Slashdot Mirror
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."
Now tell this to everyone who wants to hear it. Firefox had a great start, and was covered in most newspapers. Let's make sure this story (IE's marketshare rapidly declining) gets heared aswell. Humans are herd animals. If everyone seems to be doing something, they will follow.
The real question is if this term is long term. Right now IE is really loosing its share because it really sucks a lot. But when/if longhorn comes out with the new version of IE hopefully they would fix the major issues such as popup blocking control, Better support for the standards, and stronger security settings. Microsoft isn't dumb and they know more then what there people in marketing let on. Sure people are switching to other browsers right now. But if the next version of IE with there copy of windows gets updated. Will they switch back if they get all they wanted. A lot of people especially on windows systems switch to FireFox because it sucks less then IE. FireFox isn't a WOW this is the most amazing thing I have ever seen browser it is just well it is good enough without the popups and spyware loading every day. Most users don't use the tab browsing even after I show it to them they still open an other window, usually and rendering speed is usually a null point to them just as long as it is in the same range. An extra 1/2 second loading a site like Slashdot will not make a difference, just as long as everything shows up they are happy.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
i'll get bored of "IE losing marketshare" stories when i stop hearing people say "IE is the standard so we only need to test our websites against it". banking/utilitiy sites especially.
i work for a small company heading up their i.t dept. and i make sure that all the pc's that i support use firefox. trouble is, they are all windows xp machines (through necessity - if i had my way it would be otherwise dammit!!) and windows keeps on launching ie in a number of nefarious ways such as links embedded in outlook and sent via msn messenger. unless someone can suggest a quick fix (other than the obvious 'ditch windows' response - i would be interested) it's going to stay that way as i haven't got the time to visit all of our pcs and hack at them for an hour or so. but, back to my point, surely this sort of thing has an impact on stats?
Actually 10% should be were all the major browsers should actually be. There is IE, Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, Safari, Koncor (sp?), Opera, and others. In a good world the major players should have 10-20% of the market share and that is about it. Microsoft with its 90%+ marketshare with there products is a fluke in the system and shouldn't be.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Only this morning I attempted to log onto the UK national lottery site only to find it tell me I needed a supported browser.
I complained in vain to their customer service people just got back a standard we only support IE ignoring all my privacy / security / platfrom worries (im a Mac user).
A CD ripping guide for CDex I wrote gets its major share of hits from Firefox, Mozilla and Opera.
:-)
This may be because IE cannot display the page -- XHTML 1.1 should be served as "application/xml+xhtml" , which IE barfs at. Could I be arsed to write a browser detection script? Could I, punk?
Hardly a surprise considering that Microsoft showed off MSN search using FireFox! :D
my school just finally took ie off of all of our computers, both mac and pc. im wondering if this will make a difference, as most people used it just because thats what they were familiar with. i don't see any reason to even touch that app.
Well actually I think that since a large portion of PC's are in Offices, you will see a change when employers start getting rid of their 800-pund-microsoft-certified-gorilla IT services... in my experience they don't want to hear of anything but IE because "our dotnet infrastructure requires it" or "our vendor contract doesn't allow it" or "quit wasting my time you drone".....
Otherwise this would be one more statistic right ehre and now...
-if at first you don't succeed, stay the heck away from paragliding.
I sadly can't claim the same. I'm about 8% IE, 93% FireFox. (Used MS Calculator to check my numbers, there.) I never open IE on purpose, but sometimes it still magically launches for the express purpose of updating me to the latest spyware. I mean - I have to manually click Run... and type in 'iexplore' to get the thing open, but some spyware isn't as lazy as you'd think.
With the stats of December 2003:
We can see some interesting trends, namely the little change for IE 6.0 but the interesting increase of Mozilla. So is Firefox eating away at IE or rather taking the small marketshare of people who already look for alternatives to IE? (Yeah, I know, this is so little data it's not representative of anything, just a curiosity
---- Take the Space Quiz!
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.
That's only one half of the story. The other half is that IE has really error tolerant code - it can render very badly formed HTML. So people who write bad HTML and then test with IE will never know, but their sites will fail in most other browsers.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
Remember, Opera identifies as IE6 by default, so IE6 is probably under 80%, and Opera probably has another 1%. Other browsers like Konqueror and Safari don't by default but they can, and Proximitron users can change their UserAgent header as well. And most of the time, they probably pretend to be IE. I would bet IE6 has 2% less than what they think.
I had a similar issue about a month ago. 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.
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
It was pointed out on slashdot once before (I really am not planning on finding out when, sorry) That once Microsoft disbands a software team, it is nearly impossible for them to reassemble it:
Since they have many projects at a time, when a project is finished (like IE was several years ago,) they re-assign all but a couple of the developers, who may end up in 5 different new projects. Once they start working there, it would be disruptive to those projects to take key developers out. Furthermore, it's been years since these people looked at their own code on IE. It will take them months to re-acquaint themselves with it.
It siomply is near-impossible for Microsoft to do this without deciding to do a new version of IE, which would require a major commitment and a big push. They need to feel pretty threatened first, and firefox isn't there quite yet.
