It’s been 5 years since Mozilla released its Firefox 1.0, the open source web browser has since then achieved amazing growth and community involvement from coders and developers around the globe.
Firefox has succeed to topple Microsoft’s IE that was grappling with security and vulnerability issues. Microsoft’s IE 6 was a big disaster when it launched with huge security bugs and issues, it was a nightmare for users using IE which constantly crashed. One of the prime reasons of exponential growth and usership for Firefox was Microsoft’s lack of innovation and product development for IE.
Firefox now dominates 24.07% of the web browser market stealing share from Microsoft’s monopoly position in the last 5 years. Microsoft share now stands at 64.64% from a high of 100%.
To celebrate its 5 th birthday, its having loads of contests, you can post a photo or video of your project to Flickr with the tag ‘Firefox5′. The best video and photos will be rewarded with a cool Firefox swag.
Microsoft finally got Yahoo to surrender control of Internet’s second most popular search engine. But I am very curious to know what you think, who gained in the Microsoft – Yahoo deal ?
Steve Ballmer’s is on a battle front in the online search engine market with the launch of Bing, he has made his intention very clear that Bing will be a serious contender to Google and Yahoo’s share in the search market. Microsoft’s share of the US searches is about 8 % , a distant third behind Google and Yahoo.
A look at Microsoft’s different search efforts in the last six months (the bid to buy Yahoo’ search capabilities and the successful launch of Bing ) shows that Steve Ballmer is a persistent guy. And now, Ballmer may be ready to try harder than ever, as he’s voiced a willingness to spend something like $2.25 billion per year on search.
According to Reuters , Ballmer said at a business lunch, “Our shareholders, I told them we were willing to spend 5 to 10 percent of operating income for up to five years in this business, and we feel like we can get an economic return.”
Bing grabbed 12.1 % of the US Internet searches for the june 8 – 12 work week, up from 11.3 % from June 1-5 compared to Google’s 65 % of US searches in May. Ballmer is counting on Bing’s ability to provide more focused search results to lure web users away from Google and Yahoo. Bing was launched this month replacing the company’s previous Live search engine.
Microsoft’s operating income in 2008 equaled $22.49 billion, so that’s a not-quite-commitment of about $1.12 billion to $2.25 billion annually or more, since Microsoft’s likely to pull in greater sums of money in the years ahead.
Ballmer said, “In our industry, the number one mistake that people make is that they quit too early. We should have started earlier, but we’ve got our mojo working now I am willing to be patient to give Microsoft’s Bing search engine time to catch on with web users ”
Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing got off to a good opening week of its public launch, according to an early report from comScore
The results of the analysis showed a substantial improvement in Microsoft’s position in the search market in the days after Bing’s launch, something that Live could not live upto since its launch.
Microsoft increased its average daily penetration among U.S. searchers from 13.8 percent during the period May 26-30 to 15.5 percent during the period of June 2-6, an indication that the search engine is reaching more people than before.
Microsoft’s share of search results pages in the U.S., increased from 9.1 percent to 11.1 percent during the same time frame.
“These initial data suggest that Microsoft Bing has generated early interest, resulting in a spike in search engagement and an immediate term improvement to Microsoft’s position in the search market,” said Mike Hurt, comScore senior vice president.
“So far it appears that the lifts in searcher penetration and engagement have held relatively steady throughout the five-day period. The ultimate performance of Bing depends on the extent to which it generates more trial through its extensive launch campaign and whether it retains those trial users. It appears it is off to a good start.”
Google Analytics report for this blog shows a high number of users from Bing.com in the last week. The referral numbers from Bing are much higher than the combined referrals from Live in the past three to four months. What has been your experience with Bing, have you seen any referrals to your website from Bing.
After a good first week will Bing be able to sustain its position in the search market ?
To protect web users from malacious web pages Google recently announced the release of a safe browsing diagnostic tool. With this tool Google has taken safe level browsing to the next level, they have build large scale infrastructure to automatically determine if web pages pose a risk to users. To use the tool, just append a URL to the end of http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=.
The Google safe browsing diagonstic tool is structued into four different categories :
(1) The current listing status of a site and information on how often a site or parts of it were listed in the past.
(2) The last time Google analyzed the page, when it was last malicious, what kind of malware Google encountered and details of the page.
(3) Did the site facilitated the distribution of malicious software in the past?
(4) Has the site has hosted malicious software in the past?
Google has shown an example of a site that has malicious results. To see the results, click over here, it is safe to click the link ( its provided by Gooogle as an example ). In case you don’t want to click the link I’ve uploaded a screen shot at the begining of the post.
