If you peruse today's edition of the New York Times, you'll run across a huge ad from the Mozilla Foundation for their Firefox 1.0 browser, officially released in early November. (A beta version, though, has been out for a while.) Some 11 million people have already downloaded the software, slowly cutting into the dominant browser position of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. According to WebSideStory, a provider of Web analytics services, IE has a 91.8 percent market share vs. 4.1 percent for Firefox as of December 3. That's a drop of about 4 percentage points for IE since June. One advantage of Firefox over IE is that Firefox users don't seem to get barraged by those annoying pop-up ads. Who doesn't hate those? At his website, technology usability guru Jakob Nielsen highlights a study from Yahoo! and eBay presented at his 2004 User Experience conference that shows just how much users hate pop ups. In a survey of 605 people, pop-up ads garnered the most negative responses of any type of online ad, getting a "very negative" or "negative" response from 95 percent of respondents. People hate them even more than slow-loading web ads, ads that try to trick you into clicking on them, and ads that don't have close buttons.

# posted by James M. Pethokoukis at 2:00 PM EST
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