Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more

This was fairly inevitable really, IE7 offers nothing over Firefox, Opera or any other reasonable browser, but distinct benefits over IE6 (and some distinct drawbacks, but I assume most people won't really notice). The other key factor is that it's being pushed out through Windows Update.

<impression voice="Mr. Burns">Excellent!</impression>

Oh, and I submitted the story to Slashdot. If it gets picked up, the response should prove interesting...

Well, hardly a surprise. But the truth is also that IE7 sucks less than IE6. The goal was to stop the masses from running away and MSFT achieves that partly if users switch from IE6 to IE7 -- those users are less likely to switch to Firefox.

Eventually the massed ranks of windows users that don't use Vista when it comes out will likely do so. At some point in the future.

Just like always when they start up that spangly new computer there's going to be, more than likely, only one browser installed.

Given that IE7 is at least decent compared to what was before from MS and assuming that users will have less reason to change browser than pre IE7. If IE development keeps up with the competition better in future. It could be the MS trump card.

I hope not, but we need more alternate browsers packaged with puters.

Quoth Ben Basson:
"This was fairly inevitable really, IE7 offers nothing over Firefox, Opera or any other reasonable browser, but distinct benefits over IE6 (and some distinct drawbacks, but I assume most people won't really notice). The other key factor is that it's being pushed out through Windows Update."

Well, to fight flames with flames (sorry, Asa, but it's hard to take competition posts here seriously) - IE7 offers something that Firefox can't offer - easy network deployment, and management via Group Policy. Heck...the latter is definitely something IE6 offered (and the former was easy enough to handle)...which means that Firefox has been beaten by a 5 year old browser. Speaking as someone who was burned by the claims of "MSIs for 1.5," that's a slightly shocking observation.

For that matter, I just read Window Snyder's interview on SearchSecurity.com today, and she points out that Firefox's target audience is the end user, not enterprise. As such, the update mechanism is quite useless when all your users have *secure* computers, without admin rights. This is a big disappointment to me, and all the flamebait any colleagues give me when discussing Firefox. It's not to say they don't find some merit in it, but they won't take it seriously unless it can centrally deployed without difficulty. So, for someone who's been using Firefox since maybe Phoenix ~0.2 or so on Linux, this is an unpleasant position to be in. I read a planning document for 3.0 that suggests MSIs will finally be present, but let us see whether it gets deemed P3 or something.

(By the way, we have no intention of going to IE7 anytime soon - but that's for two reasons: a. No one in their right mind should install it before the first major update; b. It doesn't support Windows 2000, and that could make for an ugly 2 browser situation.)

I still think IE7's retarded UI will help draw people to Firefox, it's too unfamiliar for users. They should have had an XP style UI for XP and leave the current one for vista.

I thought a lot of those 100 Million downloads came from people like me/us. I use Firefox, but since I develop websites, I also want IE on my system. Of course, being IE 6 lacked a lot that IE 7 improved on...I downloaded and installed it. I don't use it for anything but to check if a design works in it and know what I need to tweak or ignore tweaking.

I wonder out of all the 100 mill. downloads who actually installed the software and didn't promptly click 'Uninstall'.

The data from the German web stat site webhit.de (http://www.webhits.de/deutsch/index.shtml?webstats.html) also support the claim that IE7 is mostly replacing IE6, but not eating into the market share of Firefox. Still, the Mozilla family has been at 23% usage share for month according to Webhits.de. The usage share does not go down but it does not go up, either.

The next big thing in the browser world is of course Windows Vista, which will hit the shops by the end of January. Does the Firefox project have any special plans to welcome Vista?

How many people downloaded IE7 and installed it then continue to use Firefox or Opera as they have done for years, just so they reap the benefits of having a much more secure browser built into Windows XP since that's never to go away. I know I did.

Only 2 reasons I ever use IE6/7 are for Outlook Web Access and for testing websites I'm working on to make sure they work "properly".

Asa: When does Mozilla plan to start the upgrade process from 1.5 to 2.0?
It sucks I have to manually upgrade my parents to 2.0.