Channel 9 - Discussions by labrat

Coffeehouse - Firefox Auto Update

labrat — Fri, 11 Feb 2005 13:15:42 GMT

Re Firefox adoption, I just checked my logs on a personal web server that gets a fair amount of traffic.

Out of 113,435 hits in the last month, 12,705 or 11% were from Firefox1.0 browsers.

A weekly graph:

So has FF already peaked?

Should be interesting to track.

Coffeehouse - Firefox Auto Update

labrat — Fri, 11 Feb 2005 00:15:24 GMT

isn't that antithetical to the whole open source movement? 90% market share I mean.

Good point. After Firefox hypothetically sweeps across the globe, it might just become the hated Borg--unless, that is, somehow the fact that it's open-source prevents it from becoming truly Borg-like. The fact that it's by design lightweight means that at least the common denominator is small, and users are free to add all kinds of third-party gewgaws such that specific installations will differ widely?

Coffeehouse - Firefox Auto Update

labrat — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 19:05:29 GMT

you don't have to use all the features that are available out there in plug-in form.

Interesting... so there would be less of a monoculture out there for exploits to propagate through.

Coffeehouse - Firefox Auto Update

labrat — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 18:40:21 GMT

The reason firefox adoption is so attractive to me personally as a linux user, is that if firefox becomes the norm on windows, I using linux will see the exact same webpage as somebody on windows when I'm developing web content.

Interesting take. Barring total adoption of Firefox though (kind of a quixotic goal?), seems like web developers just have to live with different presentation depending on browser/version/hardware. Come to think of it, how will hardware/settings ever be factored out?

Still, abstractly it would be interesting indeed if Firefox could capture 90%+ of the market, due to this consistency advantage, and the fact that it's open source and thus portable to anywhere. A true test of the potency of the open-source idea I guess.

Coffeehouse - Firefox Auto Update

labrat — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 17:44:34 GMT

I have some Linux geek friends who talk about Firefox like it was the Second Coming. When I ask why I would want Mozilla/Firefox, it seems that "tabbed browsing" comes up a lot. Not sure why this is so groundbreaking, as the XP taskbar already gives a pop-up menu of all instances of IE. Seems like the advantages if any are subtle. Probably just boils down to an affection with open source and associated evangelism.