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Dutch Survey Shows IE Web Share Below 90%
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."
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.
Useless sig.
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?
It's official. Most of you are morons.
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.
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.
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.
.net login in XP).
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,
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.
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.
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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