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Why don't we just call it what it REALLY is, which is a cash grab for the debt drowning EU? Look at the numbers folks, IE is a fricking corpse. Other than business, which sticks with an older version for some crappy Intranet apps IE has been going down down down quarter after quarter, and even the dumbest of the dumbasses know how to type the word Google into IE and get Firefox or Chrome and the numbers? It shows that. Hell even my little old lady customers come in and I find Firefox or Chrome on their desktops every. single. time, even the old folks don't use IE anymore.

Now what is the "horrible crime" that MSFT did? they forgot to add the updated browser choice screen when they rolled out SP1...Oh wow, somebody forgot to add something to a build, its a conspiracy! Did the EU bother to ASK them about this? Did they bother to even give them a CHANCE to fix it? Nope its "Give us teh monies! Nom nom nom!".

I'm sorry but bullshit is bullshit, and I don't give a fuck if it was Apple, Google, or MSFT, hitting someone with some insane fine for having a fuckup without even bothering to contact them and give them a chance to fix said fuckup is just wrong and makes this seem like what it is...a cash grab. Hell even the FSF will tell someone they have fucked up and give them a chance to be in compliance before they start suing, but the commission can't even pick up a phone and say 'Hey did you forget something?". What bullshit.

Look also here: http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-eu-monthly-201108-201208

Not a problem.

Top 5 Operating Systems From Jul 2011 - Jul 2012

Worldwide
Asia
Africa
South America

The closest Linux has come to far-reaching popular acceptance is in Android --- and the one thing Android clearly is not is traditional community oriented Linux distribution.

Not a problem.

Top 5 Operating Systems From Jul 2011 - Jul 2012

Worldwide
Asia
Africa
South America

The closest Linux has come to far-reaching popular acceptance is in Android --- and the one thing Android clearly is not is traditional community oriented Linux distribution.

Not a problem.

Top 5 Operating Systems From Jul 2011 - Jul 2012

Worldwide
Asia
Africa
South America

The closest Linux has come to far-reaching popular acceptance is in Android --- and the one thing Android clearly is not is traditional community oriented Linux distribution.

Not a problem.

Top 5 Operating Systems From Jul 2011 - Jul 2012

Worldwide
Asia
Africa
South America

The closest Linux has come to far-reaching popular acceptance is in Android --- and the one thing Android clearly is not is traditional community oriented Linux distribution.

as Windows XP still holds half of the market.

I think you confuse "market" with "install base". The two are not the same - it's not like everyone with an XP machine will get a new XP machine when they upgrade, for example.

And even if looking at install base, it's likely not true. This chart shows W7 surging ahead of XP in October last year, and while granted, not all computers browse the net, or in a way that triggers statcounter, there's little doubt that W7 has overtaken XP. If nothing else because companies can't buy machines with XP anymore, so as they switch out their old machines in a typical 3-5 year cycle, the new ones will be W7.

But I doubt they will be W8, which seems to be a productivity killer, not meant for busy workers who multitask.

Where I work, the migration to W7 is almost complete - most of the remaining XP installations that can't easily be upgraded have been virtualized, like other legacy x86 operating systems.
Windows 8, I doubt will happen at all, except perhaps for marketing.

But that was well over a decade ago, how is that relevant today?

For one answer:

Top 5 Browsers from Jun 2011 to Jun 2012 --- Europe

Top 9 Mobile Browsers In Europe From Jun 2011 to Jun 2012

Mobile vs. Desktop --- Europe

The mainstream desktop browsers are competitive running under Windows. The mobile browser is bound to the OS.

But that was well over a decade ago, how is that relevant today?

For one answer:

Top 5 Browsers from Jun 2011 to Jun 2012 --- Europe

Top 9 Mobile Browsers In Europe From Jun 2011 to Jun 2012

Mobile vs. Desktop --- Europe

The mainstream desktop browsers are competitive running under Windows. The mobile browser is bound to the OS.

But that was well over a decade ago, how is that relevant today?

For one answer:

Top 5 Browsers from Jun 2011 to Jun 2012 --- Europe

Top 9 Mobile Browsers In Europe From Jun 2011 to Jun 2012

Mobile vs. Desktop --- Europe

The mainstream desktop browsers are competitive running under Windows. The mobile browser is bound to the OS.

It's funny how all you Linux advocates claim you can't work a Windows machine, but Linux is no problem. Even though the majority who've tried Linux have clearly come to the exact opposite conclusion if you look at its flat market share.

Interestingly if you plot say all the results from this year as a line graph, you can see dips and peaks which relate to the weekends. Does this imply that people were using IE at work and then Chrome at home?: http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-daily-20120101-20120708

Check these statistics out, they are certainly closer to reality. Total IE share is around 34%, Chrome 31%, FF 21%, Safari 5%. And this is the interesting part -- they tell us that Objective-C is taking over C++ and iPhone/iPad devices hold 80% of the mobile market, yet Safari only captures 5% of the browser market share. Interesting. So, who's lying?

It has firefox near 50% in 2008, to give you an idea of how bogus this is.

Want more realistic stats? Check this, which has IE at a more realistic 30%:
http://gs.statcounter.com/

W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user. The average user tends to the browser that comes preinstalled with their computer, and do not seek out other browser alternatives.

These facts indicate that the browser figures above are not 100% realistic. Other web sites have statistics showing that Internet Explorer is a more popular browser.

Net Applications collects stats for 12,415 clients the size of Disney, Apple, Microsoft, Roche, the Moz Foundation, CNN, the WSJ, the New York Times and so on. The guys paying for these stats don't give a damn about the geek. They do give a damn about what is happening in their core markets.

Desktop Browser Market Share

Statcounter exposes more of its stats --- and there can be some big surprises:

Top 12 Browser Versions In China

Mobile vs. Desktop in China

W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user. The average user tends to the browser that comes preinstalled with their computer, and do not seek out other browser alternatives.

These facts indicate that the browser figures above are not 100% realistic. Other web sites have statistics showing that Internet Explorer is a more popular browser.

Net Applications collects stats for 12,415 clients the size of Disney, Apple, Microsoft, Roche, the Moz Foundation, CNN, the WSJ, the New York Times and so on. The guys paying for these stats don't give a damn about the geek. They do give a damn about what is happening in their core markets.

Desktop Browser Market Share

Statcounter exposes more of its stats --- and there can be some big surprises:

Top 12 Browser Versions In China

Mobile vs. Desktop in China

Global Statistics from StatCounter is more holistic. 32.76% for Chrome this month, vs. IE's 32.31%. Not shabby, but hardly the landslide w3schools is reporting.

http://gs.statcounter.com/ is my goto site for this. It has IE at 32% http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-daily-20120702-20120708-bar

http://gs.statcounter.com/ is my goto site for this. It has IE at 32% http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-daily-20120702-20120708-bar

Numbers for mobile in India get not so damned impressive if you check their mobile OS stats. It's mostly feature phones and old smartphones, so "ahead of others in mobile adoption" looks more like "behind others in tech availability"

And yet Flash isn't quite going away in Win8. In fact, originally it was said that it will. Then, suddenly, in Release Preview, there's full Flash support out of the box in desktop IE on both architectures, and limited support (basically a whitelist of supported sites) in Metro.

The short answer is in the stats:

Mobile vs. Desktop --- Worldwide

Mobile vs. Desktop --- Japan

Mobile vs Desktop --- China

Mobile vs. Desktop --- India

The numbers for mobile in India are damned impressive. But they are not typical of the world as whole --- and while the geek may rant and rave, there is no doubt who owns the desktop:

Top 5 Operating Systems --- Worldwide

And yet Flash isn't quite going away in Win8. In fact, originally it was said that it will. Then, suddenly, in Release Preview, there's full Flash support out of the box in desktop IE on both architectures, and limited support (basically a whitelist of supported sites) in Metro.

The short answer is in the stats:

Mobile vs. Desktop --- Worldwide

Mobile vs. Desktop --- Japan

Mobile vs Desktop --- China

Mobile vs. Desktop --- India

The numbers for mobile in India are damned impressive. But they are not typical of the world as whole --- and while the geek may rant and rave, there is no doubt who owns the desktop:

Top 5 Operating Systems --- Worldwide

And yet Flash isn't quite going away in Win8. In fact, originally it was said that it will. Then, suddenly, in Release Preview, there's full Flash support out of the box in desktop IE on both architectures, and limited support (basically a whitelist of supported sites) in Metro.

The short answer is in the stats:

Mobile vs. Desktop --- Worldwide

Mobile vs. Desktop --- Japan

Mobile vs Desktop --- China

Mobile vs. Desktop --- India

The numbers for mobile in India are damned impressive. But they are not typical of the world as whole --- and while the geek may rant and rave, there is no doubt who owns the desktop:

Top 5 Operating Systems --- Worldwide

And yet Flash isn't quite going away in Win8. In fact, originally it was said that it will. Then, suddenly, in Release Preview, there's full Flash support out of the box in desktop IE on both architectures, and limited support (basically a whitelist of supported sites) in Metro.

The short answer is in the stats:

Mobile vs. Desktop --- Worldwide

Mobile vs. Desktop --- Japan

Mobile vs Desktop --- China

Mobile vs. Desktop --- India

The numbers for mobile in India are damned impressive. But they are not typical of the world as whole --- and while the geek may rant and rave, there is no doubt who owns the desktop:

Top 5 Operating Systems --- Worldwide

And yet Flash isn't quite going away in Win8. In fact, originally it was said that it will. Then, suddenly, in Release Preview, there's full Flash support out of the box in desktop IE on both architectures, and limited support (basically a whitelist of supported sites) in Metro.

The short answer is in the stats:

Mobile vs. Desktop --- Worldwide

Mobile vs. Desktop --- Japan

Mobile vs Desktop --- China

Mobile vs. Desktop --- India

The numbers for mobile in India are damned impressive. But they are not typical of the world as whole --- and while the geek may rant and rave, there is no doubt who owns the desktop:

Top 5 Operating Systems --- Worldwide

They were coasting on Windows XP for over a decade.

Windows XP was released in 2001 and Windows Vista 2006. Microsoft didn't coast, the users sure did though (with many home users and businesses still holding on to Windows XP) and no matter how you cut it five years is not a decade.

It wasn't until Apple starting to pose a threat with Mac OS X

OSX isn't (nor was it) a threat, it has less than 10% of the desktop market share here too, which until recently was less than Vista alone. If you want to compare particular versions of OSX it would be 10.5. Your threat argument might be better if it were referring to iOS on mobile devices. There also seems to be a lot of backlash over Lion.

Similar story with the Zune, Windows phones, and now tablets.

They've had success with the Xbox 360 and hardware. Microsoft had some dud launches and dysmal releases for certain but they're not alone in this. Apple has had its share of defects most recently with their iPhone4 antennas and blaming users for holding the phone wrong. Here is a nice list of some Apple failures.

I think your stats are off. IE 6 finally went below 1% in the US, IE 7 is right next to it at 1.75%. It is about as good as dead except for a few corporations who cling to that as well as IE 6 and IE 7.

Websites will stop working soon, but hey it is your computer if you want to use something that less than 2% of the market uses

Go over to statcounter and take a look at the fine graph. IE is markedly down, FF is more or less stable durring the time period IE started seriously declining and has actually bumped up recently. This would not be the case if Chrome's stats were merely inflated. Make your argument based on facts, not a preconceived notion of what they should be.

For Chrome, there is a related API that both NetMarketShare and StatCounter are using to figure out what is really happening.
http://netmarketshare.com/prerendering.aspx
http://gs.statcounter.com/faq#prerendering

StatCounter recently announced that they have updated their data as of May 1, 2012 to reflect prerendering in Chrome. However, there is no indication of either methodology

They state the methodology in their FAQ:

BROWSERS: Do you adjust your browser stats for prerendering/pre-loading?
Two browsers are affected by preview-type requests - Chrome and Safari.
Chrome
Further to a significant number of user requests, we are now adjusting our browser stats to remove the effect of prerendering in Google Chrome. From 1 May 2012, prerendered pages (which are not actually viewed) are not included in our stats.

