B3D Readers Software Distribution Stats

[Dave Baumann]

Top 10 OS

Windows                92.8 % 
Unknown                 3.3 % 
Macintosh               2.1 % 
Linux                   1.5 % 
Sun Solaris               0 % 
FreeBSD                   0 % 
WebTV                     0 % 
Dreamcast (!!!)           0 % 
HP Unix                   0 % 
Aix                       0 %

Top 10 Browsers

MS Internet Explorer  62.3 % 
Firefox               22.7 % 
Opera                  4.6 % 
Mozilla                4.5 % 
Netscape               2.1 % 
Safari                 1.7 % 
Unknown                1.3 % 
Konqueror              0.1 % 
Firebird (Old Firefox) 0.1 % 
Galeon                   0 %

 

[Guden Oden]

Interesting. MS would be in a bit of a bind if this site reflected the general population on the internet... 22% firefox, not bad. Not bad at all!

 

[mito]

Come on, no one using Aix???

 

[epicstruggle]

lets hear it for firefox. I really like this browser. If only i could get the address bar's drop down list to update like IE does. sigh.

epic

 

[BRiT]

For what time period/range are these stats for? I'm wondering what portion of IE/Opera users have made the switch to FireFox. Any stats available for the first six months of 2004 and say the last 3 months of 2004?

Go FireFox Go!

 

[Dave Baumann]

Come on, no one using Aix???

Yes, they are - thats why its listed (just not enought instances to make a dent in the %'ages).

For what time period/range are these stats for? I'm wondering what portion of IE/Opera users have made the switch to FireFox. Any stats available for the first six months of 2004 and say the last 3 months of 2004?

I've only recently enabled these particular stats tracking, so this is December, the first full month of captured data.

As for Firefox, I can't say I'm overwhelmed by it - its far slower than IE , doesn't like some of my bank form tabstops and, try as I might, it doesn't like some of the web formatting even though I'm endevouring to write well form HTML. I've not found anything compelling, so far, to make me want to ditch IE, and the "its not IE" reasoning isn't really enough for me.

 

[Saem]

Konqueror all the way!

 

[one]

I've used the latest builds of Firefox for past 3 years (Phoenix -> Firebird -> Firefox) and so far it's progressing very fast compared to IE... sometimes persistent bugs are annoying, but in my case fortunately apparent ones have been ironed out in the course and after Firefox 1.0 it's very comfortable now. Check out the forum for the latest official builds.

As for Firefox, I can't say I'm overwhelmed by it - its far slower than IE , doesn't like some of my bank form tabstops and, try as I might, it doesn't like some of the web formatting even though I'm endevouring to write well form HTML. I've not found anything compelling, so far, to make me want to ditch IE, and the "its not IE" reasoning isn't really enough for me.

Well, Firefox is slower to start up than IE, and possiblly memory hog too, but when I tried Mozilla Suite when I was on a CPU < 1GHz 3 years ago it's prohibitively slow - just managing bookmarks items was painful task on the old Mozilla and I was a Netscape 4 user then and never a daily IE user myself for the past 10 years. Mozilla Phoenix was far lighter than the full Mozilla and it felt like a godsend though with many bugs at that time. Now on CPU > 2GHz and RAM > 1 GB I have nothing to complain about its performance.

If you write some JavaScript, (or JScript in MS lingo) standard DOM support in Mozilla is very useful unlike the hacked and outdated design in IE 6.

Ongoing security threats toward IE is another reason not to use IE, for sure.

But yeah, controlling a browser through COM object is far easier in IE, so I'm sold on MS developer ploy and when I program for Windows/.NET I surely choose IE over Gecko Even in IE users, many seem to use IE component browsers such as Avant Browser.

 

[Guden Oden]

As for Firefox, I can't say I'm overwhelmed by it

Neither am I - the best things I can say about it is, "it's got tabs", "it works" and "it's free". I'm not particulary impressed about the slow graphics routines and custom widgets which break the normal look and feel of windows programs, but hey. It works, and it's free.

Hopefully it'll evolve, this is just version 1.0 after all. IE wasn't anywhere near useful before version 4. (On the other hand, it barely changed at all since then also, so... )

 

[K.I.L.E.R]

Dave, you must be on drugs.

FF slower than IE? FFS IE takes up 3x the amount of memory, loads 5x slower than FF and webpages don't load nearly as quick as they do in FF.

One of the reasons I moved to FF is due to performance reasons.

 

[DarN]

8)

 

[AlNom]

Dave, you must be on drugs.

FF slower than IE? FFS IE takes up 3x the amount of memory, loads 5x slower than FF and webpages don't load nearly as quick as they do in FF.

One of the reasons I moved to FF is due to performance reasons.

As of right now... Firefox takes up 62584K of memory versus 53808K for IE.

This is with four tabs in FF versus four windows in IE where I'm at the same webpages in each respective browser for all four instances.

 

[K.I.L.E.R]

4 tabs open = 33MB RAM.
Single instance of IE uses over 50MB.

Dave, you must be on drugs.

FF slower than IE? FFS IE takes up 3x the amount of memory, loads 5x slower than FF and webpages don't load nearly as quick as they do in FF.

One of the reasons I moved to FF is due to performance reasons.

As of right now... Firefox takes up 62584K of memory versus 53808K for IE.

This is with four tabs in FF versus four windows in IE where I'm at the same webpages in each respective browser for all four instances.

 

[cristic]

i think to get closer to the real amount of RAM IE uses we should also add the RAM used by explorer.exe not just iexplore.exe.

That's also one of the reasons it loads so fast, because some part of it is always in memory.

 

[K.I.L.E.R]

That's also one of the reasons it loads so fast, because some part of it is always in memory.

Doesn't load fast on my computer.
Eclipse loads faster than IE.

 

[T2k]

I wonder how Firefox is slower than IE. Some web pages maybe but that's certainly depends.
Memory usage: FF 2 instances running, one with three tabs - that's four pages together, 47MB whereas IE two instances only and already 43MB plus some percentage of explorer.exe's 32MBs.

Try Adblock for FF - the most sophisticated ad blocker I've ever seen.
Not to mention the zillions of search engines, plugins, extensions etc.

 

[nutball]

I've found that Flash images in FF really don't play nice, maybe the fault of the plug-in, but it just don't seem multi-threaded enough to me.

The HTTP pipelining settings posted in the other (long) browser-war thread we had here some time ago work really well to speed up FF in general use though.

 

[Guden Oden]

I wonder how Firefox is slower than IE. Some web pages maybe but that's certainly depends.

I find FF is slower than IE when using the "skip to latest post of a theead" button on this messageboard (or other boards). It seems to wait to scroll down to the bottom of the page until it's made contact with the server for the bottom adbanner.

Also, flash animations draw around 50-100% more CPU in FF than IE, with the associated problems mentioned in another thread.

 

[Dave Baumann]

I've used the latest builds of Firefox for past 3 years (Phoenix -> Firebird -> Firefox) and so far it's progressing very fast compared to IE...

Progressing very fast, or catching up to?

Ongoing security threats toward IE is another reason not to use IE, for sure.

Security threats are probably as much to do with popularity as they are the software - the more popular you are the more people are going to poke its security in order to get a greater result. I note that on cropped up for FireFox recently - having not been a user of it for long I don't know how long it will be before this gets plugged, I do know MS usually gets round to them fairly swiftly.

 

[carpediem]

I also find FF way to slugish. I use Maxthon and it's withouto any doubt faster and much more responsive in the UI than FF has ever been and I try every new major version of FF and has done since Phoenix 0.3.