“Will Linux Users Miss Out on Firefox 3?” by Sean Michael Kerner talks about the release process for Firefox in Linux distros — basically taking note of the fact that distros repackage Firefox and thus it may be a bit of delay between the official Firefox release and when it shows up in distro updates. The headline is a bit misleading, I think — if you’re skimming Google News or a bunch of RSS feeds, the impression is “oh goodness, Linux users might not be able to use Firefox 3?” That would be news, if it were so, because I’m sitting here typing into a Firefox 3.0 RC while reading it…

It’s also a shame he didn’t talk to anyone on the openSUSE team or with Novell about our policies for Firefox…

But no, Linux users won’t “miss out” on Firefox 3. They might start using it a day or two later, assuming they’re running Firefox using the packages supplied by their distros instead of the tarballs from Mozilla. (Right now, I’m running one of the RCs using Firefox’s tarball myself, on top of openSUSE 11.0…)

I think the article presents the delay as something of a hassle or detriment to users, but doesn’t really take note of the fact that the distros do testing of Firefox updates to make sure they’re not passing on any problems via the update.

Also, I might add, it could be pointed out that Firefox’s update mechanism is necessitated by the fact that Apple and Microsoft don’t distribute Firefox — so their update mechanisms don’t do anything for the third-party software (like Firefox) that their users run.

Linux distros, on the other hand, have streamlined the update and distribution channel for thousands of applications — it’s entirely possible for users to get most (if not all) of their software directly from the distro, and avoid worrying about when and where updates are coming from. A single update mechanism will bring in all the required updates for software packaged and shipped as part of the distro — which is way more convenient.

I don’t think this feature gets nearly enough attention when Linux is discussed. (And I don’t just mean openSUSE here — to be fair, you get this advantage from all of the major distros…) About 98% of the software I use right now is directly available in the openSUSE repositories, so I don’t have to install and track it separately.

I was perusing my blog statistics this morning via StatPress, and found some interesting statistics. I was curious to see what operating systems and browsers were most common among visitors to my humble digs here, and the numbers are not what you might expect.

I also see a huge opportunity for the Linux desktop, when I look at these numbers.

With 25.1% of the “market” that visits this blog, Konqueror comes in a close second to… Internet Explorer 6. Firefox places third after Konq, with 22% of the visitors.

IE6 has 28.6% of the share, and then IE7 with 13.3% and FF3 is already climbing the chart with 3.4%. FF 1.5 has 1.8%, so if you unify the Firefox stats, it would come in second over Konqueror, but only slightly.

Operating System Stats

Operating systems stats indicate that Windows XP is still alive and kicking with 47.6% of the visitors hitting my blog using XP. I don’t have a breakdown of SUSE versions, just one lump sum of SUSE, which accounts for 36% of the visitors to the blog. Generic Linux only has 6.5%, and Mac OS X is the next OS, with 2.3%.

I assume that XP has such a strong showing because many people are visiting the blog from work (hello, slackers!) and/or surfing the Web using Windows while they do some research on Linux. I’ve also been linked from a few non-Linux specific blogs, so that is going to set the traffic stats a bit askew.

The other interesting thing to take from this is that Windows Vista comes in with only 1.8% of the traffic. More than a year after its release, Microsoft hasn’t managed to capture much market share with Vista, despite its marketing prowess. (If you haven’t seen that video yet, go watch.)

I think we have a window (no pun intended) of opportunity here to capture some of the elusive desktop market share. Microsoft is playing catch-up, for a change. Its customers don’t want Vista, and it is having trouble reconciling the market’s desires with its corporate strategy.

Right now, Vista’s biggest competition is XP — we need to change that, and make sure that Linux (and openSUSE/SUSE in particular…) is a more attractive option. We can’t assume Microsoft’s next release will be as bad or poorly received as Vista, so we should be focusing on the consumer and business desktops, particularly now.

A quick note for those of you who might be interested in testing Firefox beta 3, but also want to have access to the del.icio.us extension — an alpha of the next version of the extension was posted on April 4, which does work with FF3 beta 5.

You have to sign up for the Yahoo! group to access the file while it’s in testing, though. But, if you were holding off on this extension to use FF3 beta, it’s all good. I’ve used it over the weekend and yesterday, and haven’t run into any problems with it yet.

Also, FF3 beta 5 has been fairly stable — two crashes since I started using it six days ago, which is a bit of an improvement over FF2, so no complaints there.

Just curious — has anyone created an openSUSE Firefox Persona? I’ve installed the Personas extension, and wouldn’t mind having a Geeko/openSUSE themed persona to go with my Firefox.

Just grabbed Firefox 3.0 beta 5 — it’s looking real good so far, so I thought I’d post a few notes about the release. I spend far more time than is healthy at the computer, and Firefox is probably the application I use the most (next to Vim) so expect more commentary on this throughout the week.

Nothing jumps out at me as a huge change from Firefox 2.x, but I see lots of little improvements here and there, and it feels faster, even though I don’t have any hard data to support that.

This may be the release that causes me to break up with del.icio.us for good. Not because I don’t like the site/service, but because I always have to choose between using Firefox development versions or using the del.icio.us extension for Firefox. I strongly prefer using del.icio.us to using Firefox’s own bookmarks, particularly since I use multiple machines and trying to sync bookmarks between browsers is usually a pain.

But, it never seems like the del.icio.us extension supports the development releases. Since I like to hop on the development releases of Firefox with the last round of alphas or the first round of betas, I have to decide between my bookmarks or the browser for several months.

The good news is that I’m able to import the del.icio.us bookmarks with no problem. The bad news is that all of the tagging is lost, so all I have is an uncategorized lump of nearly 700 bookmarks that isn’t terribly useful in that form.

What is useful is that I can create a tag and then a smart folder from the tag and put that in my toolbar. So, I can have a smart folder of all bookmarks tagged with something like “openSUSE” and have them show up in one folder on my bookmark toolbar. This is how I was using del.icio.us, and it’s very convenient.

Back to work, more to come on the beta soon. If you’re using the Firefox 3.0beta builds, feel free to comment on your experience or any new features you find useful. I’d be curious to hear what others are finding.