Results vary from continent to continent, with Firefox being a lot more popular in Europe than North America, for example.

The complete Internet Explorer collection still significantly outranks Firefox. IE6 alone is still in use by nearly one in six users.

I decided to take a look at a couple of our websites.

Firstly, Forever Geek, which you’d expect to be frequented by a more tech-savvy crowd, confirmed my belief.

Last month, Firefox overall had 50% visitor share, compared to Internet Explorer’s 30%, while in November ’08, IE had been sitting with 35% and FF still at 50%.

Moving to a site concerned with celebrity gossip, and likely to be frequented by a wider range of users, I found that IE took at 46% share compared to FF on 35%.

Again, Firefox had held its 35% share since November ’08, whereas IE had slipped from 51%.

Not particularly scientific, I grant you, but it’s interesting that in both cases, Microsoft’s browser has slipped five percentage points, while Mozilla’s baby has held its share.

There are a few more interesting numbers for those who enjoy this sort of thing.

Via

So anyway, it’s their fifth year, and the guys at Mozilla threw a birthday party at the beginning of this week. The birthday bash was held at the Terra Space in San Francisco. Naturally, Mozilla employees were there, together with their guests and some other people – probably present on an invitation only basis. (Obviously I wasn’t one of those.)

While Mozilla is celebrating five years of the existence of Firefox, the truth is that this web browser can trace its roots to a couple of years earlier than that, when Mozilla itself was founded. That was way back in 1998.

So what are people saying about Mozilla? Naturally, fanatics are singing praises. To balance it out though, let me quote David Coursey, who says:

On its fifth birthday, Firefox must be considered both an incredible success and somewhat of a failure. The open source Web browser is a great product and quite an achievement, but has not tremendously advanced the cause of “free” software. … You might think Firefox would have encouraged a wave of open source development, but from the perspective of a typical business or home user, it has not happened.

He does have a point, doesn’t he? Then again, for many satisfied users, I think that Mozilla Firefox is doing just great.

Photo courtesy of Business Insider

It doesn’t mention what this is in response to — Apple MacBook multitouch trackpad, perhaps, or the increasing number of mobile devices with touchscreens — but of course it is dependent on associated hardware to work correctly.

A device that could input touch data for two or more fingers could integrate with Firefox and allow for a number of commands to be executed without either mouse or keyboard shortcut input (though these could perhaps be used as modifiers).

What I really like is the “create new gesture” that would allow users to add their own commands — gesture macros if you like — which would execute based on a specific set of touch inputs.

This is something that’s not really been well explored on mainstream devices. Even the iPhone has a relatively small set of gestures in the main user interface, though individual apps could always add to this.

Having this in Firefox is all very well. Now how about it rolled out across the operating system. Both Apple and Microsoft are totally capable of doing this.

How about support for gesture input on other surfaces, like this really cool video on scratch input:

Well, in most languages there’s a way to dump out some of the bits and pieces from the headers, but getting both request and response can be a bit of a pain. But you don’t need to worry about that, now… just use LiveHTTPHeaders.

It’s a pretty simple tool. You set it up as a sidebar or have it open in a new tab in FireFox or Mozilla, and when you hit a page, it gives you your request and the server’s response headers. You can leave images, css, etc in or filter them out via regex.

Here’s an example:

GET http://forevergeek.com/ HTTP/1.1
Host: forevergeek.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10
Accept: text/xml, application/xml, application/xhtml+xml, text/html;q=0.9, text/plain;q=0.8, image/png, */*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Proxy-Connection: keep-alive

HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 17:01:15 GMT
Server: Apache
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 31837
Age: 16759

Here’s another one with a post request:

POST http://forevergeek.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi HTTP/1.1
Host: forevergeek.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10
Accept: text/xml, application/xml, application/xhtml+xml, text/html;q=0.9, text/plain;q=0.8, image/png, */*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Proxy-Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://forevergeek.com/
Cookie: user=JC(rest removed)
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-Length: 26
search=freeflatscreens.com

HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 21:44:38 GMT
Server: Apache
Pragma: No-Cache
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Length: 3919
Age: 2

So, grab it, make your life easier. Oh, I should note there’s a plugin for IE that’s supposed to do about the same thing, but I didn’t have much luck with it, which sucks, because I use IE more than I do firefox, though between LiveHTTPHeaders and the Web Developer Toolbar, that’s changing.

I’m curious… did this solve a problem for you? Do you already use this, or something else? What do you guys use?