Saturday, November 20, 2004
"Firefox, Firefox, Firefox..."
I was just perusing my web logs, as I do from time to time. It looks like a lot of you out there took my posting about the browser balance to heart. During the week of November 1, only 50% of Finding Lisp visitors were using Mozilla-based browsers (including Firefox) and 18% were using MSIE of some version. The week of November 15, Mozilla usage jumped to 66%, with MSIE dropping to 14%. There isn't quite a direct correllation. A bunch of other browser usage fell, and some of the percentages are affected by things like how many times the Google Robot reindexes the site. On Thursday and Friday, Mozilla usage was over 70%, which is clearly unusual.
Anyway, the general trend is clear: away from MSIE, and towards something else (almost anything else). That's generally good.
The scary thing is that some people are still using MSIE 5.5 and 5.0 instead of 6.0, as if that didn't have enough bugs and security holes. At least a couple of others are using old versions of Firefox which was previously named "Firebird." Old versions of Firefox are known to have some security holes, some of which are large. Now that Firefox 1.0 is out, I would upgrade to that.
Update: Here's another reference to the shift taking place. We aren't yet at a tipping point, but there's a bandwagon forming.
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