I think there will be a new Browser war

Mozilla Firefox is doing a great job

[zeus]

Reports say more than 8 million people have downloaded the program since early November and this will give other developers the will to start up again.

I do see more searches come from Firefox, I think its great, a little future thinking is Google is buying firefox and will start there own operating system, I dont care what they say, but it is essential and start systems/hardware where you can have all your software, so you only need a screen to do the job.

zeus

[ronin]

a little future thinking is Google is buying firefox

Google doesn't need to buy FireFox and Mozilla doesn't need to sell out to Google. Any time Google needs access to FF source code it's there for the taking.

[tedster]

For there to be truly potent competition, computer manufacturers will need to put Firefox on new equipment - and even then, if IE is the default browser (and you can bet that it will be if it's a Windows box) that is still a big advantage.

There's another possible inroad - businesses installing Firefox for mandatory use at work out of secuity concerns. Then users liking it so much they go home and install it. This is already happening on a small scale - but changing over a large business's IT is no small task, especially if they are dependent on MS for email.

I'd be really pleased to see Firefox gain even a 10% market share. That's enough to make the point very loud and clear - that the days of slipshod, self-serving browsers are numbered.

Hey, given this thread about the Microsoft Director of product management [webmasterworld.com], there already seems to be some concern in Redmond. If they address those concerns by supporting standards instead of just trying to spin the news cycle, then we've got something.

[CritterNYC]

Will be another browser war? It's already started. The overrall share of Gecko-based browsers is now at 7.4%, and it is still growing. The early adopters have spread the word. The techies (like me) are helping their friends and family install it... which saves us LOTS of time in the future as we're usually their tech support person and they're no longer vulnerable to the IE exploit du jour.

The techie newssites have shown the fastest growth. Web developers and techies have adopted Firefox en masse. Joe average is slower on the uptake, but since their "support staff" (read: us) is having them upgrade, it's happening. Even large institutions are taking notice.

They have a goal of 10% by the end of 2005. I think they'll reach it within the next 3 to 6 months.

[Purple Martin]

Mozilla is already getting 20%, and rising fast, according to the W3C!

[w3schools.com...]

[tedster]

Interesting to see where Mozilla got its gains at W3Schools this year:

IE5 (12.8% --> 4.9%)
IE6 (71.3% --> 68.0%)

It's IE5, and not IE6 so much, that is the source of the migration - at least for this site.

[TheDoctor]

It's IE5, and not IE6 so much, that is the source of the migration

This is consistent with the idea that people tend to stay with the browser installed on their machine. I suspect a lot of the increase will have come from new machines within institutions where firefox has been installed prior to it being issued to a new user. This with IE6 will continue with it until the hardware is scrapped.

Empasises the point made in msg #3.

[Purple Martin]

IE5 (12.8% --> 4.9%)
IE6 (71.3% --> 68.0%)

It's IE5, and not IE6 so much, that is the source of the migration

Yes, that could be it.
Or...
It could be that IE5ers are upgrading to IE6, and lots of IE6ers are upgrading to Moz.