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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?"
does that mean OSX has at least 3.57%..
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
I find that my site gets about 45% Firefox or Mozilla hits, not counting my own of course. At about 130 unique visitors a day, that's not a big enough sample to mean the numbers of 12% are wrong, but definitely demographics play a large role in browser type. As Taco has pointed out, nearly all Slashdot readers use a Mozilla/Firefox browser. Sorry Mac fans, Safari isn't that big yet.
Oh You POS
"Firefox is 73% on my blog..the one about Firefox"
"92% on my Unbuntu users group blog"
etc
Just the other day you said IE's market share was up, and now it's down? But... but... you both have statistics! I don't know what to believe.
IMHO, the new releases could be very good or very bad for Firefox. It all depends on if they fixed the common complaints about it. If it's not such a memory hog, and doesnt lock up after being open too long, I'd say it could solidify Firefox's user base. However, a lot of people I know are really fed up with that. I think that's it's largely an addiction to tabs that keeps them loyal. Since IE7, at least outwardly, emulates a lot of the positives of Firefox, they might convert back if these glitches arent fixed.
Before you mod me funny, think, perhaps I was insightfully funny?
The vast majority of people who have switched away from IE probably won't switch back if they're already satisfied where they are. Not to mention the fact that the "Internet Explorer" brand has become synonymous with "security risk" to those people, regardless of how much better IE7 will be compared to previous versions.
The thing that _will_ change is the adoption rate of alternate browsers, but this largely depends on how well IE7 deals with the many issues of IE6. Part of this we'll see right away (ie. interface enhancements, rendering engine enhancements, security features, etc), but the part that counts will be how frequently it is exploited in the months following its release, and in particular how quickly Microsoft deals with it.
I feel IE works for vendors, merchants, hackers, etc. against me.
I feel other browsers are my tool.
That's why I use firefox.
Microsoft really has gotten in bed with other merchants so much that I just don't trust them.
Oh.. and there is also the relative lack of virus's and attacks on firefox.
Plus... it will work still when I switch to linux finally.
I have a long term goal of switching all my applications to ones that work anywhere so I won't be tied to windows.
Obviously- Everquest isn't on that list but it's really the only thing keeping me on windows now.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Isn't this data from the same "Net Applications" company that never publishes their source data or even methodologies and was demonstrated to have factual errors and contradictions in the summaries of their reports? I mean I'm happy with a trend towards less IE use, but I'm not about to just take these people's word for it, especially from a marketing firm. Give us real data or shut the hell up guys.
I already have users who want to try IE7. And I am already hearing some negative feadback about Firefox being slower than IE. So I'm beginning to think that the worm has turned and we are going to start seeing an increase in IE again. I'll have a hard time recommending Firefoz again unless they can find a way to decrease their memory footprint. Of course I'll still use it along with Opera, but I won't be recommending it to anyone for awhile.
Used to be there was a clear performance difference, now I don't see it as much.
Security wise I think there's still a benefit to Firefox, but most users don't see security as that big of an issue. They think we're just making shit up when it comes to security differences between the browsers.
He who said 1,000,000 monkeys on 1,000,000 typewriters would eventually type the great novel, never saw an AOL chat room
82.10% will think: "ooh, the Internet was upgraded"
As the "code bloat" of Firefox approaches that of IE, and IE 7 is released with tabbed browsing, better security, and all the other whiz-bangs "stolen" from Firefox and Opera, we will see a slowing of growth in Firefox's market share. Public acceptance / perception of IE 7 will have a big influence over Firefox's continued market share growth.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
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.
I'm looking forward to Firefox 3.0. I hear it washes your dishes and matches your socks.
I do believe it's time to stop looking for a girlfriend.
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
...this number may go back up when Vista is released and/or if/when Microsoft pushes out IE7 as a Windows Update.
Unless firefox drastically decreases it's memory use (or simply more effective management, so it doesn't interfere with user behavior), or at the very least keeps it fairly constant from a current release, I can't imagine Firefox 2.0 being much of an improvement, to be honest. That's got to be the biggest gripe about it (and only then at about 40 or so tabs). I've not compared it to IE, however, and I can't imagine MS would release a product of superior quality in regard to memory use, so...
