works out of the box. Quicktime lead me to the installation page at Apple.com and it worked too (of course this wouldn’t work in GNU/Linux).
In Opera in Linux all you have to do is click on the “Identify as Opera” in the status bar to toggle between all the different identify options. Couldn’t be easier. I’m not sure if this is the same in the Windows version.
You just revealed the hidden secret. I think most of those who post here didn’t know this. COOOL man!!!!
Opera 6.02 on WinXP
No option in Status bar to change identity..
I must admit that in the short run following the IE way for compliance might pay off, but if you plan on any long run, you better stick with the standard, otherwise you are just giving the lead to IE.
Planning a long run is to be compatible with the already existing (some are crap) Web pages too, made under the style of IE. Many technical article writers use the FrontPage generator 5> and wouldn’t even clean the <head> section:-) maybe because of shortage of time (?).
I think that in this case it is not about giving the lead to IE it was to beat the IE on his own field. If I were to make a Web page in a certain manner and it couldn’t be compatible with both IE and Mozilla ( it happens a lot ) I would made it more IE compatible, and so will 80 % of the people writing web pages for a boss or client.
So if Mozilla wants acceptance (remeber the aricle discussed instead of just talking about ‘identifying buttons’ of Opera) it is good if it makes things, at least a little, like IE ( I don’t know what way this is, I know it is different from Mozilla and that’s enough for our little discussion here) I am no expert on any subject, I’m just interested:)
and not by following a strict standard.
Following reality was more important for acceptance.
An average user of the internet using Mozilla will say: “this looks awfull, give me IE (my money) back!”.
– Supporting standards: Very important. (…) but beeing a webdesigner was a pain when we had non-standards compliant browsers so this is very important for me. In supporting HTML and CSS standards, I see Mozilla and KHTML leading, closely followed by IE6.
In 2/3 years … maybe. Standards are good I hope it sticks to the wall more tightenly. Following them up is a different thing. And you have (must) live on the present (on the real world).
Oh and plugins … (you are right) they exist on win32 but not for Linux/Unix, shame on plugins!.
I had forgot about Beonex completely, let me go check it now …
Are you trolling? Hit F12 from Windows to set quick preferences, including browser identifaction. Also, hit Alt-P, choose the network tab, you can also enter browser identification from there.
As I said, I hope you’re not trolling.
“- Supporting standards: Very important. (…) but beeing a webdesigner was a pain when we had non-standards compliant browsers so this is very important for me. In supporting HTML and CSS standards, I see Mozilla and KHTML leading, closely followed by IE6.
In 2/3 years … maybe.”
No, today.
I’m not completely sure but both KHTML and Moz (latest versions) already seem to be slightly ahead of IE6. At least I couldn’t find anything that doesn’t work right with Moz while I already found several quirks with IE.
I know that KHTML is also _very_ tight when it comes to CSS but I don’t use it that often. But usually when IE does something wrong and I check with Mozilla, KHTML and Opera, all of them get it right. I could show you some examples if you don’t believe me. I ask everyone at this place to show me examples of CSS lackings of Mozilla (not known bugs).
In Opera in Linux all you have to do is click on the “Identify as Opera” in the status bar to toggle between all the different identify options. Couldn’t be easier. I’m not sure if this is the same in the Windows version.
Nontheless irritating. It is like being Falun Gong members in China; almost every site out there is trying to opress us. Sure, you could change the identification easily, but it is highly irritating as I’m a regular of a few IE/NS4-only site… So I just keep it at IE.
I’m sure automatically changing identifications for web sites it detects force users to use IE.
After checking the site, they list three versions of IE, 5.0, 5.5, and 6.0. This leaves out versions 4.5 and 5.1 for Mac OS. I didn’t find anything about how or if they’re even counting those.
I wasn’t. I couldnt see an option anywhere in the status bar to do it.
F12 works a treat – thanks