http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=0

shows top 3 as IE, FF, Safari. All of which are supported.

FF3 on Mac however is not fully supported. According to CNet Macs only account for 7% http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10...html?tag=mncol of FF total users. Now FF current penetration is 22% (yes really.) So that puts Mac FF users at about 1.5% of total browser traffic? It would be slightly ahead of Chrome in total traffic. One could expect it to grow, but at the current rate, it should still be well below 5% in a couple of years. I'm not saying no chance, but I am saying - give me some solid reasons to justify it. I think from a business perspective the current solution makes a lot of sense. We are covering IE @ 67.4%, FF @ 20.2% (I subtracted the mac users on ff), and Safari @ 8% - that covers 95.6% of users.

Hope that helps,

--Allen



-----Original Message-----
From: Adobe Director [mailtoIRECT-L (AT) LISTSERV (DOT) UARK.EDU] On Behalf Of Valentin Schmidt
Sent: Tuesday, March 31, 2009 9:02 AM
To: DIRECT-L (AT) LISTSERV (DOT) UARK.EDU
Subject: Re: [DIRECT-L] mayor problems with SW11 in FF 3.0.6 PC?

Allen Partridge wrote:
> Confirmed. Only Safari is supported on Mac. If you want FF3 supported
> on Mac that's a feature request - I'd start buying Krishnan cases of
> something now for that one. Essentially there are currently about 50
> playerversions (language = 16 x ie + ff + safari) you'd be expanding
> that by ffx2 so essentially increasing the testing by 25%. That said,
> browser penetrations are moving targets - maybe its time we
> re-examined it. Anybody have ff penetration numbers in the mac space?

wow, that sounds as adobe hasn't even tried to get the FF bugs finally
fixed on the mac?
I had thought that this must be a mayor goal and developpers were
struggling for this for months to get it finally straight. am I too naive?

I'm involved in a big shockwave audio application, and many of our users
are musicians and therefor the percentage of mac users is rather high,
and many of them use firefox (which AFAIK in germany is more common than
in the US). telling them they can't use firefox but have to reload the
same page in safari simply sucks. as long as some mayor browsers are not
supported by shockwave, I think the usefullness of shockwave for web
applications is rather limited.

cheers,
valentin

---

Allen Partridge wrote:
> http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=0
>
> shows top 3 as IE, FF, Safari. All of which are supported.
>
> FF3 on Mac however is not fully supported. According to CNet Macs
> only account for 7%
> http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10...html?tag=mncol of FF
> total users. Now FF current penetration is 22% (yes really.) So that
> puts Mac FF users at about 1.5% of total browser traffic? It would be
> slightly ahead of Chrome in total traffic. One could expect it to
> grow, but at the current rate, it should still be well below 5% in a
> couple of years. I'm not saying no chance, but I am saying - give me
> some solid reasons to justify it. I think from a business perspective
> the current solution makes a lot of sense. We are covering IE @
> 67.4%, FF @ 20.2% (I subtracted the mac users on ff), and Safari @ 8%
> - that covers 95.6% of users.

I really don't care much about international numbers, if national/local
numbers are different, and, propably more important, if numbers in the
multimedia/music oriented public are totally different from those
general numbers which are "biased" by large companies which for
internal/pragmatic reasons stick to the worst browser on earth, the MS IE.

if FF mac won't be supported in the near future, I promise I'll never
deal with shockwave apps anymore (that's no threat, just a fact :-)

cheers,
valentin

---

I don't know about international or even national numbers, but I can say
that at my company, 100% of the Mac users are on Firefox 3.

---

On Mar 31, 2009, at 1:01 PM, Mike Blaustein wrote:

> I don't know about international or even national numbers, but I can
> say that at my company, 100% of the Mac users are on Firefox 3.

What, both of them?

