The Mozilla Foundation's Firefox managed to slightly increase its usage share in the Web browser market in May.

Firefox's market share reached 8 percent in May, up from 7.38 percent in April, while IE's slice of the pie shrunk a bit to 87.23 percent, down 0.77 percent, according to a statement released Wednesday by NetApplications.com, an Aliso Viejo, California, maker of applications for monitoring and measuring Web site usage.

Although IE's share is colossal, Firefox is consistently increasing its share by between 0.5 percent and 1 percent from month to month.

I use Firefox and I can easily tell why it's starting to grow and grow. The older versions, I admit, weren't the best. But this new version is quite amazing. I reccomend trying it out.

i only use firefox now and Ie is delegated to the few web sites that do not work on firefox. It was the best computer software switch i have ever made.

The internet is all about inforamtion, IE lets you see it. Firefox lets you manage it.

BTW Safari is rubbish, where is the rest of the fall going?

firefox with adbuster, greasemonkey and platypus. They make adverts, popups, scripts, flash, and all the crud you don't want to see history.

Sage, tabs, the default key bindings, the entire UI is better. Auto copy ... formated source, its just heaven compared to IE.

A lot of the other 5% is Opera. also free, tabbed interface and more mature than Firefox.

Exactly. Everyone overlooks Opera. BTW, did you know that in Opera, you could set the browser to identify itself as IE, Opera, etc? Did you know that a good majority of privacy software also allows you to do the same? Imagine my surprise when I look through my access logs and see someone is accessing my sites with IE 1.0. Am I to think someone is actually using IE 1.0 or reason it is something else? Access reports that identify the browser are not accurate.

Anyone who wishes to stick with IE but add a litany of well-designed and well needed features should look into a browser called Maxthon (formerly MYIE2). It uses IE code, but includes pop-up blockers, tabbed pages, content filters and all for free. Donations welcome to support the project. http://www.maxthon.com/

you guys are idiots. firefox will never get above 10%. IE comes with windows and it's just a lot easier. it's already there.

and about the idiot who was talking about getting rid of flash as if its a good thing. flash is the next generation of the web. it shows how poeple that are into firefox and opera are really just into keeping the old lame web alive and not progressing next century.

I'm still using Mozilla, but I'll upgrade to FireFox soon. I haven't used IE in a very long time because I used Netscape before Mozilla.

As for the comment about Flash being the future of the internet... I hope not. I have seen a couple of good educational Flash applications, a lot of funny Flash cartoons, and a ton of worthless bandwidth-eating Flash garbage. If I want an animation, I'll usually create an animated GIF. Flash is a proprietary format and suffers from the same proprietary problems as Microsoft products. In order to maintain a de facto monopoly, there is always a "new and improved" version that is usually not improved at all. It's deliberately incompatible with the old version, and of course you get all new bugs and security exploits with the new code.

FireFox supports Flash very well, but Flash really is the antithesis of the FireFox philosophy. The internet should be freely available to everyone wihout some greedy corporate weasels trying to lock it down and make it proprietary to turn a quick buck. Standards and compatibility are in the user's best interest. Proprietary formats and incompatibility are the goals of many large companies. I'm not opposed to profits, but they shouldn't be created through anticompetitive tactics that cause a lot of grief and hassle for the users.

BTW - Netscape, Mozilla and FireFox browsers have always been able to spoof themselves as whatever browser you like. Many dumb websites are coded to test to see if the user is running IE, and won't work for non-IE browsers. If your browser reports it's IE, everything usually works well. Secure sites such as banks and credit card companies were the worst of the "IE only" crowd. That's getting better, since CERT (the computer division of the US Department of Homeland Security) announced that IE was too insecure and recommended FireFox. But all that spoofing by non-IE browsers makes most of the automated online browser surveys totally worthless because they significanty under-report the non-IE browsers. Even an accurate count of browsers is misleading, because the more experienced users gravitate toward FireFox, and they spend a lot more time online that the casual users who use whatever browser is installed with Windows. I'd like to know the real results of browser usage expressed in hours, not browser instalations or reports to web servers.

