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Firefox Mozilla Stats News

In Indonesia, a Winner For Now In the Browser Wars 76

Posted by timothy from the no-longer-beginner's-luck dept.
angry tapir writes "Mozilla is building an army of volunteers in Indonesia to help customize Firefox and recommend add-ons. Mozilla wants that input so it can retain the high market share that Firefox already has in the country. Web statistics company StatCounter puts the share at 75 to 80 percent, the browser's highest in Asia. The worldwide share of Firefox, which competes with Internet Explorer and Google Chrome, is just over 30 percent."
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In Indonesia, a Winner For Now In the Browser Wars More

In Indonesia, a Winner For Now In the Browser Wars

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  • I live in Indonesia... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 09, 2011 @04:30AM (#36069850)

    I live in Indonesia and has been using their browsers for several years now. I first used their Netscape 7 several years ago, because at that time Internet Explorer 6 (running under Windows 98 SE) was a real resource hog, eating up SYSTEM and USER resources. I also liked its pop-up blocker. Now I am happily using Firefox 4.0, primarily because it has AdBlock Plus (note that bandwidth is expensive in Indonesia), it still supports Windows XP SP3, and it is, in my opinion, faster than Internet Explorer 8 (with my computer full of ActiveX components installed by legitimate programs).

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I live in Indonesia and has been using their browsers for several years now. I first used their Netscape 7 several years ago, because at that time Internet Explorer 6 (running under Windows 98 SE) was a real resource hog, eating up SYSTEM and USER resources. I also liked its pop-up blocker. Now I am happily using Firefox 4.0, primarily because it has AdBlock Plus (note that bandwidth is expensive in Indonesia), it still supports Windows XP SP3, and it is, in my opinion, faster than Internet Explorer 8 (with my computer full of ActiveX components installed by legitimate programs).

      To keep your bandwidth usage low, you want Opera Turbo.

    • The IE Fate (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      IE has one and only ultimate mission for freshly-bought Win 7: to download Firefox.

      • Nope.
        Not even that:

        ftp -A ftp.mozilla.org
        cd pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/latest/win32/en-US/
        mget *.exe
        quit

      • I found it a conundrum: Do I start with installing a decent virus scanner or do I start with downloading Firefox? Whether it is nobler in the mind to be able to detect viruses and remove the resource hog that was installed or to prevent most of the viruses altogether?
        To install, to sandbox and by sandboxing to say we contained the hooks and the thousands of dangerous file edits that viruses are heir to.

    • My main reason to use Firefox, beside that its fast and work well enough, is that they're always doing the right thing and not the "commercial thing" or "what pleases governments/corporations" etc.
      No other browser seems to deliver that. As I want the web to keep being free and standardized, well that's that for me.

  • There is no winner (Score:4, Insightful)

    by 91degrees ( 207121 ) on Monday May 09, 2011 @04:49AM (#36069902) Journal
    It's a constant battle for supremacy. Firefox hasn't won anything. It's simply the leader at the moment.

    Microsoft realise this. Mozilla's advocates would be well advised to keep this in mind and not get complacent.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Hence "winner for now" rather than "winner".

      • 'Winner' to me has always meant something that was final. A 'winner for now' makes no sense because the winner can still lose and therefore can't be a winner. When we have a word to describe the exact situation, 'leader' we should use it.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by e70838 ( 976799 )
          History (and the art of war) teaches us that there is never a final winner. Only "winner for now" makes sense.

          • I've never heard the phrase 'winner for now' at all in my lifetime. I also don't recount seeing 'winner for now' in the Art of War unless your para-phrasing. I agree there is never a final winner but 'winner for now' just doesn't compute. Victors, winners and leaders sufficiently cover the related outcomes. I'm willing to change my point of view if you can prove otherwise.

            Simply put, Firefox is the market leader in Indonesia and that's how the title of this story should be described.

          • And they're off! Mario shoots ahead and is off to a great start as the winner (for now)! But, uh-oh, Bowser just got a red shell! Whammo! Mario is spinning out of control and Bowser zooms by as the winner for now. Mario recovers with a mushroom and blasts ahead and is once again today's winner for now. And here he comes, approaching the finish line, and... hold on a second! Yoshi comes screaming past into first place at the last second! The race is over! Yoshi has won this race! (But only for now. The race

          • History (and the art of war) teaches us that there is never a final winner. Only "winner for now" makes sense.

            Well, OK, then the Allies are "winners for now" against the Axis powers in World War Two.
            Happy?

            • Well, OK, then the Allies are "winners for now" against the Axis powers in World War Two.

