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Tipping Firefox across the chasm

interest in the issue of browser stats

By Westciv - http://westciv.typepad.com/dog_or_higher/2005/02/tipping_firefox.html

February 03, '05

There has been a lot of interest in the issue of browser stats of late, with Firefox's meteoric rise to prominence (putting paid to my prediction early last year that simply building a better browser was not enough to build a sizable market share.)

So because I had nothing better to do on a rainy Sunday morning (well, I had lots better to do but...) I've done a quick analysis of the overall browser market share of visitors to westciv.com.

Re-design 2008 Logo

For a very small company (there are in essence two of us here) Westciv generates reasonable traffic. This year we are likely to exceed 1.5 million unique visits, and serve up perhaps as many as 10 million pages. Note that the visitors to our site are largely reasonably experienced web developers. I'll discuss the significance of this shortly.

These are the browser stats for everything over .5% of traffic. The stats don't add up to 100% because we have not included any browser with less than .5% of market share, and I didn't bother factoring out robots, and unidentifiable browsers.

Nonetheless, the stats are, as far as I am aware, reasonably accurate, and take into account browser spoofing and the like. And the sample size is big enough, hundreds of thousands of visits in each of the three periods below, as to make the them reasonably significant.

So below are the market share by browser brand, with percentage change on the previous period where available.

Browser Stats 13 May 2004 - 11 July 04
Browser Stats 12 July 2004 - 30 October 04
Browser Stats 1 November 2004 - 18 Jan 05
Overall changes

Note that MSIE represents all versions of IE, but particularly IE 5 and IE 6.

Mozilla includes Firefox, Mozilla and Netscape 7, in essence anything that identifies itself as using the gecko rendering engine (with our focus on CSS and web development at westciv, above all my interest is in rendering engines, not browsers per se).

The 5 Biggest Mistakes Almost All Web Designers Make

And Why These Mistakes Could Cost YOU A Fortune!

By Jason Mangrum, CEO - ImmWebDesign.com

January 14th, '04

Huge Mistake #1: Creating a Website with Flash

Did you know in a recent study, top internet marketers discovered that having a website created with Flash, actually DECREASED the response from prospects and customers by as much as 370 percent?

Here's why: Your prospects and customers are most likely visiting your website using all types of different computers, connection speeds and internet configuration settings...

What may look GREAT to one visitor may not even appear for another! You could very easily have shelled out hundreds or even thousands of dollars to have a website created using the Flash technology, only to find out that some of your visitors will never see it! (Not to mention the loading times can cause your visitor to close your site, never to return again.)

Huge Mistake #2: The "Internet Catalog" Approach -- You see this everywhere. Good, honest and hardworking businessmen and women get online to sell their products or services, and have a site created for them that contains a link to just about everything they offer on one page. Their thinking goes along the lines of, "...well, I don't want to leave anyone out. If they come to my site, I want to make sure I have what they're looking for..." -- This way of thinking could not be further from the truth.

Here's why: There's an ancient rule that goes back to the very beginning of direct-marketing on the internet, taught by the richest, most legendary and well-respected internet marketers of all time...

"When you give your prospects too many choices, they become confused and aren't sure what to do next. Confused people never buy anything."

Huge Mistake #3: Optimizing Your Sales Site for the Search Engines -- You'll see this taught in nearly every "internet marketing" course, manual or eBook out there... "You must optimize every page of your website for the search engines!" -- In fact, this false teaching is accepted as 'gospel truth' so often that most web designers will offer to do this for you at no, or little extra cost...

What they DON'T understand is that certain words and phrases must be either re-worded (to make it "keyword rich") or taken out completely, just to be looked upon highly by the mighty search engines -- and this could KILL your sales, literally overnight.

Here's why: When you or a hired web designer optimize your SALES page (i.e. any web page designed to sell your products and services) to get a higher listing in the search engines, you're going to have to sacrifice the pulling-power of your sales copy (i.e. written sales material) just to get those higher listings. Sure, this can bring you more traffic -- but what good is all the traffic in the world, if your visitors arrive at your website and aren't compelled enough to read why they should order your product?

For years, it has been taught that you should always try to find a "balance" of SEO (Search-Engine-Optimization) mixed with promotional copy designed to sell your products and services...

WRONG AGAIN! -- The truth is that you should NEVER optimize your sales page for the Search Engines. Instead, you should create tiny "entry pages" for each keyword related to your product or service, (highly optimized for the Search Engines) and have them link to your main sales site! (We can show you exactly how to do this quickly and easily and get *massive* targeted traffic from the Search Engines - without ever *touching* your sales site!)

Huge Mistake #4: Having a "Graphics-Based" Website -- Sure, graphics can certainly help us to visualize a particular situation or circumstance, product or service... But did you know that having a graphically-driven website can actually DISTRACT your visitor away from your sales message?

