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Firefox finally passes IE6

arstechnica.com

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Re: Firefox finally passes IE6

#21

Post by Locke1689 »

And my favorite Linux and Windows browser (Opera) continues its downward descent. It seems a bit unfair to me -- Opera always responds like a lean and mean browser with stability and a dearth of innovative features, but for some reason it never gets any traction. Is Free Software/Open Source that much of an attraction? Maybe it's just me but I have a huge respect for well thought out and well written proprietary software.

Of course, I guess I'm a little bit of a hypocrite since I use Safari on my Mac. At the same time though, no one can really compete with Mac Safari -- its running profile is tiny and integrates with Mac better than any other browser.

Re: Firefox finally passes IE6

#22

Post by glymor »

Locke1689 wrote: post #21

And my favorite Linux and Windows browser (Opera) continues its downward descent. It seems a bit unfair to me -- Opera always responds like a lean and mean browser with stability and a dearth of innovative features, but for some reason it never gets any traction. Is Free Software/Open Source that much of an attraction? Maybe it's just me but I have a huge respect for well thought out and well written proprietary soft…

a dearth of innovative features

I assume you don't mean dearth here as that would mean a lack of innovative features.

Personally I found Opera to be too much of a walled garden, they never really had a cohesive extensions story. Sure you could configure it to a very great degree but you are still interfacing with it only at points and ways the developers were able to foresee. Still I used it for years it's a good piece of software.

I think my next browser will be one of the minimalist webkits uzbl or surf as soon as they can support a decent vi mode.

Re: Firefox finally passes IE6

#24

Post by treyp »

ankeshk wrote: post #23

Umm - this link shows that IE6 just has 10.6% market share. Not 23%... http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

that's for the visitors of w3schools, which are more technical people. my mom, who would use IE if it wasn't for me tricking her into using firefox, would never be a w3schools visitor.

from the bottom of the page: W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user. The average user tends to use Internet Explorer, since it comes preinstalled with Windows. Most do not seek out other browsers.

Re: Firefox finally passes IE6

#25

Post by eli_s »

i switched to chrome a couple of months ago and have not looked back.

Firefox was starting to feel seriously bloated.

Chrome starts up quickly, runs much faster than FF let alone IE.

The only reason I fire up FF is to use firebug as the web developer tools in chrome are still a bit buggy.

I'm surprised that more tech people don't use chrome.

Re: Firefox finally passes IE6

#26

Post by alttab »

castis wrote: post #6
geuis wrote: post #3

This is such bs. Firefox outstripped IE6 a LONG TIME AGO. To back up my argument, we get hundreds of thousands of hits a day, spread around the world. IE6 gets about 3% of our total traffic of about 20 million per month. Firefox(overall, mainly 3.5 and less than half of that 3.0) are at 33%. IE(overall) is about 48%.

I work for a company that runs ecommerce stores for major companies. Unfortunately 80% of these companies still use IE6.

I guarantee for all of my clients that it will look exactly the same, or damn similar (minus font rendering) in IE6 all the way up to the newest versions of Chrome.

Once you sit there with IE6, IE8, FF, Safari, and Chrome for a while, you start to get niggles on what each browser will do.

For my current client, I've only had to do one IE6 specific hack (fieldset background colors/images).

That said, I'm not doing anything too fancy (but still use JQuery, Ajax, etc).

Unless we are explicitly leveraging new browser technology, from a design standpoint it could be construed as 'whiny-developer-syndrome' for people who refuse to design for IE. After the initial "WTF" curve with your base css laid out, it's actually not too difficult.

Re: Firefox finally passes IE6

#27

Post by known »

eli_s wrote: post #25

i switched to chrome a couple of months ago and have not looked back. Firefox was starting to feel seriously bloated. Chrome starts up quickly, runs much faster than FF let alone IE. The only reason I fire up FF is to use firebug as the web developer tools in chrome are still a bit buggy. I'm surprised that more tech people don't use chrome.

due to lack of adblock in chrome.

Re: Firefox finally passes IE6

#28

Post by andyking »

known wrote: post #27
eli_s wrote: post #25

i switched to chrome a couple of months ago and have not looked back. Firefox was starting to feel seriously bloated. Chrome starts up quickly, runs much faster than FF let alone IE. The only reason I fire up FF is to use firebug as the web developer tools in chrome are still a bit buggy. I'm surprised that more tech people don't use chrome.

due to lack of adblock in chrome.

I agree - I really like Chrome (and Opera, for what it's worth) and I can generally cope with the normal ads on most sane web sites these days.

But some sites go over the top and a few minutes of looking at flashing, flickering, CPU-hogging dross like one British forum I regularly visit (two large Flash banners at the top of the page, one down the side and one large square Flash ad, often an auto-playing video, in the first post of each page) is enough to send me scuttling back to Firefox. If someone developed a Chromium add-on that did the same thing as Adblock, I wouldn't look back.

(I normally unblock the ads on sites I use regularly and value - provided they don't abuse my eyes with videos and those flashing "YOU'VE WON A CAR!" images.)

Re: Firefox finally passes IE6

#29

Post by [deleted] »

geuis wrote: post #3

This is such bs. Firefox outstripped IE6 a LONG TIME AGO. To back up my argument, we get hundreds of thousands of hits a day, spread around the world. IE6 gets about 3% of our total traffic of about 20 million per month. Firefox(overall, mainly 3.5 and less than half of that 3.0) are at 33%. IE(overall) is about 48%.

[deleted]

Re: Firefox finally passes IE6

#30

Post by andyking »

bretthoerner wrote: post #4
geuis wrote: post #3

This is such bs. Firefox outstripped IE6 a LONG TIME AGO. To back up my argument, we get hundreds of thousands of hits a day, spread around the world. IE6 gets about 3% of our total traffic of about 20 million per month. Firefox(overall, mainly 3.5 and less than half of that 3.0) are at 33%. IE(overall) is about 48%.

... and what kind of site do you run? I think this means averaged over the web. If you're running anything remotely technical you have a very different userbase than, say, Yahoo!.

Visitors yesterday to the website I edit (for a mainstream local radio station, so likely to be one of the least "techie" audiences out there):

IE8: 28%; IE7: 27%; IE6: 19%; FF3.5: 16%; FF3: 7%; Others: 3%

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