Comments on: the numbers game

By: Paul McGarry

Paul McGarry — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 22:33:49 +0000

I think IE downloads are probably hurt by the fact that by upgrading to IE 7 you lose IE 6. I imagine a lot of the people “interested” in a new browser release are those people who work with web browsers.

A lot of those people will be thinking “Well I’d like to try IE7 but I still need IE 6 for development and testing”.

I know IE 6 will be staying on my work desktop for the near future. I installed IE 7 on my personal laptop’s windows partition. Both machines have Firefox 2.

Perhaps in part this still comes down to “respect for the user”. In choosing to push IE so deep into Windows they may have achived a strategical goal but at the expense of user flexibility.

By: ketsugi

ketsugi — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 17:16:31 +0000

Firstly, does that Firefox download count include those of us who installed Ubuntu Edgy, or who acquired Firefox through a Linux distro somewhere? The download count may be much higher than the given estimate.

Secondly, a lot of us installed Firefox on multiple machines (I’ve personally installed it on at least 3 machines running 3 different OSes) so the actual user count may be lower than the download count.

Third, what about those of us who installed both Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7?

Of course I only bring this up because I fall into all 3 categories ;)

By: blizzard

blizzard — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 14:13:07 +0000

There’s a good quote in Mitchell’s web log about this:

This is true in the basics that have always been the hallmark of Mozilla Firefox — ease of use, performance, security, privacy, elegance in design and respect for the user.

Respect for the user is the important phrase here. Mitchell really believes that we should be doing things with people in mind. Respect for their data, respect for their actions and ethos that is reflected through the way that Firefox is designed – both in action (how we build it) and effect (how it’s used.) This is a pretty fundamental part of who we are and it’s something that sets us apart from the rest of the crowd.

By: Famous last words of Marius » Firefox is the talk of the town

Famous last words of Marius » Firefox is the talk of the town — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 06:02:12 +0000

[...] Update: Christopher Blizzard said it a lot better than me … [...]

By: jobezone

jobezone — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 03:54:35 +0000

Isn’t this starting to look like the Presidential or Party elections? Instead of focusing on what differentiates these browsers, and there _are_ some important fundamental differences, we become referees or spectators to a boxing game: Who will win this round? Or the next? Will there it by a knockout?
I think it devalues the real issues at stake, which is who owns/should own people’s access to the world wide web, and in what form should that be?

As an aside, it seems to me, a bystander, that many open source / free software developers are getting onto the hype train of web 2.0, without considering that that’s how linux, gnome, kde all started and grew, ordinary hackers and people conecting with each other to create some great stuff and new… If there’s anyone who’s had experience in these things it’s you, and you could have some knowledge and wisdom on how to extend that phenomenon to a wider population.

Or maybe it’s just my view from over here, and that’s what it has been happening all along :)

P.S.- I like firefox’s spell checker, even though it marks firefox as misspelled :/.