---

Colin Holgate wrote:
> On Mar 31, 2009, at 1:01 PM, Mike Blaustein wrote:
>
>> I don't know about international or even national numbers, but I can
>> say that at my company, 100% of the Mac users are on Firefox 3.
>
> What, both of them?

hey, does adobe pay you for lobbying against firefox mac support?
if not, what's your motivation?
;-)

valentin

---

On Mar 31, 2009, at 1:27 PM, Valentin Schmidt wrote:

>> What, both of them?
>
> hey, does adobe pay you for lobbying against firefox mac support?
> if not, what's your motivation?

I was making fun of people like me, who use Macs even with a lot of
people out there using PCs. I was implying that 100% of Mac users in
his company meant just two people. The joke didn't have anything to do
with Firefox.

Mind you, if Adobe did pay me, I might be tempted to lobby against
Firefox support...

---

Allen Partridge wrote:
> http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=0
>
> shows top 3 as IE, FF, Safari. All of which are supported.
>
> FF3 on Mac however is not fully supported. According to CNet Macs only account for 7% http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10...html?tag=mncol of FF total users. Now FF current penetration is 22% (yes really.) So that puts Mac FF users at about 1.5% of total browser traffic? It would be slightly ahead of Chrome in total traffic. One could expect it to grow, but at the current rate, it should still be well below 5% in a couple of years. I'm not saying no chance, but I am saying - give me some solid reasons to justify it. I think from a business perspective the current solution makes a lot of sense. We are covering IE @ 67.4%, FF @ 20.2% (I subtracted the mac users on ff), and Safari @ 8% - that covers 95.6% of users.
>
> Hope that helps,
>
> --Allen
>
However, of the number of Shockwave users that are using Macs, what
percentage of them are using FF? I don't see a number in your post that
addresses that question. If we can agree that Director is touted as
working on the Mac as well (that's a no-brainer), and if - for
argument's sake - 100% of Shockwave users on macs are using FF, then
that 1.5% becomes rather significant, doesn't it?

Josh

---

On Mar 31, 2009, at 1:53 PM, Josh Chunick wrote:

> 100% of Shockwave users on macs are using FF, then that 1.5% becomes
> rather significant, doesn't it?

Not really, because as was argued already, many Firefox shockwave
users would know to visit sites using Safari for them to work. All
that matters is that anyone uses Firefox at all, and if that's a
significant number of people, then it's an even better argument for
supporting it.

If support was purely based on percentages, then all Mac apps would
just come from Apple, and Linux users would have no apps at all. So
I'm not complaining.

---

Colin Holgate wrote:
> On Mar 31, 2009, at 1:53 PM, Josh Chunick wrote:
>
>> 100% of Shockwave users on macs are using FF, then that 1.5% becomes
>> rather significant, doesn't it?
>
> Not really, because as was argued already, many Firefox shockwave
> users would know to visit sites using Safari for them to work. All
> that matters is that anyone uses Firefox at all, and if that's a
> significant number of people, then it's an even better argument for
> supporting it.
>
> If support was purely based on percentages, then all Mac apps would
> just come from Apple, and Linux users would have no apps at all. So
> I'm not complaining.
Yes, I get that argument, and it's certainly more to-the-point because
it's likely the real situation.

But I think you missed my point - presented as a hypothetical - which
had to do with the way Allen was looking at the statistics. He was
looking at 1.5% being such a small percentage of the overall 100% of
shockwave users that we needed to bring up other reasons for Adobe to
pursue making Shockwave work in FF3 on the Mac, right?

In actual fact, if you look at the same numbers, but from the
perspective that the 1.5% of mac users trying to access Shockwave on
their macs are FF3 users too then 1.5% becomes much more significant
because it reperesents 100% of your user base. Again, that's just
hypothetical to show that percentages and statistics can be misleading,
at best and easily manipulated at it's worst. The idea I just presented
is nothing new in the study of statistics.

Josh

---

One argument I sometimes make is that it doesn't matter how many of
your client's customers use a particular machine or software, it's
whether the head of the company uses a particular machine or software
that counts. Just imagine if the head of Google uses Firefox on a Mac,
send him a link to a shockwave example, and watch the whole Adobe/
Google deal get threatened because of lack of Firefox support.

---