 |
Nate Mook at BetaNews:
Mozilla’s Firefox browser continues to post gains in market share, according to Web analytics firm OneStat.com, while usage of Internet Explorer has fallen more than 2 percent since May. Opera, meanwhile, has surpassed 1 percent market share worldwide.Worldwide, Firefox now holds 12.93 percent of the market, up from 11.79 percent in May. The open source browser commands a 15.82 percent usage share in the United States, and a whopping 39.02 percent in Germany.
More details by following the link and directly from OneStat.
From the AFP:
Supporters of open sourcing for computers have been given a shot in the arm by news the French police are abandoning Microsoft’s Internet Explorer for the Mozilla Foundations browser Firefox.
The gendarmerie’s 70,000 desktops were being converted to Firefox and its email client Thunderbird because of the navigator’s “reliability, security and inter-operability with other state services,” said General Christian Brachet, IT director of the police force.
The move should be complete by the end of the year, he said, as enthusiasts of open sourcing wrapped up an annual meeting in Paris at the Solution Linux 2006 exhibition.
Firefox had been chosen because it was based on the W3C standard, an international norm for the Internet, and because it works equally well under Microsoft, Mac or Linux.
Last year they had switched all their desktops from Office to OpenOffice which is estimated saves them $2.4M a year. If you detect a pattern here, you’re right:
No decision has yet been taken to move from Windows to Linux, said Geraud, “but we’re considering the option.”
More by following the link including that many more parts of the French government are moving in the same direction.
Darryl K. Taft at eWeek:
IBM and a group of industry leaders on Feb. 1 announced an open-source initiative to promote the adoption of AJAX technology.The new initiative, known as Open AJAX, includes such prominent supporters as BEA Systems, Borland, the Dojo Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation, Google, IBM, Laszlo Systems, Mozilla, Novell, Openwave Systems, Oracle, Red Hat, Yahoo, Zend and Zimbra. The group plans to promote the use of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML and its use on various devices, applications, desktops or operating systems.
AJAX is a (web) client technology that enriches the user experience for shopping, working, planning, corresponding and navigating online. AJAX makes updated information available automatically without refreshing the browser, among other benefits.
Notice the presence of Google and Yahoo on the list and not surprisingly, given the open source basis, the absence of Microsoft. SYS-CON Belgium has much more including an interview with IBM’s CTO for Emerging Internet Technologies, David Boloker.
Microsoft announced it own AJAX tooling, codenamed Atlas, at PDC05 and will be featuring it at the March Mix06 conference.
Based on the amount of press coverage and blog posts, it’s the biggest story of the day. What started it all is that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 team has agreed to use the same icon as Mozilla’s Firefox to indicate the presence of a RSS feed on a web page. The possibility that Microsoft might use something else had geeky passions inflamed earlier in the year. Who knows what could be next? Maybe they’ll agree on whether they are “bookmarks” or “favorites.”
