Firefox Rocks!
Posted on 12/22/2004 8:32:38 AM PST by holymoly
Remember those days back in 1995, when Netscape Navigator was synonymous with internet? That was the time when Microsoft’s Internet Explorer entered the market for a head-on collision with the Netscape Navigator. That was Browser War –I. Now the battle was reignited by the fire of FireFox, internet browser of Mozilla. This is the beginning of the Browser War –II. And it appears that this time Microsoft is losing it.
Internet Explorer is rapidly losing market share. OneStat.com a company in Amsterdam had conducted a worldwide survey in late November. The survey shows that Internet Explorer's share dropped to less than 89 percent, 5 percentage points less than in May. FireFox now has almost 5 percent of the market, and it is growing.
Net surfers are opting for FireFox to Internet Explorer due to security concerns. FireFox offers much more security from worms and viruses than IE. FireFox 1.0 was released for free on the web on Nov. 9. Within just one month 10 million copies of the browser were downloaded. It is an open source software which improves with time as bug-reporter and bug-fixer community grows.
Mozilla’s President Mitchell Baker is optimistic that FireFox will grab 10 percent market share and Mozilla's many technology parts will become an increasingly important application development platform.
She says that “the product is so nice that people love it when they try it. It is innovative and has new features, it makes the Web a more enjoyable experience, it makes people more comfortable, and it's fast. It's a set of things you would want in a browser if you sat down and really thought about it.” She added that people rarely realize that the quality your web experience is determined to a large extent by the kind of browser you use. Firefox gives them that wonderful browsing enjoyment.
Gary Schare, Microsoft's director of product management for Windows on the other hand feels that people will stick with IE when they consider all the things that made them to opt for IE in the first place. He said that Microsoft is developing a new version of browser but one will have to wait till 2006. Schare said that Microsoft goes to people and gets there feedback on what they want and what they don’t want in a product. It is not so easy to satisfy absolutely everyone.
To us however somehow the diminishing share of IE from the market says something else. It says that nowadays costumers have a new way of giving a feedback. They just switch to someone else.
Of course, I've been using Opera for a while, so I see little need to switch over to Firefox.
Another Firefox article
So, can you recommend this switch to us inertia-bound non-tech-savvy IE users?
More media hype? You decide...
If Mozilla ever makes POSTDATA scripting compatible to Firefox....I.E. is toast.
I have Netscape, Opera, IE, and Firefox on my computer. My Web Site looks better in IE, but I use Firefox to do my browsing. I love the tabs.
I still have to flip flop between I.E. and Firefox. I stay in firefox mainly now; but if I'm on a site that uses a postdata submit script, I have to launch I.E.
Yes. Download Firefox and try it. It is free and it is easy. You can leave IE on your computer as a backup, and after a little while, you will almost never use it.
I switched a few days ago. It's twice as fast as MSIE and it eliminates pop-ups entirely. I have not found any spyware either since I started using it
I've switched all of my home computers to firefox and am downloading it right now for my work computer.
The only negative is the lousy formatting of my mail responses in Hotmail. But what do you expect from an MS Centric mail system. It is a small price to pay.
I still have to use MSIE to access the company intranet (over VPN) and the occasional balky website, but that's the total extent I'll use it.
Firefox Rocks!
>So, can you recommend this switch to us inertia-bound
>non-tech-savvy IE users?
Absolutely. I've been using Mozilla Firefox for some time on my Windows XP machine and it's a great browser.
I'd recommend the following for any Windows machine:
- Install and keep Norton Antivirus updated
- Clean and immunize your system with Spybot
- Switch from IE to Mozilla's Firefox
My experience was the opposite. And I have friends that work at microsoft. There was this thread yesterday http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1299854/posts
which gives a bunch of links to speed up firefox for broad band users. It works great!
BTW, my wife instantly noticed the popups went away when we switched, and we both love the tabs.
So Microsoft is going to get even more authors of web sites to make their pages require Explorer?
Mo
xilla? Whats the big deal? I have tried it on my Windows XP based computer and found it riff with boo boos, and general hassels. I am not impressed.More media hype? You decide...
???? What is MoXilla???
I decided you haven't tried the Firebird browser at all. Most people have a good experience with Firebird. Or perhaps your machine has a ton of Spyware and crap that keeps anything from working as it should.
I can just see the stockholder faces now! We took over a percent of a Microsoft free internet explorer with our free browser... how much did we make?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.