Firefox's Market Share Chugging Along
While Firefox doesn't seem as sexy these days (maybe it's a good sign), it now 15.8% of the U.S. browser market. Globally, Firefox has 12.93%, compared with 11.79% in May, according to OneStat.com. IE's market share fell to 83.05%, although it has fallen to 79.8% in the U.S. The most enthusiastic Firefox users are in Germany where the browser has 39% of the market. While I've been an ardent Firefox user for the past year or so, I recently started using the new version of Flock after finding its first foray to be less than ideal. One of the reasons Flock now has some appeal is how you can customize with extensions - just like Firefox. Flock became my 1A browser after someone came out with a hack so password tool Roboform will work with it. (Roboform, in my view, is the Web 2.0 because its easy to ramble all over the Web without having to punch in passwords at each site).
  While I don't expect IE to lose its perch at the top (maybe IE7 will revive its market share) but choice is always a good thing because it encourages innovative. Speaking of choice, The Economist recently had a story looking at whether there were alternatives to Google. Part of Google's "problem" is its dominance, which probably keeps new, small players with interesting features/ideas out of the search game. It is pretty amazing that Google has dominated the search market for the past four, five years. In the high-tech world, this is an eternity. Anyone using new and interesting search engines? Update: The first beta of Firefox 2.0 (download here) is slated to come out July 11 (today). If you're brave and bold, go for it. For the rest of us who want to make sure all of our extensions still work, hang on.
July 11th, 2006 at 12:20 pm
The browser that's underrated in most web stats is Opera. In fact a little while after Opera became free, instead of a surge in my Opera site-readers, I saw an increase in IE, while Opera stayed where it was.
Guess what: The default setting in Opera is to present itself as IE6.
Btw, I am also using Firefox:-)
July 12th, 2006 at 12:05 am
I definitely agree that the more competition the better. With less competition people tend to forget about improving. Zoli Erdos has a point–Opera is underrated. Opera 9 has a bountiful support for standards, and yet it hardly has an indent on the market. It's also quite a bit faster than Firefox and uses less memory. In fact, the only reason I continue with FF is its many extensions. I guess I'll check out Flock, but I don't want 50 browsers on my computer either.
As for a search engine better than Google, that'll come eventually. If Google decides to slack off on working on their search, someone is going to do work at it and beat them. The hare and turtle story, right? 
At one point I thought PreviewSeek was better than Google, but it wouldn't work on Javascript disabled browsers or slow dial up connections. (Or at least it wouldn't work well)
July 12th, 2006 at 7:53 pm
I'm glad to see you mention RoboForm - I can't imagine living without it. I can't stant the thought of manually entering my paswords or copy-n-pasting them from another app every time I want to login to a web site.
I liked it so much that when I switched to Mac, I wrote 1Passwd to manage all my passwords. Of course, I'm still using Firefox