After all, your sales message (or "web copy") is THE #1 most important factor in a website that makes money. If your visitors are paying more attention to your "professional graphics" than your sales message... you've just lost another sale.

Here's why: You've got approximately seven seconds from the time your visitor arrives at your site, to the time they decide whether to buy your product, get more information or LEAVE. If you've got a graphically-intensive website, your website will most likely still be loading past your seven-second time limit.

That's a "customer-killer" in and of itself - however, the real reason lies within the fact that the bigger, brighter and more beautiful your graphics are, the more they will distract your visitor from your sales message. And if your visitor is distracted even for one second, it could mean the difference between getting a sale, and losing a customer.

Huge Mistake #5: Designing a Website with ZERO Marketing Experience -- Most web designers have no idea how to make money on the internet, with anything other than their design services. It's not their fault - they simply have no or very little marketing and sales experience. After all, they're just website designers...

However, having your website designed by someone with ZERO internet marketing experience is like buying a street-car without an engine... it won't go anywhere, and it'll just waste your time and money!

Web Positioning With Top Results Or The Ability To Attract More Qualified Traffic?

Fernando Macia | Contributing Writer | webpronews.com

2004-12-01

If placing your website within the top search engine results, entering certain keywords in Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, or Alta Vista, has become your daily obsession, stop for a moment and reflect. Is achieving top search results with selected keywords the real objective, or, is it perhaps developing a means for connecting with your potential customers, thus attracting more qualified traffic to your web site, what you are truly after?

Besides, what are the chances that your prospective clients will key in, exactly, those keywords that you chose in, precisely, those same search engines that you have targeted to locate your website within the first page of results?

Now that the majority of website administrators have finally accepted that online marketing applying search engine technology is the most efficient strategy in the long term for capturing qualified Internet traffic, companies that offer web optimization and search engine submission services have started launching aggressive campaigns guaranteeing top positions for their clients by using a limited number of keywords (typically five, ten, or fifteen), regardless of their websites' business domain. This approach should immediately raise doubts as it is obviously much easier to position a website dedicated, for example, to the dissection of butterflies, that probably enjoys very little competition, than positioning a website dedicated to real estate operating in an extremely crowded market. Therefore, one must always carefully weigh in the promises made by these web-positioning firms since two different scenarios could occur:

Yahoo's Spider Slurp

By Jim Hedger - SitePro News November 29th, '04

As the world's second most popular search tool, Yahoo moves a tremendous amount of traffic and is a very credible alternative to Google. Yahoo receives over 2.76 billion page views per day from hundreds of millions of unique users. It boasts over 157 million registered users enjoying mail, shopping and discussion groups and increasingly personalized search and news services.

For the past two years, Yahoo, Google and MSN have been embroiled in a hard-fought battle for the loyalty of search engine users forcing all three firms into the hyper-evolution we are witnessing today. Over the next three Wednesdays we are going to examine how the Big-3 spiders work, what they look for and how to best prepare your sites for multiple visits from the bots that rank them. Today, we are starting with Yahoo's bot, SLURP.

Getting Found By Slurp

The first thing to know about Slurp is that like its better known cousin, Google-bot, Slurp "discovers" sites by following links from one site to another, reading and recording nearly everything it finds in its path. The majority of websites referenced by Yahoo were originally included in its database because they were accessed by Slurp following links from another site.

Yahoo suggests adding an inbound link to all pages in your site to guarantee those pages will be discovered by Slurp. They also recommend an internal sitemap linked to from the Index (or home) page of the site. To encourage Slurp to spend more time deep-crawling your content, Yahoo recommends the addition of "good authoritative links pointing into your site", from highly reputable sources such as news sites, established business partners and other sites relevant to your business or service.

Manual submission of the site is only recommended if for some reason or another Slurp does not find the site on its own. This is increasingly rare however as server-logs show Slurp is one of the most active spiders out there. In other words, if a site Slurp has already indexed links to your site, Slurp will almost certainly be visiting very soon. Webmasters should never have to pay submission fees to get into Yahoo's index since according to Yahoo's Tim Mayer, 99% of Yahoo's index is crawled by Slurp for free.

Microsoft says Firefox not a threat to IE

By Munir Kotadia - Special to CNET News.com November 11, 2004, 10:54 AM PST

Just days after the launch of open-source browser Firefox 1.0, Microsoft executives defended Internet Explorer, saying it is no less secure than any other browser and doesn't lack any important features.

At a security roundtable discussion in Sydney on Thursday, Ben English, Microsoft's security and management product manager, told attendees that IE undergoes "rigorous code reviews" and is no less secure than any other browser.

"Because IE is ubiquitous, you hear a lot more about it, but I don't think that Internet Explorer is any less secure than any other browser out there," English said.

