Rishi

Free web analytics company reports that Internet Explorer still leads despite falling market share

Google's browser Chrome overtook Firefox for the first time globally on a monthly basis in November, according to StatCounter, the free website analytics company. The firm's research arm reports that Chrome took 25.69% of the worldwide market (up from 4.66% in November 2009) compared to Firefox's 25.23%. Microsoft's Internet Explorer still maintains a strong lead globally with 40.63%.

In the US Internet Explorer continues to perform strongly and is maintaining market share at 50.66%, up slightly from 50.24% year on year. Firefox retains second place on 20.09%, down from 26.75%. Chrome is up to 17.3% from 10.89%. Safari is on 10.76% from 10.71%.

In the UK, Internet Explorer also leads the market with 42.82%. Chrome is on 24.82%, having overtaken Firefox (20.56%) in July. (For other individual country or regional analysis see StatCounter Global Stats).

It was a tough decision for Firefox on Android: improve the browser's performance or keep its compatibility with add-ons and other technology?

But after creating a prototype, Mozilla settled on the winning answer quickly: performance. And tomorrow, a month after making the decision, Mozilla plans to release an early version of the overhauled Firefox for Android.

The organization will introduce the new version on the "nightly" channel, where Mozilla tests raw new technology. With the organization's rapid-release cycle, the nightly version graduates to the Aurora, beta, and final-release channels, maturing for six weeks in each phase.

The new version is strategically important for Mozilla for multiple reasons. First, smartphones and tablets are at the center of a mobile-first transformation of the computing industry, and Firefox isn't preinstalled anywhere right now. Second, with Firefox shut out on Apple's iOS and Microsoft's Windows Phone, Android is effectively the only route for Mozilla to bring its browser to the mobile market.

Last, Mozilla's objective--to ensure an open Web--relies on Firefox. Right now, Apple and Google browsers based on the open-source WebKit project dominate mobile browsing.

Release manager Christian Legnitto announced the move Friday. Initially the new version was geared just for phones, but Mozilla expanded it to tablets, too, after concluding it couldn't offer separate versions.

Firefox for personal computers, and many of the add-ons that helped make the browser popular by making it more customizable, use an interface called XUL (XML User Interface Language). But because the XUL-based version of Firefox took so long to start up on Android and isn't as responsive, Mozilla instead embraced Andoid's built-in technology.

Among the native interface advantages, according to programmer Mark Finkle:

It comes at a cost, though. XUL-based add-ons are one issue.
"Native UI builds are considered a new application and are not add-on compatible with the XUL versions," Finkle said

Mozilla is working on a new approach for add-ons on Android, though, through an interface called NativeWindow, Finkle said. And in a comment, Finkle added that it could be possible to build Firefox's newer Jetpack interface for add-ons atop the NativeWindow foundation.

There are other challenges, too, with the new version. The current Firefox Sync, for example, no longer works as a way to share bookmarks, passwords, and open tabs across multiple versions of the browser. A native version of Sync for Android is under construction, though, and due to arrive in December. Also being addressed is the fact that the current upgrade path drops saved passwords and browsing history.

Another list of objections came from Robert Kaiser, a Firefox project contributor, who listed his misgivings in a mailing list message: "The awesomebar algorithm [which suggests full links based on what people type in the adress bar] will be removed. The privacy of bookmarks and history will be removed. Open video might get undermined," he said. "A lot of Add-on awesomeness will be removed... Somehow I don't believe you fully there."

All these are potential problems, to be sure. But not as big as people not using the browser at all because it's too slow.

No judge has ever declared a Firefox plug-in called MafiaaFire Redirector to be illegal. But that didn't stop the U.S. Department of Homeland Security from trying to censor it from the Web.

The Mozilla Foundation says DHS requested the removal of MafiaaFire, which describes itself as a utility that "automatically redirects you to the correct alternate site" if the main domain has been seized by the U.S. government.

