It's a good news, but it also means that we must push things much harder.

If everything said here is truth, Microsoft can't lose more than 10% a year. So even if Microsofts sleeps if everything else is the same, MS would still hold more than 50% in the next 4 years.

Now watch Asa be attacked for 'bashing' Opera...

Of course FF's eroding IE's marketshare. IE is crap, and all the publicity FF is getting is showing people that there are better things out there.

This is good news indeed. What's next? Firefox needs to get into the corporate and governmental market to grow even more. Is there a list of governmenatl agencies and big companies that use Firefox? IBM announced that they were switching to Firefox; there are certainly others. A few famous names could help.

It would also be good to get some ISPs to distribute Forefox with their install CD-ROMs and offer it to their customers for download.

I also wrote up something about Firefox share here. Firefox is making a huge dent in IE's shares.

I noticed something interesting about Safari's marketshare the other day: On my site Safari is 2.3%, and Macs are 4.4%. Once I worked out an estimate of what percentage is OS X and what percentage is Classic, I concluded that, on my site:

1. Safari accounts for just over half of my visits by Mac users.
2. Safari accounts for 65% of my visits by Mac OS X users.

It's barely noticeable when dropped in with the vast majority of Windows users, but it shows the power of (a) platform integration, (b) being installed by default, and (c) brand loyalty.

A. Platform integration is tricky, especially with something designed, like Firefox or Opera, to be cross-platform. I know there's work underway to improve Firefox's Macishness, but once Camino hits 1.0 it'll be interesting to compare uptake.

B. I can't see Firefox ever getting installed by default on Windows or Mac, but you could probably get computer sellers to install it, and I've been seeing Firefox as the default browser for a lot of Linux distributions.

C. Apple, Mozilla and Opera all appeal to customer loyalty in a way that Microsoft can't. Microsoft has inertia on its side -- the "No one ever got fired for recommending IBM" effect -- but while I've seen plenty of people defend windows and put down "crapintosh" and "linsux" I haven't seen many people get really excited about Microsoft or its products (games excluded).

Firefox has 10.4% marketshare in Poland. Opera has 5.4%. Based on 9mln tracked users.

> "While 87-percent market share may seem like market dominance"

It IS market dominance.

What's important and heartening is that Fx is consistently eating into IE's market share. If that trend keeps going and accelerates...

On the subject of stats... The W3 site has its stats up for the month of June. FF is on 26.3% for those not wanting to rta.

"FF is on 26.3% for those not wanting to rta." Uh what? rta?

I stopped using FF to prove a point for the people who pay to attend my computer training classes.

I use only IE on 7 XP Pro SP2 machines that are properly configured and none of them get crapped up even if you try REAL hard.

It seems those who listen to what I show them don't have problems anymore. Those who pay me then listen to all the junk that floats around the media, blogs, and banner ads suffer while I profit.

It takes 10 to 15 minutes to configure without any system bloat or paying for tons of junkie software.

Other then missing tabs, which have nothing to do with security, IE is perfectly safe.

It is down to personal choice. FF, Opera, and IE all have good and bad points.

Mike: "Other then missing tabs, which have nothing to do with security, IE is perfectly safe."

You are wrong here. IE totally unsafe even on newest and "greatest" Windows XP SP2 with many and longtime not resolved vulnerabilities:
http://www.securityfocus.com/cgi-bin/index.cgi?l=1&c=12&vendor=Microsoft&version=6.0%20SP2&title=Internet%20Explorer
http://secunia.com/product/11/

On older Windows version is IE even worser.

Firefox has number of vulnerabilities near to zero, less critical and often quickly fixed on *all* suported platforms.
http://www.securityfocus.com/cgi-bin/index.cgi?l=1&c=12&vendor=Mozilla&version=1.0.4&title=Firefox
http://secunia.com/product/4227/

If you use IE, you are pointlessly hazarding with your safety. Why?

