can firefox challege IE

[Hierophant]

Off Topic:

Why do these threads always end up in fundamentalist bickering? Almost as bad as religion and politics.

I use Firefox and my wife uses Firefox. My children use MSN (nice shell on IE). Each has their purpose. For one, Firefox has no parental controls so my children cannot use it because I don't have time to overlook their every action and I would like to give more and more freedom automatically as they get older.

However, I will be installing Firefox on all of my retail store's computers. Not as a web browser but I am currently writing a XUL application that will run on top of Gecko so that the inventory of the physical store and the inventory of the online store match. Currently XHTML doesn't give me the richness that I want for my interface but XUL does. That right there is the only real benefit that I see over IE. The other features are nice but not must haves to get work done.

[stymiee]

I'm a huge FF fan. I mean HUGE. I have more extensions then MS has lawsuits. I honestly cannot understand why anyone, espcially geeks like us, even think about using IE (remember people, my opinion).

Now, having said that, let me touch upon the whole "average user" topic. I very actively promote FF to anyone who'll listen. I've switched my job over to it, most of my family, and a good chunk of friends. But here's the catch: I proactively made them switch. None of them, zero, had ever heard of FF (or Mozilla for that matter). And a lot of them had gotten killed by spyware. I mean their computers were virtual pop up machines. If you opened up their task manager the processes running was a who's who in spyware. Yet, despite this, they had no clue that holes in IE were to blame and that there was an alternative to IE that would prevent this kind of spyware from being installed. They were annoyed as heck but yet still never considered a switch from IE. And some of them, even after I told them about FF, were still skeptical at first because IE was (here it comes) the Internet to them. I, unfortunately, have few tech savy friends. Most of the people I now are average Internet users at best. And they, once again unfortunately, demonstrate that the average user just doesn't have much incentive or understanding to install FF (or any alternative for that matter).

I don't think anyoine in here will argue that FF is an excellent browser and with potential to be even better. However, it really has one heck of a task ahead of it if it really wants to claim a large portion of the browser market.

[vgarcia]

I don't think anyoine in here will argue that FF is an excellent browser and with potential to be even better. However, it really has one heck of a task ahead of it if it really wants to claim a large portion of the browser market.

Yep, I totally agree. Mozilla also needs its own marketing rather than community reliance. Like a link posted earlier in this thread said, the main Firefox project page says very little that would make a novice internet user bother to hit the download link.

[icky_bu]

Yep, I totally agree. Mozilla also needs its own marketing rather than community reliance. Like a link posted earlier in this thread said, the main Firefox project page says very little that would make a novice internet user bother to hit the download link.

I must agree with most of what has been said here and specially with vgarcia on the fact that Mozilla MUST hit the main audience with their most charished app, Firefox. A lot of this is being discussed at the newly created www.spreadfirefox.com and hopefully they'll use the launching of the stable 1.0 version as a platform to open average users' eyes.

Although they say bad publicity is good publicity, Mozilla should make their more swiftly and efficiently. We dont need pup-ups, banners, and all those things that they have actually been working to prevent with their latest browsers.

[geosite]

I think the only IT people who can reasonably say they haven't seen articles about MSIE losing market share in the past month are those in Florida who have been without electricity and have been fleeing one huricane after another.

That's awfully similar to a reponse I had in mind, but I think I've used up my insult points.

[geosite]

I was interested too and sorry that this went unanswered! So, I thought about this some too and came up with a quick list, just a mini-brainstorm.

A plug-in to your community website could allow peer-to-peer features for your users. Efficient chat, image/movie/audio sharing without touching much of your site's bandwidth.

Another plug-in might manage mod points at sites that do that sort of thing. I sometimes use mod points at Plastic and it is difficult to keep track of how many I've used on various pages before hitting the moderate button. After hitting the moderate button, every other open page either needs to get reloaded or have the incorrect mod point count. Also, in order to actually deliver the points the page has to be reloaded, which is inconvenient. A plug-in could provide instant actions without.

Ok, that's two ideas. Basically, I'm suggesting that plug-ins could be used to alow users to communicate with each other without involving your server directly, or be used to add state to normally stateless webpages.

Is it clear how those could be of value to a site? Or are they completely without worth? If they do have worth, does it make sense that a user might switch browsers to get the worthwhile feature?

YES, especially if you make that feature a very important part of your state.

You could even take it one step further and develop features that only work with Firefox, even though they COULD work with Internet Explorer with a simple fix. Most people would consider this insane, but if you're a diehard anti-Microsoft activist, why not? You could make a website that's fully functional in both browsers, except that Firefox users only can access a slideshow or a "remote controlled" site index.

A tactic like this could help persuade visitors to try Firefox without driving away Internet Explorers who don't want to try Firefox for whatever reason.

On another note, there's one feature Internet Explorer has that Firefox doesn't which really bugs me. It's a CSS style that controls every cell in a column. Everyone knows you can use CSS to dictate that every table cell in a particular row has a yellow background or features blue text. But this other style allows you to modify every cell in a COLUMN. It's tremendously useful, but Firefox doesn't have it.

At least, I don't think it has it. I haven't checked it in the newest version, but I've asked the folks at Mozilla about it before, and it sounded like they had no interest in adding this feature.

That's the one big advantage I can think of that I see in Internet Explorer. But it isn't nearly enough to tip the balance.

Finally, let's revisit the post that started this thread once again:

"In just six day the number of download for firefox have pass the one million download mile stone, will firefox be able to get mainstream acceptance and challege the dominance the IE? What is ur opinion?"

Perhaps we should ask what constitutes "mainstream acceptance." I think mainstream users are generally understood to be people who aren't geeks or "technophiles." But what percentage of them qualifies as "acceptance"?

I would argue that Firefox has been accepted if just 10% of non-geek net surfers use Firefox. And I also believe that will happen.

Whether or not a MAJORITY of mainstream users will ever switch to Firefox is another question. I think it's possible, and it would obviously be more likely and/or happen sooner if more people actively promoted Firefox.

With this in mind, we might ask not just whether or not Firefox will be accepted by a portion of netsurfers but what height it will reach before it either levels off or is beaten back by Microsoft. Will Firefox ever be used by 25% of mainstream users, or 25% of netsurfers in general? 50%?

Obviously, the longer Firefox runs unchallenged, the greater the market share it will capture. So what great event(s) will clip Firefox's wings in the next couple years?

[codyrockx]

well i can safely say that the amount of firefox users on my site have gone up 1 percent in the past month, general site, not webmaster related

[Dokkalfr]

I hate M$ just because it's gives a sh!t to user!! You can run a business not being like that!! Open Software rulz because it's focus is the user!
Firefox is great because it is a very good browser made under a good philosophy. Shure M$ will try to sell their products ... but why should I help them to do it??

[asp_funda]

You can run a business not being like that!! Open Software rulz because it's focus is the user!

Well it just happens pal that Microsoft is the biggest & richest company on this planet & Bill Gates is the richest man alive, so obviously they are doing more than good if that's the case.

[mmj]

Thread closed. Too many people ignoring my warning.