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Dutch Survey Shows IE Web Share Below 90%

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the women-and-children-first-mind-your-step dept.

happycorp writes "We've seen a few too many Firefox articles by now, but it is gaining a real presence in the market: Onestat reports that IE's share is down to 88.9% marketshare, with the combined Mozilla browsers above 7%. While we saw this trend much earlier in particular communities such as w3schools this is the first time IE has dropped below 90% in a general survey. Also interesting, the w3schools page shows a steady parallel increase in both Linux and Mac OS global marketshare over the last 18 months."

22 of 428 comments (clear)

  1. Fads. by damu · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The real numbers and the true impact of Firefox will only mean something after 6-12 months after all the press dies down. Another thing is that MS is really has not doing anything yet, anything publicly, so assuming there will be a responce from MS then we will see how FF withstands on MS's direct line of sight.

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    1. Re:Fads. by mordors9 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Since these statistical studies are only good at showing trends and not absolute numbers, it may be further out than that. I would note that MSIE is just under 90% and the other set of numbers show that windows usage is almost the same figure. This would seem to indicate that Windows people are still all using IE with very few exceptions (I know and those few are all on /.). That the growth in the alternate browsers is just due to the growth in Linux and MacOS.

    2. Re:Fads. by instanto · · Score: 2, Insightful

      We must also find out how these statistics are created. Could the IE numbers be even lower, due to some browsers have chosed to identify themselves as Internet Explorer and not Opera, for example.

      I believe the old opera versions were pre-configuerd to "identify as internet explorer 6.x" due to issues with a lot of (stupid) web sites 'requiring' IE.

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  2. I think I'm missing the point by Tim+C · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why is this significant? Because it appears to corroborate earlier reports?

    What is there here to discuss? We all know that Firefox, Mozilla, Opera etc are (currently) better bets for surfing than IE, saying it yet again won't change anything. It won't convince anyone to switch, it won't convince any company to support a wider range of browsers. It's the very definition of preaching to the choir, in fact.

    How about spending a little less time talking about how great the alternative browsers are, and how much better it would be if more sites supported them properly, and a little more time actually working towards that?

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    1. Re:I think I'm missing the point by luvirini · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Market share actually has a bearing on many companies thinking. If you propose a soplution and they ask how many use it, and the response is 1% or 10%(though currently only 7%) there is a mental difference. A 1% means a marginal thing. a 10%+ means a viable alternative.

  3. 10% still looks too small by linuxci · · Score: 5, Insightful

    10% still looks to small to some narrow minded web designers that think that people who don't use IE are idiots or a geek.

    25% market share is where everyone who counts will start taking Firefox seriously, I think a time will come in the near future when that will happen. It's having a knock on effect at work here, I installed 1.0 on all the machines here and simply said "use Firefox as your web browser as it will lower the number of virus problems that we have", most people are now using it and some people have even installed it in their homes (most people here are not technical).

    People need to spread the word, alternatives are good if Firefox gets at least 25% and the others also have sizable market shares (e.g. Opera above 5%) then this will be good for us all.

    1. Re:10% still looks too small by Khuffie · · Score: 3, Insightful
      As a web designer, I have to tell you that it's not easy to support all browsers equally. Granted getting the site to work in Mozilla is a given, but some of the mundane errors that crop up when trying to get them to work properly is extremely annoying, and half the time the errors make no sense at all.

      The real problem is supporting all the 'smaller' browsers too. Opera, Safari and IE 5.5 for the Mac (which some idiots still use...) all have their little chinks and quirks too that you have to take into account. Sometimes there's simply no time to get it all looking perfectly...

      Frankly I don't care about all the "omg firefox extra features secure weeeeeeeee!" talk, because if I want all that I can just get Maxthon, which has all the 'extra features' that Firefox has (most of which you really need extensions to fully utilize ;) but uses the IE shell as a browser. There needs to be an active enforcement of CSS and HTML standards that ALL browser manufacturers have to adhere by, or be forced to eat their balls, or something equally horrific.

    2. Re:10% still looks too small by jd142 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The only problem with that analogy is if it costs $100,000 to get a new door knob but that 10% of the market only brings in $50,000 in profit over the life of the new door knob. In that case, you're $50,000 in the hole if you go after that 10%.

      It's called diminishing returns and it shows up in a lot of places. You might also have heard it as the "last mile" problem. It costs more money to go after the uncaptured part of the market than the upcaptured part of the market will generate in profits. In which case you really are better off letting that part of the market go.

      There are exceptions to this of course, such as investing on the ground floor of a trend. But even in cases like that what you're saying is "While I'll lose money this year and next year to capture that 10%, I will establish a presence in this emerging market that will make me a greater profit in the long term."

      In other words, all of this isn't really as simple as it first appears. ;)

    3. Re:10% still looks too small by edunbar93 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      10% still looks to small to some narrow minded web designers that think that people who don't use IE are idiots or a geek.

      Um, it's worth noting that roughly 80%+ of the internet population knows about nothing beyond e-mail and the web. To them, the web *is* the internet. Tucows? Downloading? Browsers? If it doesn't come with the computer, it doesn't exist.

