Re: battle of the platforms

[Ronald van Engelen <ronalde@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 2004-07-25 at 12:41 +0200, Jama Poulsen wrote:
> Something interesting happened this week.
> 
> While browsing the weekly debianlinux.net webserver log report of this week,
> it showed that the number of Mozilla users is now greater than the number of
> Internet Exploder users.

The same trend was noticed by Volkskrant (friday 16 july):
"Webdwergen knabbelen aan troon Microsoft
Internet Explorer, Microsofts leesplankje voor internet, raakt uit de
gratie bij computerbezitters. Enkele honderdduizenden zijn de afgelopen
maand overgestapt op een ander product."
(source:
http://zoek.volkskrant.nl/artikel?text=mozilla&FDOC=0&SORT=date&PRD=10y&SEC=%2A&SO=%2A&ADOC=0)
Unfortunately one has to pay 1,15 euro to read the other 298 words)

I read the article when I was on vacation and it states that a growing
number of system admins are replacing the default Windows browser with
Mozilla Firefox due to the many grave bugs in the browser (and OS ;). 

Personally, I started installing Firefox on my clients Windows-PC's
since version 0.7 (then called Phoenix or Firebird). With the rapid
growth of broadband internet in the last 1.5/2 years, now almost 100% of
the (standalone) Windows installations I performed, suffer from virii
and loose their internet connectivity.  I the past this was almost 0%
(!). Bad for my self-esteem, as I firmly believed (and propagated) that
a *proper* Windows (NT =>4) installation offered enough security and
stability to keep running for a long time, if no non-Microsoft software
was installed.

Internetnews wrote:
"According to statistics at W3Schools.com, Mozilla-based browsers market
share has increased from 8.2 percent to 12.2 percent since January.
Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) 6.0 presence grew from 71.3 percent
to 72 percent in the same time frame. Both are growing as Web surfers
switch from IE 5.0, but Mozilla seems to be the new choice for many."
(source: http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3381801)


>   Browser                                                 Requests % Total
>   ------------------------------------------------------- -------- -------
>   Mozilla                                                     5103    42.5
>   MS_Internet_Exporer                                         5074    42.2

<snip>

> I know that the visiting population for DLN is not really representative for the
> broader web space, but the above trend must exist to some degree on all sites.

<snip>

Another reason for the change might be that a growing number of big
companies are switching from vendor-specific to standards based
solutions. For browser this means that would like to install the browser
that best complies with standards, which IE surely is not.

Regards,
Ronald