Microsoft Australia's managing director, Steve Vamos, said that he did not believe IE's market share was under threat after the recent high profile launch of Mozilla's Firefox browser. Vamos said that although he has heard other people mention the threat posed by Firefox, he does not believe the threat is real.
"I’m not sure that that is the reality. I have seen comments around that but there is nothing I can refer to that really supports that," he said. Instead, Vamos added, users needed educating about all the features already offered by Microsoft’s browser.
"We probably need to do a bit of work to communicate the features that are in IE," he said. Vamos, who admitted he has never used Firefox, said there is a lot of hype surrounding the open source movement and if Microsoft's customers wanted new features they would have told the company about it. "I don’t agree is that just because a (competing) product has a feature that we don’t have, that feature is important. It is not. It is only important if it is a feature the customer wants. There are plenty of products out there with features we don’t have. We have plenty of features that our customers don’t use."
"If there are features in our products that are sub-par or need to be added then I have great confidence that we are an organisation that responds pretty quickly and effectively to that," said Vamos.
News source: ZDNet News
"I’m not sure that that is the reality. I have seen comments around that but there is nothing I can refer to that really supports that," he said. Instead, Vamos added, users needed educating about all the features already offered by Microsoft’s browser.
"We probably need to do a bit of work to communicate the features that are in IE," he said. Vamos, who admitted he has never used Firefox, said there is a lot of hype surrounding the open source movement and if Microsoft's customers wanted new features they would have told the company about it. "I don’t agree is that just because a (competing) product has a feature that we don’t have, that feature is important. It is not. It is only important if it is a feature the customer wants. There are plenty of products out there with features we don’t have. We have plenty of features that our customers don’t use."
"If there are features in our products that are sub-par or need to be added then I have great confidence that we are an organisation that responds pretty quickly and effectively to that," said Vamos.
News source: ZDNet News
Thanks to Neostyle of the forums for the heads-up on this one!
I therefore agree with him.
So let's say 10 million downloads have been done(this is not quite right because lot's of users redownload the application,this is an insignificant fraction in the world,about 900 million PC's (inluding pirated copies),firefox market share is less than expected. i think around 3-4% percent aprox based
in this situation the mozilla community have an almost impossible task to dethrone IE,in my personal opinion i think they can't do it.
microsoft knows this,and they are preparing an attack to quell firefox to the ground
they did it with netscape,in a blink of an eye they will do it again with firefoxx
i have firefox in my PC and is better for a PC enthusiast like me,despite a bunch of incompatibilities with pages that i browse,i use IE 80% of the time 20% firefox.
i think u ignore lot's of things,if u know what i mean
If not that exploits that are especially low, but exploitaion which will remains low.
You just have to keep promoting it to more and more people, and they will probably switch.
I've introduced quite a few people to Firefox, I never forced them to use it, I never made fun of them for not using it. I just told them about the browser and its benefits. They downloaded it and stuck with it. In fact with most of them I never knew that they stuck with FireFox until I either saw them using it, or they mentioned that they were using it.
Firefox has the advantage of being a browser that is built based on user feedback. If anything, thats what will keep it on the scene. IE has the advantage of being built into the Windows OS, so its the first browser that most people use with their PC.
I'm a little dissapointed with the 1.0 release of Firefox, there are several annoying bugs that still seem to exist. Some of them might cause people to switch back to IE. They should have waited a couple more weeks before they went 1.0 rather then release something that still has some small annoyances.
How in the hell can someone give an opinion of something he haven't use.
Edit: Arrogant! That is the word I was looking for
All though I disagree that firefox is not a threat, even my parents have asked me about firefox. My parents are about as illiterate as it comes to pcs. They heard about it and asked me to install it for them because they heard it was more secure and would help with spy ware and other various issues. People need to realize how worried some people are about there personal information. Plus if they have ever taken there pc to the repair shop and had it fixed due to spyware or virus they are willing to pay for, or use good software that will protect them. So they can avoid the costly repairs that incur through misuse and unprotected internet searching and surfing.
Do you run Windows as "administrator" or those rights? I'd bet so.
Can OEMs install Firefox onto Windows pre-ship? Yes.
You don't have a point, really. It's old.
If they still like MS products better after having the opportunity to sample other good programs, then who am I to argue with their descision?
EDIT: doubledragonxz you are totally correct, most people use IE because they don't know that there is something better out there.
Do not get me wrong.. .I use firefox quite a bit. There are just some things that it is not compliant with.
Just my 2 Cents.
Now to get everyone out of the smog.
There are features in Firefox that aren't included with IE. However programs such as Maxthon add many of these features to IE.
As for speed IE loads faster as measured from the time I click on the icon until the application is fully loaded.
Further they haven't fixed the silent install for Firefox. This hasn't worked since I started using version 0.8. To do a silent install you need to use the Mozilla installer which is total BS.
For starters you have to understand that W3C standards are recommendations. IE has propietary extensions to its HTML subset as did Netscape (and im sure Firefox since it uses the NS codebase).
What you have to get through your head is that W3C standards are recommended standards. As a result its your job as a web designer to code to the standard if you want cross browser compatibility. If you see some propietary extension in IE that you like, but isnt in the standard you should be talking to the W3C not complaining here.
As for speed IE loads faster as measured from the time I click on the icon until the application is fully loaded.
Well... obviously. IE is permanently loaded in memory since it is so integrated with Windows. So when you click on it, it is already there. Firefox has to be loaded. On my machine I see no difference, but on average machines there is a tiny latency indeed.
I don't hate IE, but it annoys me that all of MS sites only work properly in IE. It gives most people the impression that IE is better, they don't realise that other browsers dont like MS sites by design.