              Happy?

              Did you read your ballot papers for last week's election? Mine had three - count them, three - different variants on the resurgent Nazi Party.

              Come back in a century and you might well see that the Nazis are back in power and regretting their temporary setback in the second half of the twentieth century.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Mozilla has won the most important battle by getting Microsoft off of its ass and actually developing a browser again. While Microsoft had a virtual monopoly on browsers, innovation stalled and security issues exploded. Compare today and 5 years ago and you will see that consumer has gained many things, among them are options to pick another browser while still being able to use most websites.

      • "Mozilla has won the most important battle by getting Microsoft off of its ass and actually developing a browser again. While Microsoft had a virtual monopoly on browsers, innovation stalled and security issues exploded. Compare today and 5 years ago and you will see that consumer has gained many things, among them are options to pick another browser while still being able to use most websites."

        That's true. However... Mozilla is showing every sign of repeating every mistake they made with Netscape, with F

        • Just FYI Firefox has multiprocess for tabs and UI (not multi threading - its already multi thread) planned. The mobile version already uses a separate process for the UI in fact.

          Additionally, multi process tabs, while "solving" a few issues (since even if you have leaks or bugs=> close tab and it works) uses a lot more memory.

          Then again, Firefox 4 uses a memory pool per tab (global in FF 3) for security and that already uses quite some memory, so yeah. Anyhow, multi-process is coming.

          Also, it's still ve

    • Re:There is no winner (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Tuqui ( 96668 ) on Monday May 09, 2011 @05:45AM (#36070096) Homepage

      It's a constant battle for supremacy. Firefox hasn't won anything.It's simply the leader at the moment.

      Firefox already won !
      In the days mozilla started, there where sites requiring VBscript and ActiveX to display.
      If mozilla failed your servers would be running IIS, and .Net, and Silverlight would already destroyed Flash.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by GNious ( 953874 )

        Our definition of Victory is that Flash still exists? Oh, man, we're futbucked.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Tuqui ( 96668 )

          No my definition of victory is that we have options to choose. Not only IE and MS staff.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      As long as no browser wins, we win.

      If one would completely obliterate the competition, development would grind to a halt. See Microsoft for example: they didn't care while they were leading. Now that they have competition they have to catch up.

      I've been using Netscape and later Mozilla all my online life but I wouldn't want them to globally dominate the market for two reasons: 1) too much attention is bad (more targetted malware, legal wars by corporations to regain market share, attacks on add-ons like adb

    • Before Chrome,Firefox was winner.But now, Firefox has much to do.

  • The Indonesian translation of various software is just too funny to use and sometimes confuses even experienced user in the field who are used to English.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by gmueckl ( 950314 )

      In other words just like the German translation of Microsoft products: technical terms forcefully translated into German in hideous ways so that only translating them back into English can give you hints to the originally intended meaning of the message.

  • Not surprising this emphasis is being put on Indonesia since, if I remember right, it is the world's seventh most populous country.

  • Under the authority of myself, I declare the browser war to be over and the victor is No one!
    The Great Netscape vs. IE of the Late 90's was was a completely different dynamic then it is today.
    It was the case the both browsers were trying to push their version of the standards. CSS vs. Layers JavaScript vs. VBScript. Java Applets vs. Flash vs. ActiveX. To the victor the rights to use their technology to the looser having to pay license fees and 2 to 3 months of extra development which could have been put to

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by BZ ( 40346 )

      Sort of.

      For example, Chrome's certainly fighting for the right to push their own standards; they just don't mind if someone else implements them too, since it all helps their non-browser business. But there's a fair amount of "we'll implement this, write up a useless description that doesn't actually describe how it works, throw it over the wall at the W3C, open-source the code, and claim that this is an open standard" going on in Chrome-land. This is how NaCl is being done, this is how a bunch of DOM stu

  • Chrome has already displaced Firefox as the largest non-IE brwoser in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and Chile; and other regions are following the same path.
    That's what I love about fair competition: now Firefox is bound to implement multithreads if it wants to catch up.
  • Because the awesome bar is.. awesome!
  • I do a lot of business in Indonesia and Malaysia, as well as Egypt and Peru. The browsers people use, and versions they use, have to do with bandwidth, which in turn has to do with availability of affordable computers. In countries where the hyper-rich are the only ones with internet, they tend to have whatever speed of PC and bandwidth they want. As the nation gets more and more penetration, and "emerging middle class" starts to get online more (the case in Indonesia and Malaysia and Egypt), bandwidt

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