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Thread: Open Source Software

Author Image Gerry Patterson. The world's most humble blogger
Edited and endorsed by PGTS, Home of the world's most humble blogger

The Amazing Little Fox Is In The Mainstream!


Chronogical Blog Entries:



Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 03:05:41 +1100

The extraordinary growth of FireFox continues unabated. When I noticed this a few months ago, I predicted it would eventually boil-over and spill into the mainstream.

Visitors 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!


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Copyright     2005, Gerry Patterson. All Rights Reserved.