Site Navigation
Gerry Patterson. The world's most humble bloggerVisitors to this site have always shown a bias towards open source software. But there is a remarkable trend in the FireFox figures. Putting it into a query:
select * from ( select w.os, sum(a.hit00) as hits from webagents w, agent_stats a where w.agent_id = a.agent_id and w.robot_ind = 0 and w.name = 'Mozilla' and w.version like 'Firefox%' group by w.os ) as hit where hit.hits > 0 order by hits desc; os | hits ---------------+------ Windows XP | 4787 Windows 2000 | 1308 Linux intel | 1039 Mac OS X | 266 Windows 98 | 167 Windows ME | 33 - | 21 FreeBSD intel | 14 Linux ppc | 7 SunOS | 5 NetBSD intel | 2 (11 rows)
Or as percentages:
os | % ---------------+------ Windows XP | 62.5 Windows 2000 | 17.1 Linux intel | 13.5 Mac OS X | 3.4 Windows 98 | 2.1 Windows ME | .4 Others | 1.0
There is a large number of Windows users -- larger than the averages for this site overall (55.5% Windows XP and 18.1% Windows 2K). What these figures indicate is that a very large number of Windows XP users have adopted FireFox. And they are the users who are using Microsoft's flagship software.
In plain English, FireFox is cutting deep into the fat fleshy folds of Microsoft's premium market.
And now I read, in the New York Times, an article about the upcoming release of MSIE 7.0. And it is worth quoting John Markoff, who writes:
Mr. Gates did not mention the Firefox browser, which is freely available and has rapidly gained users since it was introduced by the open-source Mozilla Foundation late last year. But Firefox is apparently enough of a threat that Microsoft felt compelled to rush Internet Explorer 7.0 into the market, ahead of the Longhorn version of Windows, which is not due out until 2006.
If you have an NYT subscription you can see this article at: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/16/technology/16security.html?th.
Did I mention mainstream? ... our stream just don't get much more main than the New York Times!