Other than that, I've not had a single problem with firefox in months, even in Windows. Every couple months I'll encounter a shoddy page with horrid gobs of javascript (myspace profiles, I'm looking at you), which is the only thing which has caused a fuck-up since I-can't-remember-when.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Kent: Mr Simpson, how do you respond to the charges that petty vandalism such as graffiti is down eighty percent, while heavy sack-beatings are up a shocking nine hundred percent?
Homer: Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. Forty percent of all people know that.
IE7 is not a value-add for Vista. As a product bundled with Windows, IE7 only needs to be decent enough to keep ignorant consumers from seeking alternatives. How does Microsoft expect to make money with IE7?
The marketshare for web browsing from a Windows PC is shrinking. I'm not just talking about Mac OS X and Linux. Realize that this is the year 2006. We snipe eBay auctions via mobile phone. We get RSS feeds on our PDAs. The people using the web these days are doing it less and less with desktops running Windows. I can't buy IE7 for Windows Mobile or Symbian. IE7 doesn't just fail to add value, it fails to compete at all.
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.
/* No Comment */
There is a big difference between market share (number of people using a particular browser) and web usage (how many hits by a particular browser). When someone says that market share of IE is 82%, it should IMHO mean that 82% of users are using IE. But IE users tend to use the web a lot less than Firefox users. Why ? Huge amounts of pop-ups, no tabs (lots of Windows saturating the task-bar, security holes). IE users are, from my point of view, mostly occasional users of the Web. They simply use what is installed as default. Advanced web users will be rapidly pissed off by the pop-ups and other annoyances... and switch to something else...
For those complaining about firefox's memory footprint, I suggest you read this. In general firefox will use more RAM only if you have more RAM available; you WANT more of your memory to be used for caching to speed things up (as long as it doesn't result in swapping). That said, there are a few real bugs in plugins, and probably the main codebase too. They are hopefully being worked on. By the way, here are my referer browser stats for October so far, for anyone interested.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
Try this:
-
Go to Entrust.
-
Click on "Login".
Firefox goes to 100% CPU utilization, hangs, then crashes if you close the window. That's with the latest Firefox and the previous one. (Some really wierd stuff happened with the previous version of Firefox, including typing going into right-to-left mode for English.)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!
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
I'll be using firefox as IE7 won't be released for windows 2000.
So wait, we're trusting a guy named "Mosaic" to give us unbiased browser statistics?
These numbers match what we are seeing at hotels.com. Needless to say we get a bit of traffic:
(For 9/1 - 10/11)
Safari and FF usage goes up every month, and has been for at least the past two years.
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.
It's not like it's that big a drop. They still have many times the share of their nearest competitor, and Firefox is not gaining ground as fast as it once was.
I won't be celebrating until Firefox takes over IE, but seriously, what are the chances of that *ever* happening?
Furthermore, the article points out that IE has not had any really big improvements in ages. It is likely that has had a big effect on the uptake of other browsers. From the average users perspective, the only thing they get out of switching to Firefox is tabbed browsing. They'll get that in IE7 for free.
What can IE's competitors use to differentiate themselves from IE (to the average user) in Vista-land?
Can't just figure out somehow that my (secondary) computer has 92MB of ram, so it probably shouldn't cache 105MB in memory? Or that I only have 1GB of memory on this computer, so it probably shouldn't cche 1.5GB (it happened on a rather image-heavy site)?
Ewige Blumenkraft.
Is the glass half empty or half full? Some would say it's half empty. Some would say it's half full. People like you would say "It's probably poisoned anyway."
Security. I have friends (non-geeks) converting to Firefox because of the security issues in IE. They didn't even know about tabbed browsing until I pointed it out to them.
Je ne parle pas francais.