Steve Vamos, Microsoft Australia's managing director, agreed, saying he does not believe IE's market share is under attack following the recent high-profile debut of the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox browser.

Vamos said that although he has heard other people mention the competitive threat posed by Firefox, he doesn't see it as a problem. "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 said, consumers need to be educated 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 that if Microsoft's customers wanted new features, they would have told the company about it.

"I don't agree that just because a (competing) product has a feature that we don't have, that feature is important," he said. "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 subpar or need to be added, then I have great confidence that we are an organization that responds pretty quickly and effectively to that."

English reiterated that features such as tabbed browsing are not important to IE users. "I don't believe it is a true statement that IE doesn't have the features that our customers want," he said. "We take user feedback very seriously. If you have that feedback, then you should feed it back to us because we will feed it to the product team."

Ross Fowler, managing director of Cisco Systems Australia and New Zealand, said the networking giant uses IE internally but only after deploying Cisco's Secure Agent, which is a desktop utility that monitors all activity and alerts the user if it spots something unusual--such as a keystroke-logging program.

"Internally, we have deployed Cisco Secure Agent to prevent those day-zero attacks, and we have more and more of our customers--particularly in the university sector--deploying the Cisco Secure Agent," Fowler said.

are links hurting search relevance?

SEO wisdom

Insider Report: 2004-11-09

According to conventional SEO wisdom, link building is the key to a successful search engine ranking. The rationale is simple; with more links pointing to your site, your site has a better chance of getting noticed by search engines as they crawl the web populating their index.

Because search engines are thought to value links, site owners have been scrambling to acquire links pointing to their web presence. However, has this mad dash to acquire links also damaged the importance of links as an indicator of relevance? Or has it damaged the quality of Internet content has whole? Some think both scenarios have occurred.

search engine news

too hard to keep up?

November 3rd, '04

"Google has changed it's algo again!" "Yahoo is slurping, like never before!" If you are a designer who is looking a top ranking for your site, these are just some of the phrases you'll hear.

kiwi leads effort to build a better browser

The web browser wars are over and Microsoft won, right?

17.09.2004 - By PAUL BRISLEN

Well someone's forgotten to tell Ben Goodger and his team at the Mozilla Foundation because this Kiwi software engineer is taking market share from Internet Explorer (IE) with Firefox, the browser that's smaller yet smarter than just about anything else available.

Goodger, back in New Zealand this week visiting family and friends, works for the Mozilla Foundation and has been the lead engineer on Firefox throughout its development.

He began while still at the University of Auckland waiting for the launch of Netscape 5.0. "I used Netscape 4.0 and basically was just designing web pages and doing web development work." The wait for version 5.0 was a long one and when Netscape finally ceased development work on its browser and opened up the source code to the Mozilla Foundation, Goodger found himself taking time off to work in the US on the browser itself.

Today he leads a relatively small team of engineers who are hard at work preparing for the release of Firefox version 1.0 and the Kiwi input is hard to miss.

The code names for the previous versions of Firefox include Three Kings, Royal Oak, One Tree Hill and Greenlane.

Firefox has generated an enormous amount of interest among hardcore internet users around the world and for the first time has taken market share away from Microsoft's Internet Explorer

Guild of Accessible Web Designers

New GAWDS Web Design October 12th, '04

You may or may not recall, that the competition to design the new GAWDS website was won by Phil Treble; I apologise to Phil that it has taken some time for the design to appear on the site. We spent a bit of extra time trying to make it as usable as accessible as we could (of course we thought it was darn good in the first place).

Unfortunately, there are still a few issues we have struggled to fix, e.g., the navigation wraps around when the viewed on a low resolution small screen. We couldn't use the original 'cutting edge' navigation buttons (glossy with nice rounded corners) as they didn't work on a host of legacy and non-standard browsers - again I apologise to Phil for going for simpler buttons.

We know there will be a few problems we've missed - give use the benefit of your talent - and tell us what they are, and how to fix them.

Thanks,
Jim

Mozilla has done it!

Mozilla Firefox 1.0, Thunderbird 0.8

October 2nd, '04

Firefox

Rediscover the web

"The world's best browser just got better. The new Firefox Preview Release is the award winning preview of Mozilla's next generation browser. Firefox empowers you to browse faster, more safely, and more efficiently than with any other browser."

Firefox logo

The Mozilla organization has released Firebird 1.0 PR, and Thunderbird 0.8. These latest products, the intenet browser and email client from the folks at Mozilla are, in my opinion, much better than Microsofts products (Internet Explorer 6.0, and Outlook Express).

I have been using Firefox 1.0 PR for a few days, and have nothing but praise for it. I actually have been a Firefox user since it was labled Firebird 0.7.