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IE Market Share Drops to Lowest Level in Years

Cultural Mosaic writes "Browser market share figures for September were released yesterday, and the numbers showed a big dip for Internet Explorer, as it dropped to just 82.10%, its lowest market share figure in years. Ars Technica notes that 'it's no surprise that Internet Explorer has been losing ground steadily over the past couple of years. There have been no significant innovations in the browser since XP SP2 was released over two years ago, and most of those were security tweaks.' Firefox grew from 10.77% in June to 12.46% while Safari jumped to its highest figure ever, 3.53%. I wonder how the release of Firefox 2.0 and IE 7 later this month will change the game?"

9 of 386 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Site stats by rolfwind · · Score: 5, Informative

    I think IE would be even lower, but a lot of businesses and school have IE and "force" it on them.

    My college has IE on all of it's terminals, so I guess, at times, I am a dot in their corner, although I consider IE less than useless w/o tabs and with pop-ups.

  2. Re:FF 2 doesn't seem to have fixed the memory leak by CRCulver · · Score: 4, Informative

    As said time and time again, Firefox's large memory use is caused not only by memory leaks, which are now presumably fixed, but also by generous caching, which is a feature that will stay around and which you can turn off if you want.

  3. Re:Queue up the anecdotes by Tom · · Score: 3, Informative

    should've posted this:
            Windows 3196755 93.5 %
            Linux 81396 2.3 %
            Macintosh 68457 2 %

    Just to illustrate that this truly isn't a "geek site". 93% dumbs. :-)

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  4. It's a shame that... by PurifyYourMind · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...this number may go back up when Vista is released and/or if/when Microsoft pushes out IE7 as a Windows Update.

  5. It would be interesting to see... by Tarlus · · Score: 3, Informative

    If somebody were to produce a large-scale statistic of people who use IE because they prefer it over Firefox (or other browsers), I think we'd see much larger numbers in favor of Firefox instead of IE. (Not to sound like flamebait, but this is true.)

    It should be noted that IE's share is still as high as it is because it's the default. A large number of PC users aren't even aware that there are alternatives to IE out there, or even what the advantages/disadvantages of different browsers would be, so of course the slice of the pie for IE will be the largest.

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  6. Re:FF 2 doesn't seem to have fixed the memory leak by Com2Kid · · Score: 4, Informative

    I used to think that FF had memory leaks (and I also have a Toshiba Portege Tablet PC!), but it all turned out to be due to plugins.

    Google's plugin for FireFox is the worst offender, but others do it as well.

    This add-on detects a lot of leaks, but only of one particular type. It can give you a good idea if you have a plugin that is leaking emmensly though (as the Google plugin does...)

    I *love* the Google plugin's features, but it leaks memory so fast... It does a damn good job of giving FF a bad name though!

  7. Usage stats for hotels.com by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    These numbers match what we are seeing at hotels.com. Needless to say we get a bit of traffic:

    (For 9/1 - 10/11)

    • IE: 79.56
    • FF/Win: 8.64
    • Safari: 3.77
    • FF/Mac: 0.84

    Safari and FF usage goes up every month, and has been for at least the past two years.

  8. Firefox memory usage... by pavera · · Score: 4, Informative

    Ok, I've seen so many posts on this article about firefox using an inordinant amount of RAM... I've been using firefox exclusively since like .9 or something...
    I have a browser open on my laptop 24x7.... I've never had firefox crash, and I've never seen it use more than 100MB of ram... just now for kicks I did a small test, I've only got 3 tabs open, my email, slashdot, and msnbc... firefox is using 52MB of ram, so I opened IE opened up the same 3 sites, and wow look at that 47MB of ram...

    MS can probably get away with 5MB of savings because they are using already loaded system libraries for a bunch of stuff, that's the advantage they get by integrating the browser into the OS... Now, if people are really going to switch browsers for 5MB of RAM then Firefox is doomed.

  9. Don't hammer nails. by eddy · · Score: 3, Informative

    Presumably, they're not [only] caching files, they're caching already processed data structures (parsed documentss). You disk cache only knows files. If you want to be fast when going to the previous page for instance, that is what you have to do.

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