I work at a municipality in FL and manage the web server for the main public website. Some months we are as low as 65% IE visits (that month had 23% firefox). I like looking at our stats because I think it's a pretty good mix. It's geared toward the general public and isn't a tech site, building site, music site, but a site for everyone. Mind you this is up to a million visits a month (somewhat large city).
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
After these results were reported..
Microsoft's Stock tumbles 50%, panic in Redmond, protests in the street, millions of users alarmed
Oh wait.. nevermind that's all untrue.
In related news...
Who cares? Do I need to see an update everytime someone uses IE, Firefox, or Opera? Maybe we can get this tally added to census.gov!!
Nonsense - We have a small quantity of water in the glass, and it just had a few more drops added to it.
If we all sit around and hope Firefox will magically continue to gain market share, that glass is ultimately going to evaporate. Unless Firefox actively competes, they are going to get trampled.
And as said time and time again, the browser will be used at its defaults by most users and should function at peak performance in that configuration if you want the user base to grow anywhere near the size of IE's.
>>Nonsense - We have a small quantity of water in the glass, and it just had a few more drops added to it.
The difference is that the dork that used to claim he didn't have to code to w3c standards used to spout that he covered 90% of the market doing things specificly for IE.
It sounds pretty stupid now to say that your website is good enough if it works for only 82% of the public.
Critical mass of coverage by someone to lazy to test on browsers other than IE always seemed to be around 90-95%
We've already seen a huge change in how popular sites are designed in the last 2 years or so. My guess is that if IE were to drop down into the 70s, even the dumbest website desingers would have no choice but to test against multiple browsers.
I'm sure I'm not the only one here who thinks Mac's Safari is great and all but runs OS X alongside Firefox. I just prefer it's interface and features over Safari (especially the blatantly lacking tabbed browsing), so even though Mac's market share may go higher and higher, Safari's doesn't necessarily go higher along with it.
I work for a small computer company which mainly deals with people who simply use whatever the default happens to be. In today's computers that means Internet Explorer. So I thought I'd look at the stats from our company website for the month of September and I was somewhat surprised to find the following:
MS Internet Explorer - 2714 hits - 74 %
Firefox - 822 hits - 22.4 %
Netscape - 37 hits - 1 %
Unknown - 33 hits - 0.9 %
Mozilla - 25 hits - 0.6 %
Konqueror - 17 hits - 0.4 %
Opera - 16 hits - 0.4 %
Lynx - 2 hits - 0 %
Over 22% of visits to our company website were using FireFox. This from customers who typically just accept the defaults. Quite surprising to me.
- James
Well that's easy to say, but how do you compete in the browser market? It seems like every new feature we see in Opera or Firefox is quickly copied by Microsoft in their IE betas, and also copied in the newest Opera and Firefox releases. How do you compete with that?
Since competition is often equated with innovation, I might as well bring this up: On a somewhat related note, are new features even what people want in a browser? I mean, Opera's mantra was once "faster, smaller" and even their products are starting to bloat in favor of added features. Aside from being an open source product and enjoying the benefits of that, the only thing that Firefox really has going for it these days is its modular design and extensibility (and even then some argue that "This should be included, it shouldn't be an extension!")
I suppose Mozilla could continue to rely on word-of-mouth advertising in addition to their promotional campaigns, but ultimately how do you overcome the fact that it's just easier for non-internet savvy people to use that big blue 'E' on their desktop that came with Windows?
I have yet to find something I can't make Opera do.
Since you now can write your own widgets and it has UserJS, I refuse to spend all that time downloading and keeping plugins up to date when a FF update breaks something.
Artifical Intelligience is no match for natural stupidity.
That's ridiculous. The glass is merely twice as large as it needs to be.
"The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in times of moral crisis, preserved their neutrality." -Dante
Or I could have just looked under "help" and seen that I really DON'T trust the methodology. It's quite limited, and there is no stated error about random distribution of survey points. (i.e. if they are examinging the OSDL web sites that may overrepresnet firefox for instance)
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
"If we all sit around and hope Firefox will magically continue to gain market share, that glass is ultimately going to evaporate. Unless Firefox actively competes, they are going to get trampled."
