I want to like FF but it still has some of the feeling from Netscape circa 1996 in it. It makes my skin crawl for some reason. IE 7.0 is a big piece of bloatware but I prefer it over FF. I like Maxthon as well.

Opera user.
Fastest.

The only people that are not using Firefox either don't know about it or are Microsoft employees.

I manage several hundred medium to large websites in both the US and the UK.

Although the UK (and Europe) show great Firefox adoption, I'm not seeing anywhere close to 28% Firefox share.

My survey of several popular radio station websites shows Firefox share at 11%. Now I understand "Media" oriented websites might have more users biased towards IE, but I find the 28% number to be just to high for the UK at least.

I don't control any websites on the continent, and perhaps Firefox adoption is much higher there?

Regards,

-Phil

I'm still confused why people care about internet browser "marketshare" these days.

IE has tabbed browsing, and security features. Which were the most important, but it's till missing copy image location, spell checker, decent hotkeys (can anyone tell me what select address bar is in IE7?), a plugin community. Oh, and it forces you to scroll 3 times faster. Hey Microsoft, if I wanted to scroll at 9 lines per click, I would have set it to that, I want 3 lines.

the stigma of using IE pretty much makes me stay away from it.

LOL?

I'm a big fan of Firefox, in fact many of the sites I use regularly require it... except for the ones that need IE. Such is the corporate "intranet".... Too bad for some reason it seems to freeze up completely on a regular basis on one particular site we use that is 100% ssl, and uses all kinds of redirects/popups etc...(its a HTTP front end for managing a few thousand DSL modem/router devices.) But this particular tool doesn't work with IE at all. So meh.

I use FF almost exclusively. I gave IE7 a try, but to me it felt like Microsoft shoved a bunch of new features in it and kicked it out the door. Nothing seems to be integrated nearly as well as Firefox's features and I also find the text harder to read.

I still keep IE7 around for web development purposes, but I use IE tab for rendering other pages that don't play nice with FF.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1419

FF FTW!

I have IE7 on my work computer, and it's not nearly as smooth as FF, to be honest. Plus...the stigma of using IE pretty much makes me stay away from it.

FF is my browser of choice but I have to keep ie 6 and 7 around for testing purposes. I also enjoy seamonkey as a FF alternative. Opera is nice as well. IE6 is the devil.

Yet some countries lags seriously behind in Firefox penetration. Why?

There's a very nice graph detailing the gains in 8 European countries, though seemingly only the ones where market share is currently very high.

http://mozillalinks.org/wp/2007/07/firefox-takes-28-market-share-in...

Note in particular the EXPLOSION of Firefox' market share in Ireland. A 65% increase this year alone (going by the graph, from ~23% to ~38%).

That's truly astounding and one has to wonder what is behind that success and if it can be replicated in the low-market-share countries such as the UK, the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway. These countries would seem to be very similar in many ways to high-market-share countries like Germany, Ireland and Finland, yet they are lagging by a factor of around 2.5.

At work we have ff installed and it's the end-user's choice if they want to use or not. Proxy logs show about 40% use ff exclusively. We have a few sites that require IE though, which pisses many of us off that use FF.

"Finland, Poland, Ireland, Germany, and the Czech Republic, where the browser's market share has jumped to 45.4%, 39.5%, 38.6%, and 36.6%, respectively."

You have 5 countries listed, and 4 percentages respectively. :)

Heh, I'm using FF on a daily basis and am forced to use IE for stupid things like :

- The quarantine management of Norton AV (enterprise) which works with no other browser then IE. Heck, it doesn't even work with IE 5.xx on the Mac..

- Our intranet's lame design only works with IE 6 (7 is iffy..) and NOTHING ELSE ! :O No, this one doesn't work with IE for the Mac either. No, i did not create it and it's being replaced this year..

That's pretty much it..

Adi

I'm one of them

Not really surprising that Firefox is still gaining ground. I tried IE7 for a while, but I eventually went back to Firefox because I believe that it implements features much better than IE does.