Firefox 3.5 Now the Most Popular Browser Worldwide | Hacker News Reader

Firefox 3.5 Now the Most Popular Browser Worldwide

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36 pointsjmonegro15 comments

To be fair, it's still a 30/60 split between all of IE and Firefox.

But the good news is that we should be under 10% for IE6 some time next year. That has me even more excited!

Ignoring Asia, IE6 is at about 5% right now. It is small enough to start ignoring.

The source for this story puts IE6 at 10-12% in North America and Europe and 20-35% in South America, Africa, and Asia.

Whether or not IE6 support is still necessary depends on who your target audience is. Are you targeting a young and tech-savvy crowd? Then drop it. But if you're working on a project intended to be used by non-profits and government agencies (as I am right now) then it's unfortunately still necessary.

Our target audience is primarily NGOs and organisations working with poverty in developing countries. IE 6 last month was 17%. IE(5/6/7/8) was 40% and Firefox/Netscape total was 34%.

I know the problem of such a large share of IE6 in China is basically due to millions of pirated WinXP ...

Yeah, this is just part of the long trend of IE7 users upgrading to IE8. The real test will be how much market share Chrome will gain, and how it will impact Firefox vs. IE.

Unfortunately, Firefox 3.5 is blocked by the company proxy. 3.0 wasn't, but I guess they're getting wise to those wily engineers trying to use a (arguably) more secure browser.

Reminds me of the sites they have blocked under the category "productivity", no joke.

Yeah. Earlier this year, while Firefox 3.5 was in beta, I noticed that the update check wasn't working any more. I finally figured out that our company proxy was blocking it (Firefox isn't officially supported at all, but many of us use it). I promptly browsed to Mozilla's FTP site and pulled down the installer manually. Silly admins.

I've personally just switched to Chromium from Safari. Firefox on Mac is a dog and doesn't seem to be getting better.

I wonder if Chrome will start rapidly eating at Firefox's share since more technically inclined users are probably more like to switch, and more likely to use FF in the first place.

As of 6:45UK time on Sat BBC News has picked up this story. Interesting how mainstream this is.

actual source: http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-weekly-200827-...

how sad that firefox reaches its adoption peak while hitting an all-time low for stability. it took me 7 years to jump ship from ie to firefox. it took me 1 to go from firefox to chrome.

well from someone that has done a lot with Firefox since 2.0, i jumped the ship to chrome just 3-4months ago and simply love it. Firefox evolved into a FireBear.

Its fascinating how decisions taken by companies can have such a long term effect. MS decided to give away IE for free before Mozzila and even now some how IE6 has a major market share even though Mozzila has a much better product

A very interesting incident

In October 1997 Internet Explorer 4.0 was released. The release party in San Francisco featured a ten-foot-tall letter "e" logo. Netscape employees showing up to work the following morning found the giant logo on their front lawn, with a sign attached that read "From the IE team ... We Love You". The Netscape employees promptly knocked it over and set a giant figure of their Mozilla dinosaur mascot atop it, holding a sign reading "Netscape 72, Microsoft 18" representing the market distribution.

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