Firefox remains a popular choice

Would be interesting to know general SA stats on this, I suspect that its a lot lower than 24% here.

Just checked: on one of my sites we have about 13% Firefox users (which is higher than I had thought)
 
Opera always had many good features, but it has never been able to save web pages neatly like Internet Explorer and Firefox. Worse its developers have flatly refused to fix this defect despite years of complaining from users.
 
I agree... To me Opera is as good as Firefox or IE7...
 
I like opera. The good and bad thing about it is that you can tweak it to suite your needs. I still need to sit down and tweak it nicely for me. Once that's done I can lose Firefox and IE. Unless I need them to view specific sites.
 
Used all of them and nothing suits me better than FireFox. I luuuuve FiFo! :D The expandability of the browser is my main attraction. There is nothing I want it to do, that it can't.
 
Doesnt Opera masquerade as something else anyway in the stats?
 
lilDeath said:
hey Bwana, aint Safari cool too?? ;)
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But of course. :D It's currently my preferred one.

EDIT - I just acid tested my four browsers Safari, Opera, Camino, and Firefox and was surprised that only Safari and Opera passed.
 
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lilDeath said:
MS doing good things with their new IE7 browser too :p
:D
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I wonder if they'll be able to make it secure. Internet Explorer has been horribly insecure for TEN YEARS now (yes, it's ten years this year that IE users have been basically constantly highly vulnerable). So I have strong doubts that they're either interested or capable of making it even relatively secure (yeah yeah I know 100% security is a myth, but it's like crime, there's a huge difference between, say, living in SA and living in the UK in your 'risk profile'). Given how much time and (trainloads of) money they've been given now to fix it, it's disgusting that they haven't bothered. I'm sure IE will remain the number one entry point for spyware and other malware for many years to come. I'm sick of doing the "free Microsoft support work" that I'm sure many of us here do of cleaning the malware off family/friends' PCs, I'm grateful that Firefox market share is now large enough that I can install it on their systems.

Internet Explorer is also the worst browser now in terms of standards support, and Microsoft have indicated that they have no intention of fixing it in IE7, so IE will remain junk. Standards are important to me (and to everyone even if they don't realise it), because they're the most important thing the computer industry has in promoting competition and keeping prices low.

bwana: apparently FF passes the acid test on the reflow branch - and at least they are working towards better standards compliance, unlike IE. And in terms of Opera masquerading as something else in the stats, that's a "yes and no": Opera makes itself look like Internet Explorer to websites in terms of detecting how to display the site, but it does include some "Opera" info at the end of the User Agent string that allows (most decent) stats generating programs such as awStats to know which hits are from Opera browsers (however IIRC there's a preference setting in Opera itself to turn this off, so some Opera hits may still look like IE hits, but I can't remember the exact details of what it does here).

BTW my favourite Firefox plugin: http://www.downthemall.net/ :)

I maintain three websites, and the latest FF usage percentages are 30.8, 12.5 and 21.3 (the three sites have very different average user profiles).
 
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I agree with you in part @ Turtle
However, it is logical that the program / company with the highest market penetration will be susceptible to more attacks /attempts, thus leading to more vulnerabilities.

Thus far, IE7 is much better than IE6, security, performance and feature-wise. So they are making an effort.
 
Jeeva said:
Firefox is the SUCK! I crashes like 3-5 times a month. Rather use Seamonkey or Opera.
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I'm not questioning that you're having problems with FF, but considering that millions of people use it all the time without any crashes (including myself, I use it every single day, a lot), perhaps it's not necessarily Firefox that is "the SUCK" in your situation? I've been using Mozilla/Gecko/Firefox (previously the Mozilla browser but more recently Firefox) for over five years (since before Mozilla 0.8) and on many different computers and in all that time every single release has always been FAR more stable than IE.
 
lilDeath said:
However, it is logical that the program / company with the highest market penetration will be susceptible to more attacks /attempts, thus leading to more vulnerabilities.
Click to expand...
There is some truth to that, but in this case I think it only plays a small part; Firstly, Internet Explorer has always been the most insecure browser since even when it had the tiniest market share (I've been using the web since 1995 but most people here probably don't remember or realise that back then Netscape had over 80% market share). Secondly, there are just some fundamental problems with the the way "security" in Internet Explorer works (e.g. ActiveX). I recall security experts were already publicly denouncing it as a bad design practically the day Microsoft first released/announced it - with Java rising as a possible threat, Microsoft needed an object model fast to allow developers to create active content embedded in web pages, they had nothing, so they just grabbed ActiveX which was never intended for such networked environments and shoved it into IE, claimed that their "trust" model was superior to Java's "sandbox" model, but probably full well knowing it would be a disaster (and it was).
 
<argument as old as the mountains> :D
All fair and well, as long as people remember that no single browser is flawed and the only reason everyone 'knows' about IE is because of all the noise that are made about it when there is a flaw or newly discovered vulnerability.
You have to inform the masses after all.

I didnt like Netscape at all btw :p

As with the different browsers, same happens on the OS level as well. :rolleyes:
 
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