How do I know? On the 18th of August, I posted a few comments about my web stats and noted that 57% of you used Firefox. At that time, Internet Explorer accounted for about 20% of visitors. Today, I checked again and it’s 39% apiece for both Firefox and IE users.
Incidentally, I also discovered that ’shortcomings’ is one of my top search terms… No. really. Check it out. Not sure I can monetise that one.
I like Flock, the social web browser. The integration with blogs, photo-sharing and online bookmarking sites is really well done. And the design looks fantastic. Having a built-in RSS reader is a great bonus and miles ahead of Firefox’s Live Bookmarks or the weird and unintuitive use of feeds in Thunderbird or Opera. So am I moving from Firefox? No way.
Part of the problem is that I can emulate almost every feature of Flock with a Firefox extension that is considerably more mature than the social browser. Flock is still in beta one as I write. My Firefox extensions are all version three, or later. I have the del.cio.us extension for bookmarking. I have the Bloglines bookmarklets for RSS feeds as quick buttons on my toolbar, along with a dozen other websites and Wordpress buttons. I have the Performancing extension for blogging (that one’s on trial, I have to admit, since it munged up the Fred Flintstone post a few days ago). I haven’t got anything to integrate photosharing, I’ll have admit, but since I store my photos rather than share them, that’s not really a big loss.