Rore, "RTA" is shorthand for "read the article"

i think he knows that he just didnt know that artical that mark was refering to

Rishi, I don't think it is "bashing" at all. Asa is just showing the current browsr usage trend. :-)

minghong, I think rishi was being ironic... (Rishi didn't actually think Asa was bashing anyone...)

See? IE sucks!

Ack. Isn't it sad how most of these browser flaws documented at Secunia and SecurityFocus involve people being tricked into doing something they otherwise wouldn't in order to compromise their system. Too bad more people don't take/have the time to learn a little about how computers, the internet, their operating system works. Back on topic, I no longer feel more or less secure running Firefox than I did running IE, but I like the Firefox interface better.

Yeah, minghong, the quotes were for sarcasm. ;-)

"IE totally unsafe even on newest and "greatest" Windows XP SP2 with many and longtime not resolved vulnerabilities"

I haven't checked carefully, but I think pretty much all those "vulnerabilities" are rated "less critical" or "moderately critical" - they include DoS stuff, which are crash/hang bugs. Counting those is pretty meaningless - you could probably add dozens of those to Firefox's count by going through bugzilla.

IE has more unpatched minor vulnerabilities partly because Secunia has been tracking them for longer. Firefox has a couple of "less critical" "vulnerabilities" from last year, which aren't likely to get fixed because they're impossible to fix without breaking lots of legitimate sites, and the number of those will build up.

I'm not saying Firefox's security record isn't better, but you can't just count total numbers from Secunia and say that it proves anything...

It's worse that those numbers show. I run www.googletutor.com and my numbers show about 55% Firefox! The bleeding edge of users is moving quickly to Firefox.

michaell: If you go to http://secunia.com/product/11/ you'll read, just at the first paragraph, this:

"Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.x with all vendor patches installed and all vendor workarounds applied, is currently affected by one or more Secunia advisories rated Highly critical".

Pretty clear, isn't it? The holes causing that criticality have been there for more than a year.

heise.de, a big German IT site, just broughht an article on this:

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/60561

"Mozilla Firefox knabbert weiter am Marktanteil des Internet Explorer" (english "Mozilla Firefox keeps nibbling on the market share of Internet Explorer"). Heise.de publishes its own stats, which show that most of the heise visitors are Gecko users. The heise.de forum trolls are already at it. If you think Slashdot was bad, you should see Heise!

"Pretty clear, isn't it? The holes causing that criticality have been there for more than a year."

It's not "holes", it's a single hole. Although it's been there for a couple of years, there seems to be no known exploit. There are a few less critical problems as well, but Firefox also has several of those unpatched. The statement I argued with was that there were "many" long time critical flaws. As far as I can see, there's one and I can't find any information to support that particular secunia advisory - usually if one searches around you can find other pages with more information about a vulnerability. In that case, all I can find are copies and translations of the secunia page, which only goes as far as saying it's a "possible" flaw and that there's no known exploit.

Having done some more reading about that particular vulnerability, I think the Secunia write up is misleading (at the least). The flaw is actually in Visual Studio. If you don't have Visual Studio, then you would first need to install the vulnerable ActiveX control. Even having installed the control, the security researcher that reported the issue was unable to find a way of exploiting it (and apparently nobody else has either, two years on), so it's probably just a DoS rather than a remote-execution flaw.

There's certainly a security issue there, but to say it's a critical flaw in IE is rather a stretch.

I guess Mozilla would do better in circumstances like that, because they'd take the time to argue with Secunia, whereas Microsoft don't seem to be bothered...

"It's not "holes", it's a single hole". What about http://secunia.com/advisories/11482/ ? That's two holes rated "highly critical", I'm afraid. As to the other one happening just if you have Visual Studio installed, notice that the advisory explains that the responsible VS plugin can be installed easily because it's signed by Microsoft.
There are several other security flaws rated "moderately critical", all unpatched from more than 6 months. The only "moderately critical" security flaw from Firefox has just a week, and will probably be fixed soon.