Harvey Anderson, Mozilla's general counsel, told CNET today that the request from DHS was made over the phone. Anderson replied in writing, posing a list of questions in an April 19 e-mail, includin

g this important one: "Is Mozilla legally obligated to disable the add-on?"

Anderson says DHS hasn't replied, and the plug-in has not been removed.

A DHS spokesman told CNET this afternoon that "ICE's Homeland Security Investigations does not comment publicly on our interaction with Internet intermediaries on intellectual property theft enforcement issues." ICE stands for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement division.

The reason DHS doesn't like the MafiaaFire plugin is obvious: It makes the government's tactic of seizing domain names less useful. FirstRow.net, Atdhe.net, and Torrent-Finder.com are among the domains seized on grounds that they're allegedly infringing copyrights of U.S. companies.

One response to a domain name seizure is, simply, to move to a new one, preferably in a top-level domain that can't be easily reached by DHS and the U.S. judicial system. That's what the popular sports video-streaming Web site, Atdhe.net, did after its domain went offline. It's now at Atdhenet.tv (and, just in case, Atdhe.me as well).

MafiaaFire helps to make this process a little easier by redirecting Firefox automatically to the replacement Web site. Its unflattering name arose out of a protest against the RIAA and MPAA--aka "the Music and Film Industry Association of America"--and the "mad-with-power ICE."

If a government official applies pressure on a private company to delete a file or document, that can raise constitutional and free speech issues. In the 1963 case known as Bantam Books v. Sullivan, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a commission's extra-judicial notification that some books or magazines were objectionable was an illegal "system of informal censorship."

"Whether the add-on is unlawful, or whether any speech is unlawful, is for the courts to determine, not for DHS to determine," says Aden Fine, staff attorney with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project. "Nobody from DHS should be going around trying to get speech removed from the Internet before a court decides."

The irony for Microsoft is pretty hard to escape.

The federal judge overseeing Microsoft's 2002 settlement with antitrust regulators noted at a hearing today (subscription required) that the software giant had made "extraordinary" progress in resolving outstanding issues. But just consider the much bigger story of the day: Mozilla's new Firefox 4 browser was downloaded 6.5 million times in less than 24 hours. (Check out Mozilla's real-time Firefox 4 download data here.) Compare that to Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9, introduced a week earlier and downloaded 2.3 million times in the first 24 hours.

Turns out the marketplace is doing a pretty good job of what the court tried to do. The Justice Department brought the case, alleging that Microsoft illegally used Windows to monopolize the browser market. A federal judge ruled against Microsoft, leading the company to ultimately settle with trustbusters, a deal U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly has spent nearly a decade overseeing.

It may seem odd that a judge is still overseeing the nearly decade-old settlement. But Microsoft's deal with regulators requires it to abide by a series of guidelines--most notably, disclosing key technical information about making software applications compatible with Windows. Kollar-Kotelly continues to monitor Microsoft to make sure it abides by the consent degree.

In the meantime, though, the battleground for computing has shifted. Windows, the source of so much of Microsoft's power, no longer gives the company the cudgel it once used to thwart rivals. It's still the dominant computer operating system. But Mozilla doesn't need to play by Microsoft's rules to reach the masses. That's because the Internet, of course, matters much more than Windows.

Just look at the browser market. When Microsoft settled the antitrust case, it controlled more than 90 percent of the browser market. In February, according to Net Applications, Internet Explorer held 57 percent market share. It's still the leader. But Firefox has 22 percent of the market, followed by Google's Chrome with 11 percent and Apple's Safari with 6 percent. Certainly one reason for that shift is that the rival browsers are every bit as good, and sometimes significantly better, than Internet Explorer.