actually, my comment isnt to do more animations or skip intros... those are a result of bad design. When I say flash is the future of the internet. I mean that finally we have a true application frame work that is not page driven. It just doesnt make sense that everytime you hit a button on a web page, the entire page gets loaded with no persistance of state (except for cookies). With flash you have true speration of ui and data. The server side script doesnt have to screw around with the ui at all. The ui is all contained in the swf and it's way smaller than the equivalant dhtml (except for the cases of bad designers that add too much animation and sound).

You made my point exactly when you said Flash really is the antithesis of the FireFox philosophy. People who are fans of firefox are excited by things like tabbed browsing and really want us to be mired in slow moving standards. html and javascript are simply not moving fast enough to get us where they need to be. DHTML, VRML, and SVG are all standards based attempts to take the internet to a new level and they simply are not doing it. The only innovation Ive seen in standards based development in the last 3 years is the introduction of the javascript rollover menu. The rest of it is completely invisible to the end user, my grandma doesnt care wether a page was implemented with a bunch of fancy style sheets.

While Im at it, I might as well talk about fault tolerence. While firefox is probably very compliant, but it doesnt do a good job in making sure it at least tries to render sites that arent coded properly, there are a ton of legacy sites out there that have html and JS bugs and its just not realistic to expect them to all be made compliant.

If the open source community had any brains. It would make sense for firefox to be coded so it not only can spoof themselves to look like IE, but it actually renders pages and acts like IE (along with its standards compliant functionality). From the developers perspective, I usually only have so much budget at my disposal, if someone wants a site delivered for a certain amount of money, there is no way Im even going to test on firefox because I don't want that budget coming out of my pocket in the end. so, please think a little bit before calling a web site that does this dumb, you might not have a good handle on the economics of business on the internet but coding for two or more browsers is more expensive than coding for one.

The strength of flash and a non standards approach is that you can actually code for one platform, have it run everywhere bug free, count on fast evolution of features, and not have to deal with everyones buggy interpretation of the standards (outside of any shared code, I bet firefox and mozilla don't even implement dhtml exactly the same).

Look around you, Im sure you've seen examples of video ads on a lot of web sites now adays, that wasnt possible before flash incorporated video into its feature set. It used to be that you had to select your bandwidth settings and what player you had installed, now its super easy. Thanks flash!

You might not agree with where the world is going but I suggest you either accept it or plan to be pissed off for a really long time.

actually two more thoughts that aren't as much of a flame as the last post.

The Open Standards Philosophy promises us a day where everything is open and free, a day where you can have a bunch of different products that all work the same thanks to the standards committee. This is a false promise, most of the open source browsers that are out now are based on the same code base and they still don't work exactly the same. If you have two seperate teams of programmers and have them write their own browsers from scratch without looking at the other teams code. They will write products that have different bugs in them. they will have different interpretations of how to implement the standards.

security: firefox isnt as big as a target for hackers as IE because of the simple fact that everyone hates microsoft. If the day comes that firefox is a target. Doesnt anyone think that it would be easier to write an exploit for a product where you can get the full source code?

Firefox is pretty nice.

But I am wondering, what will we do with all the morons who still code for IE?

Okay, I remember a time; not that long ago; when we left our doors unlocked.
For real, my house when I was a kid, did not have locked doors.

Things change.

Now, I know that Billy Gates is a great person, however, he reminds me of my grandfather, who would not lock his door at night because someone, some stranger, might need to come in out of the cold.

It was a different time.

That time has gone away.

So, I am wondering, what do we do with all those web pages coded with front page and all that other MS script kiddie stuff?

Show them a need to code for a different product. Or perhaps you could get all the other browsers to actually work with common code.

QUOTE

But I am wondering, what will we do with all the morons who still code for IE?