Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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"
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
...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.
So wait, we're trusting a guy named "Mosaic" to give us unbiased browser statistics?
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."
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.)