Kelson's blog

Opera Software has filed an antitrust complaint with the European Commission against Microsoft.  In it they allege that Microsoft has used their monopoly on the desktop OS to obtain and a monopoly on the web browser, and that they have maintained this monopoly by not properly supporting open web standards. (Recall that Microsoft was convicted of this nearly a decade ago in the United States.)

The complaint seeks two remedies:

1. Unbundle Internet Explorer from Windows, or at least provide alternatives on installation.
2. Fully support open standards in Internet Explorer.

The Q&A with Opera's Haarvard is worth a look.

So how does this affect Firefox?

Well, if they succeed in getting IE separated from Windows in Europe (like Windows Media Player), computers are still going to have to ship with a web browser. That opens the door for Firefox to come pre-installed on systems.

If they succeed in forcing Microsoft to improve their standards support, then it will be much easier for web developers to target four major browsers with one set of code: IE8, Firefox, Opera, and Safari (or rather IE8, Gecko, Opera and WebKit). Once IE6 and IE7 fade away, the biggest barrier to alternative browsers -- IE-only websites -- will become a relic of the past.

Hey, we can dream!

It will be interesting to see how this turns out, and what impact it will have on the web browser market.

If you have time to read a zillion responses, you can check out commentary at CSS3.info, Web Standards Project, Slashdot, Asa Dotzler, and Opera Watch.

(And before anyone starts posting "Opera sux," please go read LIJI's excellent post, 3 Browsers, One Enemy, or my site, the Alternative Browser Alliance, then come back and try to post something a little more insightful.)

According to Net Applications, Firefox is again gaining on Internet explorer: Firefox, Safari Back on Browser Attack.  After a slight dip in January, Firefox has climbed to 14.18% in February -- still ahead of December's 14.00%.

This shows that January's drop was only temporary. Firefox has caught up to its previous position and passed it, as all three major alternatives to IE gained ground.

Source: Net Applications Statistics. 

I just noticed something interesting on my website stats.  For the first 15 days of January (well, 14½ days), Firefox accounted for 22.5% of my hits.  The top three versions were:

Notice anything interesting? The first two are the most recent security releases in major versions that have had auto-update. 1.0.7, however, is not. In fact, 1.0.8 (which is the most recent security release in the 1.0 series) comes in at only 68 hits, less than any other non-beta release, and registering 0%.

It looks like a lot of people stopped at 1.0.7 -- the last release before Firefox 1.5 -- and never updated to 1.0.8.  By contrast, people on the 1.5 series have mostly updated to 1.5.0.9 (which came out after Firefox 2).  What's different?  Auto-updates.

I noticed something interesting about my website's browser stats over the last few days.  I'm specifically looking at IE7 and Firefox 2 as compared to the total IE hits and total Firefox hits.

IE7 has been running about 21,000-29,000 hits/day.  Firefox 2 has been running 12,000-17,000 hits/day.  So by that measure, there are almost twice as many IE7 users as Firefox 2 users.

Compared to other versions, though, IE7 accounts for ~23% of all IE hits, and Firefox 2 accounts for ~44% of all Firefox hits.  So nearly twice the percentage of Firefox users have upgraded to the latest version compared to IE users.

I found it very interesting that the ratio reversed itself so exactly when switching from raw numbers to per-browser percentages.

For most of October, the vast majority of Firefox users hitting my website were using Firefox 1.5, The percentage using Firefox 2 (betas and RCs) hovered around 3% for the first three weeks. The percentage of IE users with IE7 hovered around 2%.

The IE7 percentages didn't change much when IE7 was released. It climbed from ~2% to ~4%. But Firefox 2 jumped from 3% to 8% the day it was released, and has already climbed to 22% in less than a week!

IE7 will probably take off more next month, when automatic updates start offering it. But it's interesting to see: when Firefox offers a new version, nearly 1/4 of its users have upgraded within a week. When IE offers a new version, everyone wants to wait and see.

(I've got even higher FX2 numbers on the Alternative Browser Alliance, but traffic's so much lower that the stats are very erratic.  On that site, the second-highest percentage of IE7 hits (14%) is actually a week before the release!)

Well, IE7 is out.  As we've known for over a year, it's only available to people using Windows XP or later, and only those on the latest service pack.  Windows XP is the most commonly used operating system out there right now, but there are still quite a few users of Windows 2000 (especially businesses that have standardized on it) and Windows 98 (mostly home users, I'd expect).  You can still find people using Windows Me and even Windows 95!

As an example: My website gets 83.2% of its hits from Windows XP, 4.5% from Windows 2000, 2.1% from Windows 98 and 1% from Windows Me.

All these people with older versions of Windows can't upgrade to Internet Explorer 7.  Here's where Firefox comes in.  Firefox will run on all of these operating systems.  One component of the Firefox 2 promotion should be a campaign aimed at these Win9x/Me/2k users who can't upgrade Internet Explorer, but can still get a modern web browser by installing Firefox.  (I wrote a post on my own blog on this subject a few days ago.)

The only problem with this scenario is that Firefox 3 won't run on Win9x/Me.  We might risk alienating people if we encourage them to switch to Firefox since they can't upgrade IE, then 8 months from now they can't upgrade Firefox either.

In observance of Talk Like a Pirate Day, I've written The Voyage of the FyreFawkes -- a tale of the browser wars on the high seas.