November 24th, 2004

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Technology
3 Comments »

Go Firefox, It’s Your Birthday

I’ve been very impressed by the amount of mainstream press the Mozilla Foundation has been able to produce. I mean, among normal humans, who really cares much about their Web browser? Regardless, I’ve been pleased to read that Firefox is already making some in-roads against Internet Explorer:

Net traffic monitor, OneStat.com, has reported that the open-source browser Firefox 1.0, released on 9 November, seems to be drawing users away from IE. While IE’s market share has dropped 5% since May to 88.9%, Mozilla browsers - including Firefox - have grown by 5%.

I’d like to offer what this site’s stats reflect, but Webalizer’s browser usage reporting is a bit cryptic. Check out the top five entries:

1. 172182 10.15% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET
2. 120893 7.13% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)
3. 118909 7.01% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)
4. 117493 6.93% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1
5. 109227 6.44% Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gec

What am I supposed to make of that bollocks? Maybe I’ll install AW Stats and see what they have to offer.

Comments: 3 Responses so far

Matt Clements
November 24th, 2004
1:36 pm

I have AWStats running and it breaks things down very nicely. I’ve been seeing Firefox’s share on my server be around 21% and that doesn’t include any of my own hits (using Firefox). Firefox is definitely making some inroads.

[Reply]

Todd
November 24th, 2004
5:00 pm

The amount of press buzz around Firefox is nice to see, though not totally surprising: everyone wants to be there first when a giant like Microsoft stumbles, and underdog stories are always good reading. What *has* surprised me is the surge of interest in Firefox. It seems that when word got out past the inner membranes of the geekosphere that there was a real alternative to IE that was genuinely free, people showed they were more than ready to make a switch. BTW it’s from a different post but great comments on the CBC piece, Darren.

[Reply]

The Peruvian Llama
November 25th, 2004
6:49 am

Of those five entries, the top four are still referring to versions of MSIE, running on somewhat different incarnations of Windows. The fifth seems to actually refer to Firefox, again running on Windows. Googling will of course bring up a bunch of information on decoding browser identification strings, but the two pages below probably have what you’re looking for.

(Fairly) Exhaustive List of Identification Strings:
http://www.zytrax.com/tech/web/browser_ids.htm

Brief Synopsis of the History of Ident Strings:
http://www.quirksmode.org/js/detect.html#string

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