Firefox 4's outpacing Internet Explorer 9 in downloads is to some extent Microsoft's own doing. The company put itself at download disadvantage by making IE9, released March 14, incompatible with Windows XP, which, though long in the tooth, is still used by more than 40 percent of Web surfers. The company said it wanted to have a browser that could take advantage of the modern graphics technology of its newer operating systems. And surely, it doesn't hurt to encourage folks using the old operating system to upgrade by limiting the availability of the latest software.

To be fair, the antitrust case has played some role in shrinking Microsoft's power. It'd be hard to argue that the terms of the settlement have prevented Microsoft from using Windows to monopolize other markets. But the antitrust case raised the specter of drawn out regulatory hurdles to major acquisitions, likely tempering Microsoft's acquisition ambitions. And the company instituted corporate accountability guidelines in the wake of the settlement intended to curb the abuses that led to the antitrust case in first place.

The antitrust settlement is set to expire May 12. Much has changed in the intervening years. It faces emboldened rivals such as Google and Apple, as well as new technologies harnessed by Facebook and Twitter. Today's technology landscape would have been unthinkable when Kollar-Kotelly agreed to the antitrust settlement. The biggest change of all may be that Microsoft no longer dominates computing the way it once did. Just ask the folks at Mozilla.

Firefox may be under fire from Microsoft's newly competitive browser, but with more than twice the downloads in its first day, Firefox 4 today soared over its rival by one measurement.

Microsoft, not without reason, boasted that IE9 was downloaded 2.35 million times in the first 24 hours after its release last week. And that is indeed a big number, especially for a browser that tech enthusiasts had scoffed at for years.

But less than 24 hours after its own launch, Firefox 4 cleared 4.7 million, according to the Mozilla Glow site that logs downloads.

Firefox logo

That's a lot less than the 8 million copies of Firefox 3 downloaded in that version's 24-hour debut in 2008, but that event was a heavily promoted "Download Day," and it should be noted that Firefox 4's full day hasn't finished yet.

And it does signal that at least a very sizable chunk of the Net-connected population is, in Firefox's apt phrase, choosing to "upgrade the Web." New browsers bring new Web standards, new performance, and often a new auto-update ethos that likely will lead to browsers staying continuously updated. That could simplify lives for Web developers who constantly wrangle with the difficulties of supporting old browsers.

Firefox 4 brings a raft of new features--new security and privacy options, faster loading and JavaScript, support for a variety of new standards including WebM video and WebGL 3D graphics, and 3D acceleration that extends even to Windows XP.

Mozilla expects that its arrival will lead to an increase in usage. The browser maker said it has 400 million Firefox users and counting, but as a percentage of worldwide browser use it has lost share to Chrome, which now accounts for more than 10 percent of usage worldwide.

Three years ago, Firefox 3 set the record for most downloads in a 24-hour period, cracking 8 million and positioning itself as a viable alternative to Internet Explorer.

Firefox 4, released today to the public at large after 12 public betas, two release candidates, and nearly a year of development, faces a hugely different landscape. Microsoft's Internet Explorer remains the dominant browser. And in less than three years, a significant chunk of the browser market has taken a shine to relative newcomer Google Chrome.

Mozilla flips the switch from version 3.6.15 to version 4 as Firefox possesses more than 400 million active users. The new version of the browser sports several massive changes, including a radically redesigned interface, significantly faster browsing speeds, strong support for the still-in-development HTML5 and other "future-Web" tech, and competitive features like synchronization, restart-less add-ons, and tab grouping. The official CNET review of Firefox 4 is available at the Download.com pages for Firefox for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Browser speed remains an important point of comparison. But as the five major browsers have developed over the past year, their speed differences have become more muddled. For example, Mozilla noted that when Firefox 3 was released, it took "60 milliseconds to change Gmail from showing one message to another with Firefox 3... compared with 413 milliseconds for IE 7 and 227 for Firefox 2."

