August 28, 2002

12:43 PM

Netscape market share at an all time low? Not according to Heise Online, a major news site here in Germany. In their very substantial weblogs, Microsoft went from 66,9% down to 65% from March to August of this year, while Netscape/Mozilla rose from 21,3 % to 22,6 and Opera from 7,8% to 8,4%. (Warning: Link in German, but you will understand the tables at the end of the article easily).
posted by vowe (18 comments total)

But Websidestory already acknowledges says that netscape usage is higher in Germany than the global average. Maybe it's just the Hasselhoff of browsers?
posted by Gary at 12:57 PM on August 28, 2002

Gary, LOL. There is no IE/Linux, and you would not call Linux the David Hasselhoff of operating systems, or would you?
posted by vowe at 1:02 PM on August 28, 2002

I don't find this suprising, the newest Netscape/Mozilla builds are finally becoming ready for the primetime. Mozilla finally reached a 1.0 build just in June so there's no doubt there will be a slow movement towards this browser. I'm not sure of the satus but I seem to recall rumors of a couple of ISPs (AOL included) thinking of switching from IE to Netscape as their default browser. I don't know if this has happened but Netscape is no doubt going to see a decent rebirth in terms of marketshare.
posted by bitdamaged at 1:17 PM on August 28, 2002

The tables only give stats for visitors to the www.heise.de web site, and only after a big disclaimer:

Browser-Statistiken sind mit Vorsicht zu genießen, da nicht nur die Vorlieben je nach Zielgruppe variieren, sondern auch die Erkennung der Browser nicht immer sicher zu gewährleisten ist ...

[roughly: Browser statistics should be viewed with cauthion, because not only do they vary according target groups [types of users], but also because browser detection is not always trustworthy... ]

So, I think they're just pointing out that their stats differ from what websitestory reports, and they are not trying to claim that either they or websitestory have representative stats.
posted by tippiedog at 1:28 PM on August 28, 2002

ok, this site collects all kinda stats on a monthly basis and the figures are really really in favor of IE. I am a web developer and believe me I have fought with my management to stop thinking of supporting Netscape 4.* series or atleast pay me more for all the outrageous extra hours I have to work. Now thanks to Netscape 6.1 I write only one piece of code that works just fine with both browsers. Only needs a bit of tweaking. Every thing works just fine and I can really spend some time working on the server side rather than on the client side.

PS: If you still use Netscape 4.* series, some body should drink truck loads of ice tea and then camp infront of your front door until that some one has gotten rid of all that he/she drank.
posted by adnanbwp at 1:34 PM on August 28, 2002

adnanbwp: I agree with your sentiments regarding NS4.x. However, you'll need to know that you're not really safe coding the page one way, and having it work the same for both browsers. It becomes more apparent as you work with complicated DHTML (particularly in hiding/revealing DIVs with Form code in them) -- I'm still not completely satisfied with Netscape's implementation.

Thank god the DOM is primarily the same, though, right?

To the topic at hand: The online game market appears drastically different from these folks' market, it seems. On the site that I run, I get around 1000 unique visitors a day, and I pull in 97% IE, 2% Netscape, and the rest are random browsers of older quality. The majority of that last 1% can be easily identified as a spider of one sort of another. In the last 3 months, I've only had 30 people browse the site with Opera.
posted by thanotopsis at 1:47 PM on August 28, 2002

cauthion

Is that a new, slower AMD chip?
posted by ParisParamus at 1:52 PM on August 28, 2002

No, that's the Crathlon. Not to be confused with the earlier, not-so-successful Crapthlon, or the multiprocessor Decacrapthlon.
posted by websavvy at 2:07 PM on August 28, 2002

In the last 3 months, I've only had 30 people browse the site with Opera.

Opera also lets you configure it so it identifies itself as something else. I usually leave mine on MSIE 5.0 since some sites choke if you don't have MSIE/Netscape browsers (even though everything works just fine). Not that it would make a drastic difference, but it I'd hope the percentage is a little bigger than 0.
posted by Gary at 2:13 PM on August 28, 2002

Google's Zeitgeist page is probably a good source of information on this topic. Personally, Mozilla is the best browser I've ever used.
posted by Ryvar at 2:14 PM on August 28, 2002

On a related note, opera 7 is coming and will crush all other browsers once and for all. Or at least, maybe they can do a re-write and not come close to driving themselves out of business.
posted by Gary at 2:18 PM on August 28, 2002

After using Opera for the past 2yrs or so, I can't believe that anyone would want to use IE or Netscape.

I haven't tried Mozilla, but I like Opera so much, I'm not even eager to try it.

Also, as someone mentioned above, some sites choke because you ID yourself as an Opera user. Because of this reason, I often ID myself as IE instead.

I can't wait for Opera 7.

Witold
posted by Witold at 2:42 PM on August 28, 2002

Of course, Reported Browser Stats are far from standardized - compare the numbers linked above to this story in today's ZDNet news - "Netscape's share continues to shrink". WebSideStory claims total Netscape Browser usage is at an all-time low of 3.4%.
posted by kokogiak at 3:19 PM on August 28, 2002

word, witold.
posted by lescour at 9:58 PM on August 28, 2002

the reason for Mozilla's rise is tabbed browsing.

tabbed browsing is the greatest single piece of functionality yet in a browser and coupled with the middle mouse click makes websurfing an absolute joy compared to IE and opera (which also has tabbed browsing but not as good). the rest of Mozilla is a buggy piece of shit which crashes 3 or 4 times a day on me, so as soon as IE implements tabbed browsing i'll be back with them.
posted by zoid at 2:41 AM on August 29, 2002

I'm running Mozilla 1.1, and it hasn't crashed once since I installed in a couple days ago.

Tabbed browsing is my main reason for using it, but I find it just runs better than IE does.
posted by benjh at 4:21 AM on August 29, 2002

I can second benjh's comments about mozilla 1.1. It hasn't once crashed for me, and the combination of tabbed browsing, resizable text, and popup blocking utility have made me a mozilla convert.
posted by astirling at 6:18 AM on August 29, 2002

I'm using Netscape 7, and it's noticeably more stable (and faster on certain operations) even than Mozilla 1.0 and 1.1beta; the new official Mozilla 1.1 release may have brought some of these fixes back into the tree. I find I crash maybe once every 2-3 days now. I do love the tabbed browsing, as I've said before, because it's perfect for sites like Metafilter and blogs. Bang bang bang with the middle-click and all the appropriate pages load in the background, without back-and-forth returns to the same page.

Alas, I still have problems with cookies, which I can ameliorate with tools like perfectkey, but it's still a small hassle. And N7 seems to eat graphics resources a little more quickly than Mozilla, for whatever reason. Still, it isn't enough to make me switch back.
posted by dhartung at 8:19 AM on August 29, 2002