      In fact, I think you would be shocked at the number of *webmasters* that have no clue whatsoever. It never ceases to amaze me to hear from people designing web pages for their business in Frontpage, and the painful process of explaining to them that no, we don't support that, it's horribly insecure and a royal pain overall, and that they have to download something called FTP. Most of them have asked questions like "download?" or "upload? I just want to publish!"

      So many people have trouble with basic computer usage that getting them to try an alternative to that icon on their desktop called "The Internet" is a huge conceptual leap. 25% market share for any software that is an alternative to what comes with windows is a pipe dream.

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  4. Re:How Long by jokumuu · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I do not think there has been much WOW! feelings in web browsers for a long time. The browser is quite "mature technology" in it's current incarnation. I think that for the WOW! effect would require one to move away from the browser, into some other format.

  5. Re:What's the critical marketshare threshold... by Vegard · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The reason so many pages works so well in IE and not in others, is *not* that IE works better. It's just that people design and test against IE. And not against the other browsers. The reason for this? IEs market share.

    By tolerating and giving in to this, using IE, you are part of the problem. *You*, and the millions others that tolerates this. Firefox works very well today. Some IE-specific pages not rendering quite as nice as in IE, is a *very* small price to pay, compared to the benefit there is in restoring the notion of designing browser-independent, STANDARD HTML.

    The reason we others like the fact that the share of people using Firefox grows, is *exactly* this. We like competition. We like standards. We like there being alternatives.

    And, some of us doesn't have the option of using IE at all, without switching operating system.

  6. Ongoing illegal abuse of the desktop monopoly by SgtChaireBourne · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Yes, 90%+ market share despite poor products and competitors with excellent counter parts is a problem. If you count the US courts as a reliable source, then the cause has been from illegally leveraging the monopoly in the desktop markets to gain entrance into new markets. In that example it was to enter the web browser market and crush Netscape.

    The same is being attempted in the EU by leveraging the desktop monopoly to force WMP's file format into the audio/video streaming market, probably with a goal to go after HDTV in general.

    Firefox is good in that it brings up a little public awareness about good products. Also, it's not too far a lead for the rare curious individual to then find out how MSIE got so much market share and what it takes to get rid of MSIE and make the computer secure. With a little digging, they can easily find out about more good products to replace the shoddy MS ones.

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  7. mentioned on dutch radio news too by rixdaffy · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It was even mentioned on dutch radio news, as it is reported through the central press agency (ANP)... it's weird to hear about "the firefox internet browser" on my radio :)

  8. Re:How Long by Bigby · · Score: 2, Insightful

    You have some valid points, but it will be quite difficult to have Firefox start up very quick unless they keep the application in memory like IE. This has been done, but I don't think they've put this "feature" in Firefox.

    Also, the taskbar is not tabbed browsing. Can you go to slashdot and single (middle) click on all the articles you want to read, allowing them to load in the background for later viewing? In IE, you have to right click, then click "open in new window", then that page is loaded above your current page. It is better and more efficient to do your tasking in groups, and selecting articles you want to read before reading any of them is not efficient in IE.

    Although IE has a popup blocker, I don't trust it, as I think MSN has popups. The blocker may be biased, and hasn't been tested in the real world. But maybe I'm wrong here.

    I don't care about whether a product is OSS, but Firefox does the right job for browsing the web as a developer or general end user. I also think Linux right for a developer, but not for the general public, but that's another issue. :)

  9. Re:What we need is to remember... by SilentChris · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Actually, it's more along the lines that the browser isn't an important business model anymore (or ever was, for that matter); see my comment from yesterday. All this talk about percentage signs and "market share" are foolish, because there is no "market".

    Personally, I use whatever I happen to have at hand. If I'm at home I use Safari on my Mac, Firefox on my PC. If at work, I use IE. If I'm telneting somewhere, Lynx (if it's available). In the car, my phone's browser. The point is the browser is just a window to the real business models, and anyone still comparing browser numbers is either an MS IE developer (the 3 that are left) or Mozilla diehards.

    At this point, everything targets standards. Even ASP .NET, like I mentioned yesterday no longer pushes ActiveX crap onto the client. Ditto on Apache, of course. It doesn't matter what you use to view the content. What matters now, from a business standpoint, is what's running on the backend to deliver that content.

    To plumb a buzzword ("application services") I really don't think we're even going to recognize a "browser" in 10 years. We'll be too busy running our word processors, financial software and games straight over the internet. The "browser's" border will become transparent, and you won't need to know (or care) what you're using.

    Application providers will realize (they've already begun to) that it makes no point targetting IE if your clients suddenly move to Blackberry, for example. They're targetting standards now (the most basic HTML that'll run on anything) and the browser is being relegated to a window environment.

  10. Re:What we need is to remember... by geordie_loz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The reason it's important, is why Microsoft fought the war in the first place. Microsoft wanted the way Internet Explorer does things to be the standard. It wanted any web based systems (which is becoming increasingly larger a market - although I don't think it'll be the size that people really think) will require Internet Explorer to run.

