From: Ad 

mike wrote:
> http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2007/05/02/1177788202450.html
>
> ===
> When the Firefox web browser was launched in 2004, the then head of
> Microsoft Australia Steve Vamos was quoted as saying he did not believe
> it would pose a real threat to Internet Explorer's market share.
>
> He said the additional features Firefox offered, such as the ability to
> view multiple web pages within "tabs" in a single browser window, were
> not necessarily what consumers wanted.
>
> Mr Vamos, who was recently appointed vice-president of Microsoft's
> international online services group, must surely be eating his words
> now.
>
> Firefox continues to claw users away from IE - the most recent measure
> by web analyst NetApplications shows Firefox has a worldwide market
> share of 15 per cent, compared with 78 per cent for IE.
>


There is an under current which is less talked about. We & many other
orgs I know of have started targeting FF as our std browser coz:

A) It's a small download
B) It's cross platform
C) It's more stds based (esp wrt CSS & JS/DOM) D) It's far less buggy
(from a web app pov) than IE6. E) As per above numerous people are using it
anyway.

e.g. We have to offer "content" of a health/modeling variety to
our consumers (our suppliers, hospitals etc). We have noted that there are
a fair few linux/mac users. It's a lot easier to load ff on Windows than
IE6 on Mac or Linux.

Also there are very useful things in FF such as SVG handling.

However the driving force n many way was we simply gave up targeting IE due
to it's bugginess i.e. it would double (at least) the cost of any web app
for little benefit. We put a big "Works with Firefox" notice
& I used to run a browser detect with fi not ff/seamonkey would fire up
an alert but people found that a mite annoying.

BTW I am getting more & more impressed with Konqueror as the latest
Mandriva uses that to open links from Thunderbird etc & it took a
little while for me to realise that it wasn't ff.

Adam

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