I'm a concientious
A web development means for MS:
So Microsoft faces a dilemma. And they are losing no matter what they do.
You simply cannot get accurate statistics from observing HTTP traffic
How come? I would have thought that a large enough sample would provide useful information, albeit not perfect information.
Surely it depends what statistics you're gathering? Clearly we can't draw conclusions about precise market share, but surely trends might be identified? For example, current surveys hint at a trend away from Internet Explorer; should we disregard this as a statistical hiccup?
NB. I'm not trolling, or even particularly disagreeing, but I would like more evidence/citations to support your viewpoint.
This is where the serious fun begins.
I know a few web devs and they all test their web pages with IE and not much else. When told that this is bad, their answer is simply that 95% (some say 98%) of users use IE so there is no need to test the web pages with multiple browsers. I bet they use the same excuse to their PHB's.
Publish these reports enough, and the PHB's will hear about it. They will wander in an ask the web dev whether the company site works fine with firefox, and real soon you'll find those devs putting in the extra time to make sure the site works with browsers other than IE.
The more that firefox's growing market share is publicised, the more sites will begin to support it properly, not the other way around.
East Coast Brewers
Has anyone noticed that there's been a serious lack of browser innovations since the death of Netscape? I remember how during the good old days of the browser wars both camps would come out with new features and nifty ideas all the time.
With Netscape's passing, all M$ has been doing is sitting around on their fat a$$es and doing NOTHING. Not even fixing bugs that have been out for months!
Hopefully with the rise in popularity of Firefox, competition will heat up again, which ultimately leads to better products for consumers.
One downside though, is that during the "innovation" periods, competing browsers hijack standards so much (especially M$) that most websites break upon rendering, and required lots of ridiculous re-work.
eTrade SUCKS
I don't understand why there's not more support on Slashdot for Opera. It's been fighting IE for years. (And Firefox now incorporates many of its ideas). An arguement I hear against free software is that there's no one to hold responible if something goes wrong. Well, Opera is not free, so there is someone to hold responible.
Despite what some people may think, it's possible to have more than one browers installed at a time. I have Opera and Firefox both on my machine. I'm checking out Firefox but I find myself switching back to Opera often.
I'm not anti-Firefox. I just don't understand why it gets all the attention.
And a related question: How can I find information on how to program a Firefox extention. I can't seem to find any links about coding one from the Firefox website. (And google didn't help either.)
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
You'd think that slashdot crew don't uses IE, but surveys in the past has show the contrary.
Besides, slashdot is now frequently cited as sources of news in multiple IT news sites around the world.
So why not putting a Firefox ad in the top of the page? I bet there're a lot of users who look at slashdot from a IE browser just because there was a link in other news site or because they're working or because they like lokking to slashdot. One would think that so many Firefox topics showld have convinced to many but...why not a firefox ad in the front page and in each one of the articles?
It's strange, though. Closed-source companies like Nintendo and id Software get plenty of coverage, and are almost worshipped by large parts of the Slashdot crowd, it seems.
So I can't imagine why Slashdot would ignore Opera. So, it's closed-source, but it is also "the third browser", and has been around since the days of Mosaic. And as I said, Slashdot generates a lot of hype for other closed-source companies, including Apple.
Clever signature text goes here.
Yeah, buddy... *you* go ahead and run your financial software seamlessly over the internet. Just give me a call when your internet goes down, or the application fails, and you need someone to design a *real* application, that you own, that works in-house, that has no dependencies on external services.
Integration is great for some things, but it will never encompass everything.
"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"
.NET does) then it doesn't matter what the client is running. Microsoft STILL makes money, just in a different way.
.NET, although I'm hesitant to say it), and still makes money. It's freaking brilliant.
I think you're missing the point. Microsoft no longer cares about increasing desktop market share. Let's say they lose 5 percent, maybe 10 percent, of overall marketshare. They have 80% of the world's machines running Windows. That's not a big enough dent to worry about.
On the othe rhand, they're looking around and seeing all these handheld devices (Blackberries, cell phones, etc). Sure, they have "Windows Mobile Smartphone Edition", but it'll be a while before that takes off. Why not go after the real growth market: backend application servers? If they target standards (like
Basically, what MS is doing is patently ingenious. They're shifting their attention away from their dominant market to growth markets. Even if they lose share in the dominant market, they're still in a comfortable position. This gets antitrust off their back, caters to the geeks (I'm actually fairly impressed with
I would have thought that a large enough sample would provide useful information
Useful information on what? Examining your own logs to determine how best to tune your web servers is useful. Thinking you can determine who is using what software is not.
Clearly we can't draw conclusions about precise market share, but surely trends might be identified?
Not really. All it takes is a large ISP like AOL to tweak their caching parameters, or for Microsoft to push out a service pack, and you can see a gigantic change in traffic with zero difference in market share.
For example, current surveys hint at a trend away from Internet Explorer; should we disregard this as a statistical hiccup?
If you can back up those surveys with evidence, no. But httpd logs are very flimsy evidence. Traffic analysis alone is not enough; there are two separate aspects - the design of HTTP, which can't support analysis on this level; and the assumption that traffic corresponds to market share.
Firstly, the design of HTTP. Unless you switch off caching of your HTML, you aren't going to get anywhere near the right figures. If you switch it off, if you have a website that has enough traffic to count for anything in these statistics, it will cost you real money and will slow down your website. Chances are, if somebody does that, it's because they are clueless rather than they value the stats more than the cash - and if they are clueless can you expect them to gather statistics reliably?
Even then, there are biases. There are biases towards Internet Explorer (spoofers generally emulate Internet Explorer rather than otherwise, etc) and biases against Internet Explorer (users of Windows are more likely to be both Internet Explorer users and "firewall" users that block things like the User-Agent header, etc). All sorts of random odds and ends that alone are likely to be swept under the carpet because they are small and these analysts can't account for them.But probably more importantly, these analysts are equating traffic with market share which is a mistake. The best example I can think of to illustrate this is Google. Given identical market share, a browser that has a Google search field built in will send, on average, about half as much traffic to Google as a browser that doesn't have it built in (assuming the user prefers Google, of course). Simply because the toolbar users won't be loading the Google front page first. Identical market share, half the traffic. The same sort of thing can happen across a wide range of websites, problems with some browsers not caching things when they should artifically inflates the numbers for those browsers, for instance.
NB. I'm not trolling, or even particularly disagreeing, but I would like more evidence/citations to support your viewpoint.
Well half of it's just common sense, but I really wish people would ask these analysts how they have accounted for these things, because the surveys I've seen in the past simply ignored the issues, and the popular web statistics packages that everyone likes to quote from are all pretty flawed, e.g. the commercial ones assume cookies are always present, always written to, etc.
If you want second opinions, the person who wrote the most popular logfile analyser in the world agrees with me, and even links to a study done at Xerox. Another decent introduction to the issues is Why web usage statistics are (worse than) meaningless.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
After rereading my letter, I think it may have been a bit harsh (and I sound a bit zealotous). Also, to answer a later post, it is a small hometown bank that uses a third party for online banking. Lastly, when I did call their tech support line, while they could offer no good advice, did mention that I was not the first caller regarding the matter.
To whom it may concern;
For the last two years I have been using my XXXXX account to do online bill paying. I have never had a problem using Mozilla as my browser of choice, and in fact I bank at several sites using Mozilla. I do not and will not use Internet Exporer browser to access these sites due to the numerous security issues surrounding this browser. In fact, the Department of Homeland Security has recommended *not* using Internet Explorer (you can find many references if you do a search on google.com). As such, you must realize my concern.
Upon realizing what was happening, I contacted XXXXX who gave me a toll free number to the technical support people for the XXXXX service. Their immediate (canned) response was that they only support Netscape and Internet Explorer. Netscape is compiled from the same code as Mozilla and as such is exactly the same browser as Mozilla -- except that Netscape has advertisements. Even after explaining my concerns, the only answer from them was that Internet Explorer is the recommended browser and that Netscape (same thing as Mozilla mind you) should work.
I am not an uninformed consumer. I am a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer and Microsoft Certified Systems Administrator. I think I know what I am talking about with regard to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. You can also follow these links for more information.
1). "The U.S. government's Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) is warning Web surfers to stop using Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) browser." http://www.internetnews.com/security/article.php/3 374931
2.) "...the usually staid U.S. government's Computer Emergency Readiness Team, or US-CERT, published a warning strongly suggesting that users of Microsoft's Internet Explorer should switch to another Web browser, due to "significant vulnerabilities" in technologies included in IE. " http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,640 65,00.html?tw=wn_story_page_prev2
Now, you can imagine my dismay when this morning I could no longer access the BillPay section of the XXXXXX site. This was due to a redirect to another page based on my browser (Mozilla). In other words, the web developers of this site have looked at my browser, determined that it was not an Internet Explorer browser, and then rejected my access to the site based on the fact that I was not using an insecure browser (Internet Explorer).
Upon realizing what was happening, I contacted XXXXX who gave me a toll free number to the technical support people for the XXXXX service. Their immediate (canned) response was that they only support Netscape and Internet Explorer. Netscape is compiled from the same code as Mozilla and as such is exactly the same browser as Mozilla -- except that Netscape has advertisements. Even after explaining my concerns, the only answer from them was that Internet Explorer is the recommended browser and that Netscape (same thing as Mozilla mind you) should work.
I would not be so upset by this if there were actually something wrong with the Mozilla browser; however that is not what was stopping me from accessing the site. The fact that this site first checks to see what browser I am using and then rejects access after determining that I am using a browser that they do not like. There is absolutely no technical merit in this decision. Not to mention, the fact that it was implemented with no notice of their intent to do so. Mozilla was fine yesterday, it is not today. This is unacceptable.
After hearing such a canned answer (the operator admitted that she had received several calls today concerning Mozilla bro
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
In the context of your statements then it may be important to realize that many Microsoft Server products, most notably Exchange 2003, do _not_ require IE anymore, although certainly the behavior of Outlook Web Access is more enjoyable in IE than in FF. In fact, in my organization I've only needed IE for windows updates and Software Update Server to work properly. Is this the sign of a paradigm shift over at Redmond?
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.