ASP.net actually turns off a lot of visuals when viewing in FF, even though FF is 100% compatable with them.
I'm a web developer, and I actually like FF's rendering much better then IE, and most of the time its much easier to get my sites working properly in FF then any other browser including IE.
jafo
Last edited by 39987 on 11 Nov 2004 - 22:26
It's common sense. The average user doesn't know / care about what browser they use.
I found some of his comments funny.
"We probably need to do a bit of work to communicate the features that are in IE"
Like non-standards rendering!
...said there is a lot of hype surrounding the open source movement and if Microsoft's customers wanted new features they would have told the company about it.
WE ARE! STANDARDS SUPPORT!
""If there are features in our products that are sub-par or need to be added then I have great confidence that we are an organisation that responds pretty quickly and effectively to that,""
IE 6.5 / IE 7!
Also you should note that he said customers... A developer isnt the end-user... End-Users are the customers. End users dont care about standards like HTML,XHTML,etc. just like they dont care about C,C++,Java,.NET its all garbage to them. All they care about is if they page looks right and works. At this stage in the game IE does that well.
Sure poorly made pages display, but what about pages made perfectly to W3C recommendations? It might look correct, it might not, it depends on what styles and tags you used. See how IE can be irritating for making webpages look correct in?
A minority call for support of the standards as a minority actually know what the standards are and a minority write webpages.
It wouldn't be hard to make IE comply with CSS and XHTML correctly, and there would be zero negatives for doing it besides a few programmers being tied up for a bit and a little cost in beta testing. But it's not like MS are low on funds.
back on the topic at hand though, I really don't think Microsoft has much to worry about at this point. The joe schmoe user doesnt know and doesnt care to know about "standards" or "security". As long as they can get to teh porn and ebay, then they are happy.
he just brought his opinion.
This thread is not just about FF or IE, so please shut up, and let people express their opinions.
Oh, and no I don't think i'll shut up because me calling him a troll is MY OPINION. So please go on your holy crusade elsewhere and let others speak for themselves. Thanks.
and well opera is a very good browser
hehehe i know what's ignorance isn't that beautiful?
Last edited by 69181 on 11 Nov 2004 - 18:54
And while FireFox and Mozilla needs the enthusiastic support to survive, Opera Software is making money. That fact alone says something about the quality of their product.
And I really think that the "trolling-factor" here on Neowin.net is relatively low - however there seems to be a lot of people calling each other trolls; or telling other people to take their trolling elsewhere.
And like I said, there is a rapidly growing number of people spending at least an hour a day online, and I believe they are more than willing to pay for making it a better experience.
Just use a crack or a key generator (no, I will not tell you where to get one) if you want to get rid of those stupid ads that Opera comes with. I mean, c'mon now, why would one pay for a web browser when the top 2 leading web browsers are free?
Just like how I'll pay more money to eat at say Red Lobster vs Long John Silvers, because the experiance is better.
That's quick
No, Mozilla released version 1.0 a while ago, Mozilla Firefox just released version 1.0 a few days ago; get your facts straight before posting!
mv * > /dev/null
Alister
actually, Mozilla did just released 1.0. You see, Mozilla is the organization that makes The Mozilla Application Suite (the browser you are referring too that was released a while ago) and Firefox.
So, his/her sentence should read, "Mozilla released Mozilla Firefox version 1.0," But it doesn't really matter because he/she is right, and I think we get what he/she's saying. I did.
I mean, if Mozilla didn't just release it, then they should correct the error on their page that says, " Firefox 1.0 is Mozilla's award-winning next generation web browser."
And if you want to get technical, it's Mozilla Application Suite, or just Mozilla Suite for short.
Last edited by 15377 on 12 Nov 2004 - 06:56
Can't wait to see what it does for market share once the advert goes out in the NYT
IE - Does
1-0 to Firefox so far
I don't have any unintended crap (albeit i use avantbrowser for the tabs, that's one thing I.E HAS to get to grips with.)
Educate yourself instead of jumping on the bandwagon and you'll have no probs with I.E at all.
Please try to be less insultive, its not good to judge people from just one post. I've used IE since 3.0 and quite frankly I've seen it grow. Only I find FireFox more functional to my needs and alot more faster and rendering.
Its not about education, but more of carelessness. With FireFox, I can be as careless as I want to be and if it breaks, it doesnt break everything.
Firefox is more secure, because it does nearly nothing.
IE is less secure, because it does nearly everything.
You can turn the knobs both ways on both products, so don't bother responding saying the usual "but firefox rulezors your iezors!".
You want to see a copy of IE6 that is more secure than firefox? Run the IE that's pre-locked down in Windows Server 2003. Can you get IE that secure on any other OS? Yes.
Can firefox do everything IE can? More or less. Will it be more secure? I dunno, are you running it as "administrator"? Then no.
Its tweakability is better than IE as well. The Advanced options are very limited in IE, you'd have to get into the registry to "hack" into some of the hidden features. With FireFox it just takes a simple command line in the address bar.
Like mram says, it can turn both ways. Except for the part where it does nearly nothing... Thats too exaggerative.
Also I installed it on my old Hard Disk Drive without having the same problem, so it came to me as a surprise.
What people are saying is that what happened to you had nothing to do with IE, you installed it. It could and i expect will happen just as easily with ff but ff's the market share was to small to target them. On a side note are you talking about MSN Messanger Plus? because that is not a MS program it is a third party add on for an MS app.
I'm a Windows 2000 users, and would like, for starters the pop up blocker, that you added to IE in XP SP2 for 2K.
But I hear you stopped development for IE in anything other than Longhorn.
Oh well, bac