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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?"
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?
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 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.
82.10% will think: "ooh, the Internet was upgraded"
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.
Since you asked for it:
Firefox Nein 2001451 58.5 %
MS Internet Explorer Nein 1059985 31 %
Opera Nein 179838 5.2 %
Mozilla Nein 89402 2.6 %
Safari Nein 31450 0.9 %
This is October data. As you can see from the numbers (we're talking 3.5 mio hits here), this is not a tiny site. As you can see from the site itself, it's not a Linux, Free Software or Firefox site. I've got plenty of AOL users, hotmail users and other "dumb", average, random Internet users as players.
History: Firefox was at 50% in January, 46% in October last year, 34% December 2004 (my oldest data).
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
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.
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.
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!
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So wait, we're trusting a guy named "Mosaic" to give us unbiased browser statistics?
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.
Why does FF have its own gigantic memory cache in the first place, instead of letting the OS's disk cache do its job properly?
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."
>>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.
A site I work with is not a slashdot / geek demographic. It's a combination of government use (primary), non-profits, education, and business (in that order of heaviest to least % of users.) This site gets on average a million page views / day. Looking at the month of September, 76% IE, 16.3% firefox, 1.9% safari, Opera 0.2%. Back in March, it was 81% IE, 6.3% FF, 2% safari, Opera 0.2%. From my viewpoint, FF has jumped HUGE in that time frame. (Yes, the numbers don't add up to 100% - unknown and other browsers are the remainder.)
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.