    The upshot of this is that if Internet Explorer is required to be used, then Windows is required to be used, and therefore no matter who is providing the web-based services, at least microsoft will be getting some money, and it'll make it easier for them to "bundle" their web-services into the browser by default (aka, .net login in XP).

    If the browser becomes interchangeable, then the platform will too, and Microsoft cease to be in control, so there goes all the people who use their services because they're installed as default.

    Naturally the people who'd use Microsoft's defaults would be less likely to use Mozilla or other OS's, but there is concievably a time when these things can be pre-installed, especially to save cash from an OEM point of view.

  11. Re:What's the critical marketshare threshold... by Jucius+Maximus · · Score: 2, Insightful
    "I do most of my day to day banking online. My bank has, for over two years, never had an issue with Mozilla or FireFox. One Friday I tried to access my accounts and the normal login was redirected to a "Your browser is not secure, please use IE" page. I wrote a lengthy email to the admin in charge of the site (they did provide an email address on the page). I explained my concerns with security in IE and ended the email explaining that although I had been their customer for 7 years, I would take my business elsewhere before using IE for banking. The following Monday morning I was able to access my accounts with Mozilla and I recieved an aplogetic email from the admin to boot."

    I think it would greatly benefit the community if you published (without names) your letter so it can be used as a cookie-cutter kind of thing to try to get other organisations to make these kind of changes too.

    I recently sent one to the webmaster of dilbert.com and some changes to make it more standards compliant were made on that same day, but it sounds like you made a much more eloquent, erudite argument.

  12. Re:What we need is to remember... by arendjr · · Score: 4, Insightful

    To plumb a buzzword ("application services") I really don't think we're even going to recognize a "browser" in 10 years. We'll be too busy running our word processors, financial software and games straight over the internet. The "browser's" border will become transparent, and you won't need to know (or care) what you're using.
    Yes, we will quite likely be using word processors over the (inter|intra)net in some years. But we won't be doing so over HTML, because it's simply not up to the task. So we need a next generation markup language for that. Currently there's only one contender, and that's Mozilla's XUL. Microsoft will try to push its own format with the introduction of Longhorn, namely XAML. If Mozilla takes off and XUL becomes a real standard before XAML even sees the daylight, Microsoft has a real problem. They will either need to adapt XUL or loose the backend market as well. That's why Microsoft should be worried for Mozilla.

  13. YOU are missing the point by onlyjoking · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The point is not how much market share Firefox or Mozilla have by themselves. The point is that 11% of users are not using IE so that must surely make the owners of IE-only ecommerce sites think again.

  14. Re:What we need is to remember... by robertjw · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Have you been reading the news lately? Every indication is that Microsoft is VERY concerned about losing market share. All we here are veiled threats to sue Linux (users, developers, advocates, etc...), Ballmer spouting off about increased efficiency and reports and analysis of the first dividend payout.

    I would be surprised you don't think Redmond is nervous about something.

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  15. Mozilla will get greater market share if it suppor by tarikida · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Mozilla will get greater market share than what it has now if it starts supporting Dynamic Fonts. Lot of indian websites are using Dynamic Fonts to render their pages due to issues with regular font support. We browse lot of indian newspaper websites daily and we could read only if our browser supports Dynamic Fonts. Newspapers are not going to change its current process as IE users have no issues and they constitute 90% more of the hots. Once again we have lot of population and we could change the statistics if Mozilla starts supporting Dynamic Fonts

  16. Re:Slashdot vs. Opera... by MrNemesis · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Oh, to have mod points!

    I can't begin to state how much I agree with you. I switched to Opera in the 5.x days after my "don't use IE!" zealot flatmate convinced me to give it a whirl, and after running pretty much every browser I know of (IE, Nutscrape, FireFox and all it's forebears, Moz, Konq, etc etc) I still keep going back to Opera (and have two fully paid up licenses, one for Linux, one for windows).

    It's lean, fast, small and uber-configurable to a degree that FF and Moz aren't (either that or I'm missing something about FF's configuration). Yes, the default UI and theme are a bit messy (how I wish they'd switch to Wonderland as the default skin), which I think will put alot of new users off.

    FireFox is rapidly catching up with Opera in terms of functionality (and has some killer features like Live Bookmarks), but as a long time Opera user there's too many usability niggles; like the way the entire page is re-rendered when you gesture back, instead of it being pulled from RAM like in Opera. Ho-hum.

    I'm not a FF basher by any means either - I have both installed on my home computers, and have standardised of FF at work (with Opera for those who prefer it). The "bad" press it gets on /. is a bit of a mystery to me; yes it's closed source, but it's one of very few closed source apps that, IMHO, is better then the OSS equivalents. Yes, the ads are irritating if you're used to not having them, but you quickly learn to zone them out.

    If you don't like Opera, don't use it. But please don't continually post how Opera sucks cos of ads, or any one of the hundred other FUD's I've seen perpetrated against it's name. Until very recently, it was hands down the best alternative browser for the windows platform.

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