Some points to note:
Prerendering was announced by Chrome in June 2011. This change did not have any significant impact on our stats.
Chrome is currently allowing the detection of prerendering behavior via its Page Visibility API.
Google specifically states: "
Important: This is an experimental API and may change-or even be removed-in the future, especially as the Page Visibility API standard, which is an early draft, evolves."

This means that in the future it may not be possible to track/remove the effect of prerendering on Chrome. If other browsers adopt prerendering then it may not be possible to track/remove the effect of prerendering on those browsers. In that case, the fairest solution would be to include all page views (prerendered or not) for all browsers rather than only excluding prerendering in Chrome. That scenario would require us to revisit this methodology change in the future.

We publish a graph showing total prerendered page views tracked in Chrome, together with the portion of prerendered pages which are not actually viewed by the end user. The prerendered pages (which are not actually viewed) are removed from our stats. For May 2012, the percentage of prerendered pages (not viewed) in Chrome is approximately 1.3%. Note that this change has not had any significant impact on our browser stats. This is due to our use of page views to track browser usage - page views are less susceptible to influence by prerendering than unique visitors.

Safari

The Top Sites feature in Safari shows preview thumbnails of frequently visited sites. These preview thumbnails are refreshed by Safari periodically. Unfortunately, it is not possible to exclude these previews from being tracked. To get a bit technical, this is because the "X-Purpose: preview" header is only sent with the request for the base page. The header is not sent as part of requests for images, CSS or JavaScript that have to be downloaded and executed as part of the Top Sites preview. With online web analytics (as provided by StatCounter) the relevant header information is not passed so these preview requests can't be detected and therefore can't be removed. Ideally Safari will change this to ensure to send the "X-Purpose: preview" header with all Top Sites HTTP requests, however this is not the case at present.

Interesting that Safari is still being over-counted though.

So are MS just complaining about a problem which was already fixed before Chrome topped IE in their rankings? That's how it sounds at least.

From StatCounter's FAQ, and also noted on all of their graphs for this time period:

"Further to a significant number of user requests, we are now adjusting our browser stats to remove the effect of prerendering in Google Chrome. From 1 May 2012, prerendered pages (which are not actually viewed) are not included in our stats."

http://gs.statcounter.com/faq#prerendering

BROWSERS: Do you adjust your browser stats for prerendering/pre-loading?

Two browsers are affected by preview-type requests - Chrome and Safari.

Chrome

Further to a significant number of user requests, we are now adjusting our browser stats to remove the effect of prerendering in Google Chrome. From 1 May 2012, prerendered pages (which are not actually viewed) are not included in our stats.

Some points to note:

Prerendering was announced by Chrome in June 2011. This change did not have any significant impact on our stats.
Chrome is currently allowing the detection of prerendering behavior via its Page Visibility API.
Google specifically states:
"Important: This is an experimental API and may change-or even be removed-in the future, especially as the Page Visibility API standard, which is an early draft, evolves."

This means that in the future it may not be possible to track/remove the effect of prerendering on Chrome.

If other browsers adopt prerendering then it may not be possible to track/remove the effect of prerendering on those browsers. In that case, the fairest solution would be to include all page views (prerendered or not) for all browsers rather than only excluding prerendering in Chrome. That scenario would require us to revisit this methodology change in the future.

Safari

The Top Sites feature in Safari shows preview thumbnails of frequently visited sites. These preview thumbnails are refreshed by Safari periodically. Unfortunately, it is not possible to exclude these previews from being tracked. To get a bit technical, this is because the "X-Purpose: preview" header is only sent with the request for the base page. The header is not sent as part of requests for images, CSS or JavaScript that have to be downloaded and executed as part of the Top Sites preview. With online web analytics (as provided by StatCounter) the relevant header information is not passed so these preview requests can't be detected and therefore can't be removed. Ideally Safari will change this to ensure to send the "X-Purpose: preview" header with all Top Sites HTTP requests, however this is not the case at present.

I tell everyone to use a far better decrapifier. Those who have listened always thank me profusely every time the subject comes up.

The probability that a geek will post a oh-so-cleverly disguised link to a Linux distribution as the all-purpose solution to any problem with Windows approaches 100% on any online forum ---

but the trend line for Linux adoption remains as flat as the Kansas prairies.

Top 5 Operating Systems From Apr 2011 to Apr 2012
OS Platform Stats 2003-2012

The good folks who post to Ars Technica have grown rather weary of the business --- and quite sharp with those who continue to waste their time.

No [cnn.com], it just isn't.

No, that's sales of new devices. Existing devices don't just go poof and disappear every month (though mobile vendors and carriers wish that was true). Wikimedia's stats say ~75% Windows clients. Other stats show similar numbers.

All computing devices? How many computing devices do you use in a day that run Microsoft software?

OK, I should have said "personal computing devices" so you couldn't pretend you didn't understand what I meant. If you include all the servers, then Apple becomes completely insignificant, so the original point becomes moot. And even if you combine server and desktop values, MS will still be dominating, as Windows server share is somewhere in 30-45%. But of course we should count all the routers, DVD players, calculators and toasters, then MS of course is just a poor unfairly singled out minor vendor.

No [cnn.com], it just isn't.

No, that's sales of new devices. Existing devices don't just go poof and disappear every month (though mobile vendors and carriers wish that was true). Wikimedia's stats say ~75% Windows clients. Other stats show similar numbers.

All computing devices? How many computing devices do you use in a day that run Microsoft software?

OK, I should have said "personal computing devices" so you couldn't pretend you didn't understand what I meant. If you include all the servers, then Apple becomes completely insignificant, so the original point becomes moot. And even if you combine server and desktop values, MS will still be dominating, as Windows server share is somewhere in 30-45%. But of course we should count all the routers, DVD players, calculators and toasters, then MS of course is just a poor unfairly singled out minor vendor.

There's a pretty big reason why all these changes are being implemented; that's where a large portion of the users are at

True. Especially true for web browsing. Mobile long overtook desktop and currently climbs up to 95%... Ah goddamit! I hung the damn thing wrong side up! Somebody tell Mozilla the desktop's still alive!

Yeah, and if you look behind a bit, you'll see that Meego took 5% in less than three months of launch as well.

Second, s/Lumia launch/Lumia 900 launch/. Two previous Lumia models weren't all that sunny for Nokia, and the link speaks about 710 and 800. There are no official 900 numbers yet, AFAIK.

Third, Finland, as Nokia's home turf isn't quite representative - in most other countries neither WinPhone nor Meego can even break out of "Other (dotted)". Though you can see Nokia's decline as Finland's favourite by Symbian being steadily replaced by Android, but it's tangential to current topic.

Those also seem to be the worst available numbers, since it's from the disreputable anti Nokia troll pulling numbers out of his ass.

For example, lets look at Statcounter Data for mobile OSes in Finland.

http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-FI-monthly-201201-201203
(click on the legend for other OSes to make them disappear from the graph).

You see that it's a straight up increase for the Lumia since launch in Feb and taking about 5% share in less than 3 months of launch and still uptrending, with the N9 pretty stagnant at 2%.

Just a note: w3schools is a terrible site and furthermore, it's statistics are not from the web at larger but only from their site, which is obviously very biased towards webdevs. More reasonable samples like those from StatCounter show that IE is still the most used browser, although extrapolating the switch seems near.

According to statcounter XP in the United States is dying very fast if you include Aprils numbers. Home use on the weekends is only around 18%.

It is not good enough for most users anymore. Its old and will have a place in conservatives hearts like Windows 98, 95, and W2k did. Meanwhile its time to move on.

Answer is here:
http://gs.statcounter.com/faq#pre-rendering

I doubt they measure number of pages when measuring market share here.

Wrong, that's exactly what they do: Why do you base your stats on page views rather than unique visitors?

And yes, they're aware of the prerendering Chrome stats inflation problem, even though they believe it doesn't significantly skew their stats, for some reason they're unable to explain themselves (sounds like "faith" or "we're too lazy to adjust our data even though we could").

I doubt they measure number of pages when measuring market share here.

Wrong, that's exactly what they do: Why do you base your stats on page views rather than unique visitors?

And yes, they're aware of the prerendering Chrome stats inflation problem, even though they believe it doesn't significantly skew their stats, for some reason they're unable to explain themselves (sounds like "faith" or "we're too lazy to adjust our data even though we could").

The Infoworld article is pretty funny, and confirms what many have long assumed. However, while I'm just as anxious as anyone else to see earlier iterations of IE get their deserved due, a wider breakout shows something else: http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-daily-20120101-20120402

In linked three-month period by browser version, notice that IE9 also has the same corresponding spikes (albeit smaller) on weekends. Possibly that reflects no active choice on part of home users who just use the default install (while corporate continues to play catch-up). But it might also represent a segment that simply continues to prefer IE (the "web-compliant" kind).

"Adoption of the HTML5 video element has been hampered by the lack of (software vendors like Microsoft and Apple implementing WebM)" is closer to reality

Companies that won't support H.264: Mozilla
Companies that won't support WebM: Many...

Not to mention that for mobile devices, in many cases the hardware support for WebM is missing. H.264 is what almost all cameras record in now. H.264 is what professionals use in BluRays etc. H.264 is what pirates tend to use. Almost everybody, everywhere is using H.264, apart from the WebM beta on YouTube I haven't seen it used anywhere. Firefox represents one web browser, zero devices and a microscopic share of the whole video format ecosystem but think the whole world will bend to their will for WebM. The rest of the world will continue to work with H.264, while Firefox is worked around with Flash/H.264 until Mozilla either changes their mind or becomes irrelevant. Which I suppose is the case on mobile, I can't even find them on the mobile browser stats.

I see you're quite a good conversationalist; you must be quite a blast at parties. No, the claim that Javascript interpreter speed may have a role in browser performance is not easily testable because the author lumped different versions of the browsers together. It's possible that some obscure intermediary version of Firefox, for example, had an exceptionally poor performance, and that this skewed the data. I have in fact determined that Aurora 12.0a2 seems to have no performance difference between IE 8 on my laptop, but this does not necessarily mean, either, that IE 6 performance is entirely ignorable. Given the statistics for overall browser usage it would be exceptionally improbable that these have an overwhelming role in confounding results, but the landscape could still be measurably different as a result. Given that Javascript engine performance has increased dramatically as a priority for browser manufacturers in the past five years, this data incorporates information from a very broad set of configurations.

At any rate, I find it very disappointing that you chose to focus entirely on one statement about Javascript engines and not consider the rest of my post, or the larger significance of the point I was making. Instead you chose to attack (and violently, I might add) one relatively arbitrary theory when you could have contributed by gently stating any objections, before positing your own.

Here is an example of how to make a rebuttal correctly, for future reference: "over the span of a million data points from across the planet, it seems unlikely that network latency would have presented a bias towards one browser or another, particularly since the differences are on the order of magnitude of several dozen seconds, the application does not need to talk to the server for the player's experience to continue. To produce the kinds of bias observed given the nature of the application, Firefox users would have to be several times further from the Earth than the moon."

Perhaps the phenomenal absurdity of your suggestion explains why none of us are capable of thinking of it. Unless you meant to say network bandwidth, as in "IE users are all on dial-up, which is why they haven't spent the time to download a more secure browser, and it actually takes them 30 seconds to download the page," in which case I sincerely hope your entire post was made in jest, and that you have something better to do than make condescending remarks about intellect.

If you're responsible for maintaining a corporate network that still has IE5 as part of its ecosystem, then a) you should be fired, and b) you won't need to worry about it for much longer, because MS is going to force an upgrade on you, and you probably don't know how to prevent it.

Users at home? Perhaps a different story. Though XP has been out for more than 10 years, and that's well beyond the replacement lifecycle of most computers (recall that XP shipped with IE6 out of the box), and most ISP's don't even support pre-XP SP2 any more... the folks who know enough to keep a computer working well for 10+ years are not in the demographic I'd be worried about still using IE5. According to this link, IE5 isn't even in the top 12 browsers world-wide, and number 12 on that list was 0.22% of the global market share in January. I don't think IE5 is something you need to worry about any more... IE6 maybe, but that is being forced out by a mandatory MS update, meaning that before too long, the only people who will still be running IE6 are in the corporate world.

There will always be idiot users, but if you know what you're doing as a network administrator, almost everything you listed won't actually be a problem for you: with the exception of people needing things "plugged back in", none of what you listed would be a problem at my office... even for the resetting of passwords, anybody on my team (who reports to the same manager) can do a manual password reset on the intranet. I get an e-mail saying it's been done and by whom, and that e-mail is cc'd to my manager, so if somebody starts abusing it, it's easy to figure out who. And even the "plugging things in" thing shouldn't be a problem, because the only thing users *can* plug in at their workstation is a keyboard/mouse. (well, and a thumb drive, but most of us have a system policy on our profiles that prevents Windows from mounting external storage)

Not sure where they got their figures from, but I imagine it's something to do with country figures etc. being updated, which can lead to such odd jumps. At StatCounter IE6 continued down from 1.78% to 1.56% and Chrome grew a lot. Firefox is on the downward trend though, though not as bad as IE. In fact at last month's rate of change (with all the dangers of extrapolation) Chrome would overtake IE as the world's #1 web browser in four months, at least according to StatCounter. They seem to disagree with 10-15% percentage points now.

Only 156,000 people care enough to restore the old behavior.

Nope, 156,000 people restored old behaviour by installing this extension. Indeed, we don't know exactly how many users restored old behaviour by installing 3.6 and how many didn't restore old behaviour, but chose new browser with new behaviour instead. All we can observe is this pretty correlation between introduction of FF4 with radically changed UI and acceleration of FF's user share decline

As for your take on Unity or UX designers, I couldn't care less. I'm not a UX designer, my Linuces don't have GUIs, and none of that has anything to do with why Google should pander to an exceptionally small number of toxic users..

You seem to miss the point. UX design matters and "not pandering to an exceptionally small number of toxic users" seem to mean "everyone who doesn't think as me is small and toxic" both for you and many UX designers. Unity was just an example of such "not pandering", as well as FF4. Google is safe for now, as it's the only real choice after migrating from IE and FF. If, for example, MS - I know, unimaginable - starts to "pander". while Google still disregards all them "toxic users" and proceeds on the because-I-wanted-to-put-in-this-feature development path, it will start bleeding users just like FF bleeds them now.

P.S.: And again you refer to "exceptionally small number of toxic users". You must be a real hit at parties.

Only 156,000 people care enough to restore the old behavior.

Nope, 156,000 people restored old behaviour by installing this extension. Indeed, we don't know exactly how many users restored old behaviour by installing 3.6 and how many didn't restore old behaviour, but chose new browser with new behaviour instead. All we can observe is this pretty correlation between introduction of FF4 with radically changed UI and acceleration of FF's user share decline

As for your take on Unity or UX designers, I couldn't care less. I'm not a UX designer, my Linuces don't have GUIs, and none of that has anything to do with why Google should pander to an exceptionally small number of toxic users..

You seem to miss the point. UX design matters and "not pandering to an exceptionally small number of toxic users" seem to mean "everyone who doesn't think as me is small and toxic" both for you and many UX designers. Unity was just an example of such "not pandering", as well as FF4. Google is safe for now, as it's the only real choice after migrating from IE and FF. If, for example, MS - I know, unimaginable - starts to "pander". while Google still disregards all them "toxic users" and proceeds on the because-I-wanted-to-put-in-this-feature development path, it will start bleeding users just like FF bleeds them now.

P.S.: And again you refer to "exceptionally small number of toxic users". You must be a real hit at parties.