Current browser benchmarks that look only at JavaScript place them all in the same ballpark now, so the point of comparison has begun to shift to graphics processing unit (GPU) hardware acceleration. This allows the browser to shove certain rendering tasks onto the computer's graphics card, freeing up CPU resources while making page rendering and animations load faster. These tasks include composition support, rendering support, and desktop compositing, and there are few benchmarks that are capable of testing it.

One interesting publicly available benchmark is the new JSGameBench from Facebook, which looks to test HTML5 in real-world gaming situations. The Firefox 4 beta was the fastest tested without WebGL and was the second fastest with it. Mozilla's own tests put Firefox 4 at three to six times faster than Firefox 3.6.

Mozilla remains a leader in developing the Web, and interestingly that role has led it to hold back on building out one of the more interesting minor features in Firefox 4. The new do-not-track feature supports a header on Web sites that tells sites and advertisers not to track you, so you don't see targeted ads as often. Internet Explorer also supports the header, and it includes robust, configurable support for blocking ad trackers; Firefox 4 relies on add-ons like AdBlock Plus to gain the list blocking.

"Beyond blocking the ad loads, which you can do with add-ons, this is a business social trust situation between sites and users. We need people to vote with their feet, or at least want to have that conversation. We've spoken to a lot of advertisers. And by and large, they want to be good citizens here," Nightingale said. As a current solution, though, that makes users entirely dependent on advertiser behavior, which is likely to fall short of what people want.

Another security repair in Firefox 4 fixes a hole that affected all browsers until last summer--a vulnerability so old that it was mentioned in the documentation for CSS2 a decade ago. The exploit is a CSS sniffing history attack, in which malicious code can gain access to your browser history by manipulating link appearance and style. What made the bug so difficult to repair is that the simplest solution--to prevent all link style manipulation--would be like throwing the baby out with the bathwater, Nightingale had said in an interview at Black Hat 2010.

Nightingale also addressed other changes in Firefox 4 as providing the feature in question without playing fast and loose with a user's data. Firefox 4 removes the "lucky" automatic search result jumps from the location bar's search functionality because Mozilla had "concerns about sending a lot of private data from the location bar to search engines. We will get there," he added, "but like with Sync we want to do it right."

Sync is another new feature in Firefox 4 and is possibly one of the best implementations of the feature across the competition. Not only can you synchronize your data across traditional PC versions of Firefox, but you also can sync your bookmarks, passwords, preferences, history, and tabs with your Android or Maemo-running phone or tablet. However, Sync debuted in 2008 as an add-on and had a notably rough beginning. Fortunately for user data, which it used to delete seemingly at will, Mozilla fixed the problems with it.

Along with the Android support, Sync gets two security features right. One is that Firefox encrypts your data before sending it over an encrypted connection to its servers, where it remains encrypted. Mozilla said it could not access the data even if somebody there wanted to. The second is that you have the option of setting up your own personal sync server. In an age in which private data stored by corporations gets hacked and stolen with shocking regularity, setting up a personal sync server is one way to ensure that you bear the responsibility for your own data. The only problem with the feature is that it doesn't yet support syncing add-ons, a factor that is at least partially tied to Firefox's nascent restart-less add-on network, also debuting in version 4.

Other big changes in Firefox 4 include a minimalist interface with a condensed menu button that closely resembles that of Opera 11 and Chrome 10; app tabs; tab groups for keeping tabs organized; an overhauled add-on manager that also supports restart-less add-ons; and expansive support for HTML5, CSS3, and the aforementioned hardware acceleration for Direct2D and Direct3D on Windows, OpenGL on Mac, and XRender on Linux.

One "future-Web" tech that Nightingale said probably won't come to Firefox before version 5 is support for WebSocket. "The specification had security problems, so we turned it off," he said. He added that users can enable it at will through the "websocket" options in about:config.

Although it took more than two and a half years for Firefox 4 to get here, expect that time to get axed like a tree in a rainforest for Firefox 5. Mozilla plans to put Firefox on an accelerated release schedule, much like Google has done with Chrome.