Firefox is gaining, IE is losing.
What's your point again?
evil is as evil does
OK so 80% is a giant share of the market, but 20% of the market is also far too much to ignore and that means websites are gonna have to cater for the non-IE browser. That means conforming to web standards which means anyone with the skills and desire can write a standards conforming browser and fight for their share of the market on even ground with IE, Firefox, and the rest.
IE may still be the dominant browser but the days of "this browser requires Internet Explorer" are long gone. And thank God for that.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
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.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
"When IE7 comes out, that will change."
/. I have installed firefox for dozens of people not one of them ever complained about memory usage or performance.
I guess time will tell.
"I refuse to use Firefox due to its ridiculous memory usage."
The only place I hear this complaint is on
You can of course refuse to use it for whatever reason you want but that does not change the overall trend.
"This is something that people would be mocking IE for, but it's Firefox, so it's given a pass."
If you provided a specific, repeatable bug report I don't think anybody would give it a pass. It's been my experience that every bug report to firefox gets looked at pretty seriously even if it's a dupe or only occurs on one platform.
evil is as evil does
Please, do not take my post as flamebait. I introduce general points. Many of you are geeks. Admit that, it's okay. Many of you are developers, too. Many of you are enthusiasts and like to tweak and customize out the wazoo. For all of you folk, browsers like FF are great. They're secure, customizable, not Microsoft, everything you could want in a browser. Now consider everyone else in the world. And actually, this even includes myself, even though I AM an enthusiast and a slight geek. You have IE7, given to you automatically via Windows Updates. No hassles required. It is already on your system, offers tabs and good security, and works without a hitch. It is integrated into the OS so it opens faster and does not introduce any problems. I have used IE6 for years and never once got a virus or spyware because of it. So please, tell me, why should I switch to Firefox? Answer: I shouldn't. IE7 may not pass some Acid2 test or whatever, but I am a user, not a developer. IE7 is secure and does what I need and there is really no reason for me to use any other browser.
Maybe you are right. Either way they are ordinary people with ordinary needs and firefox seems to make them happy. So I don't see how your perceived memory problems will make any difference to them.
evil is as evil does
Sorry, wrong. The correct answer is "excuse me? is this my glass? my glass was full! and it was bigger! you bring me a new glass right now!"
and yes, Terry Pratchett does have a very enlightening view of human nature.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Gaining slowly against a static competitor is good news but it's not great news.
The critical way to read it is that a browser that hasn't been touched in 2 years still has an 80-odd% share. And that browser has a big, BIG update coming which includes the one feature in FF that most people consider the "killer app".
Internet Explorer does have one useful thing, specifically because Microsoft's web site is designed as much as possible to require the use of IE.
So, folks, remember, the only thing you really need to do with IE is to go to Microsoft's web site and download patches for IE!
I have a Firefox Window with 20 tabs opened (mostly /. postings I want to check today). That has a foot print of 146MB
I have 2 sessions of IE, that has a foot print of 46MB
Let me open 2 more of each one, pointing lets say, to Google and the BBC.
FF is now, 147MB
IE is now 75MB
So
FF is 147MB/22 sessions ~ 6MB/session
IE is 75MB/4 sessions ~ 18 MB/session
Now, feel free to throw your anecdotal evidence, but do not tell us that there is a generalized problem unless you can quote serious sources on this regard.
In this little nonsense example it seems that firewall manages far more efficently memory once it is running.
I am pretty sure that launching one session of each would be favourable to IE (well of course, all the MS's kitchen sink is already loaded), but that is not all what memory management is all about.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Amen to that. Personally I prefer Opera (since at least version 6) and the biggest usability improvement is that sites now are coded to standards. I don't care that Opera's marketshare is near zero as long as they manage to stay fairly current with new tech like AJAX and DOM manipulation, standards compliance (ACID2 anyone?) and such. Whatever the other ~20% is, be it Firefox, Safari, Konqueror or some other variation doesn't matter as long as it is there.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings