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IE Market Share Drops Below 70%
Mike writes "Microsoft's market share in the browser dropped below 70% for the first time in eight years, while Mozilla broke the 20% barrier for the first time in its history. It's too early to tell for sure, but if Net Applications' numbers are correct, then Microsoft's Internet Explorer will end 2008 with a historic market share loss in a software segment Microsoft believes is key to its business."
So....heard that Microsoft might be laying off 15% of its workforce?
Well.....this might compound that.
Let me be the first (?) to say "Yay"!!
IE has been dominating and destroying the Web for far too long. The lower market share will indicate increased platform diversity and consumer choice.
This is really not a surprise. IE is an inferior product. It always has been. The market share it has received is solely attributable to the bundling with the Microsoft operating systems.
When people become savvy enough to realize there is a choice and be able to find and implement that choice.... they do. I have been trying to get all the offices, clients, etc. that I have worked with to switch to Firefox since.. well forever. It's more secure.
Now, I realize that there might be some MS fanboys out there to argue that point, but you have a lot of work to do. IE is horrible at security. It is almost as if they just don't care. I am willing to admit that IE is a bigger target, but that does not excuse Microsoft's behavior with it.
The greatest setback that Firefox, and others have is that Microsoft does not play nice with the world community. Until recently there have been a huge number of websites that will only work with IE. That is slowly changing now too. No longer are consumers and business customers chained to IE because Firefox cannot work with their website that they need.
The only direction IE ever could go was down. If Microsoft wants to change that then they need to do some serious work and start cooperating with the rest of world. Build a better product is the simplest way to put it.
In the end it will Microsoft's hubris that pushes IE into the minority.
I think just about everyone in tech, outside of Microsoft, saw this coming. Instead of adopting inclusive standards, MS opted for exclusive, proprietary technology and then implemented it poorly. ActiveX, VBScript, .NET...all require Windows and IE to work right. They tried to tie their OS to the development environment, the server environment and did everything they could to try and force the client as well.
IE was a stagnant, monolithic bug farm that lacked imagination and, perhaps most desperately, innovation. How many Firefox add-ons would be hard to live without? NoScript, FlashBlock, FireFTP there are dozens of applets that let you customize your browsing experience to your preference.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
How about NOT pointing out that more than two thirds of users on this planet are still browsing the net with IE -
I imaging that just about 2/3rds of people fall into those categories. Those that are scared of their computer probably think that Firefox is a virus because it wasn't pre-installed at the factory, these people also are the type to still have the Dell wallpaper still as their desktop background because changing it might somehow break their computer. These are the older people or people who don't really understand that the worst they can do to their $1000 is delete all their data.
Those that use their computers very little usually think of their computers only as tools to write e-mails, check blogs, and get on iTunes. They don't care about their browsers, they don't care about most anything on their computer. They might know how to play FreeCell but thats about it. This is a lot of students and working people.
And it is self-explanatory about those who have other people manage their computers, they just lack the access to change the browser or are afraid of getting yelled at by their computer-illiterate CEO because they installed Firefox even though it would be better than the IE6 currently installed on the company's desktop.
So really, 1/3rd of computer users know how to actually *use* a computer and have root access on their boxes. Or they just use Mac/Linux and wouldn't use IE.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Somehow I must question those surveys. While quite a number of people I know use Windows, almost no-one I know actually uses IE as their default browser. Unfortunately severely insecure features of IE, like ActiveX, are needed to upgrade Windows. I'm sure Mozilla is capable of making its own 'ActiveX', but I guess they'd be sued as we are talking essentially American businesses. As we all know, it is rather difficult to remove IE from Windows. Clearly, the best option is the trend: Abandon Windows!
Any hacker can make their Firefox (or Opera) look like IE or any other browser. For instance, I don't use "Flash", but while I use FreeBSD, the scripts say its "Flash-10" on "IE-7" on Windows. Perhaps I should have some pride and tell the truth? I'm using Firefox, but I'm not sure that Firefox is what I have set in my proxy. Let me explain. Ikea, in Holland, gives you a 5% discount if you order with IE. Of course I'm not going to fire up Windows to order from Ikea! So, I simply "lie" and take 5% off.
If IE has up to 70% market share, its simply because Windows doesn't allow you to choose your browser like any other system does. If they did, they could just as well throw in the towel on IE. The percentage that use Windows is suspect too. Maybe some have it on hand just for an application or two? I know for a fact that many Windows desktops are running in Linux. (Doesn't an Xterm look great on a Windows desktop? ;)
Finally: (Taco) How many more people say they use Firefox on Slashdot than your logs indicate? I think you see what I mean.
BillSF
It's control. If the majority use IE, then MS can push out their proprietary standards that will force everyone else to buy their development products, and maybe use their server platform.
Safari on Windows just... fails compared to Firefox. No extensions, the strange Aqua GUI which no doubt increases the amount of memory and libraries to load that is un-themeable, and just about 0 customization makes Safari hard to recommend. Granted, its better than IE, but compared to Firefox just about everything minus the WebKit rendering engine (which, isn't much faster or slower then Gecko) can be done on Firefox and much, much, more.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Okay let's start with the obvious
1> IE being popular means it makes sense to run a windows server to maximize compatibility for businesses.
2> Search traffic gets sent to MSN by IE.
3> Microsoft can dictate coding standards forcing other browsers and coders to have trouble competing.
Then of course the fact some websites won't work with anything but IE (because they can't be bothered to tweak for other browsers too) and of course the homepage of IE will be msn. Add on top of that Microsoft will make other coding software- which of course will easily be the best in line with its browser.
Of course you can just take the line that Microsoft, Apple and Google are all putting serious money into this market- so it HAS to be hugely valuable for some reason.
Mozilla's browsers are based on a rendering engine and a user interface model which are both complete rewrites. All that is left of the old Netscape is the inspiration created by making an open source project out of a dead end codebase with a famous name, a cute mascot and a uniting enemy.
It's called a "trend." Snapshot statistics are not important. Trends are very important. This has been going on since 2002. If you lose 5% browser-share share every year consistently, eventually you go away. It happened to Netscape, and now we know it can happen to IE.
Controlling the way that people access computing is a big, big deal.
If you control the channel you get to call the shots in a ton of (even tangentially related) ways.
Safari does not, if you notice the marketshare for various versions of safari 96%+ of safari users are using Mac versions.
Firefox has been just about the most successful open source project in history, it has broken beyond the geek domain to the general public. It addressed a need for a reasonably secure easy to use web browser. It runs mostly the same on mac or windows or linux so so people can let their friends use it and they comfortable and familiar with it.
People who would never touch linux see firefox and they will say "Hey can I use your internet" they dont know its linux and they dont care.
Mac's market share went up more last month alone, than there are people using Linux as a desktop OS altogether (no time frame).
Just like Opera, which has been stuck at ~0.7% since pretty much forever.
When you can't somehow manage to give away your main and only product, and most people would seemingly rather pay a lot of money for the alternative (like Macs), you know you have a serious problem.
Something must suck with your product, when people would rather pay a lot for the alternative than use yours for free.
Microsoft will not take this lying down. When Java started eating into VB, Microsoft plunged tens of billions into dot-net, and for the most part stopped the bleeding.
A focused MS can produce like nothing else. Prepare to see gobs of features added to IE. It will be comparable to making Emacs look like Notepad when the dust settles.
IE has stayed mostly the same for most of the decade. This is probably about to change. They'll probably add music and video managers, spell-checkers, text-box history savers, better widgets such as editable data grids, email/Outlook integration, history searching, Google-like hard-drive searching, kitchen sink, etc.
Table-ized A.I.
More and more people are buying iPhones (and other handhelds) and using them to surf the web.
Not to replace their normal browsing, just to browse the web more.
This report is very slim on details (it doesn't even say where the metrics came from), but I'm going on a hunch here that it's not so much Firefox is gaining in popularity, but that overall usage of the web is increasing and moreso with devices that IE is not on.
Some simplified math: If 8 people use IE and 2 use Firefox, IE has an 80% share. Now add 2 more people to the party, both on iPhone/Safari, and IE's market share drops to 66%.
I honestly don't think Firefox is making a dent in IE for the desktop, when you compare it to the beating it's taking elsewhere. It's clear that Microsoft, if it wants to retain dominance in the browser market, needs to do something with the handheld sector and quickly. PocketIE is great for sites that are mobile-ready, but for everything else it lacks and is driving people away.
-David
Not quite. NN5 was based on the original open-sourced bits of the NN4 code. It was all set for release then the project was canned. That's why the Netscape released from Mozilla code was numbered 6.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
There are nearly twice as many Linux users as iPhone users? Cool! Those things are rather common.
How many iPhone users do you see surfing the web? Regularly? For extended periods of time? There's tons more iPhone users than Linux users, and even the little web surfing they do is half the market share of Linux. The only thing I read out of these numbers is that even though Macs are chipping away at the Windows market share, Linux isn't making any inroads in the opening market. This is when Linux should manage to draw a little attention to itself and say "Hey, don't just make a Mac version it's time to make true cross-platform tools!". I'm not sure why not, maybe the Macs have managed to steal away those I'd consider natural candidates for using Linux too. I think you can safely dismiss 2009 as the year of the Linux desktop, unfortunately. It's on the right track but not progressing nearly fast enough for that.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Everyone trashes Active X as a security problem while Mozilla plugins get a pass and this is rather silly. The essence of both is that you download a DLL and it runs arbitary code in the process space of the browser (and then hence, often the user). Active X is just a different way of talking to the DLL, nothing more.
If you can run flash plugins, java plugins, and other plugins, inside of a browser, they can and will have the same security problems that plague Active X. It's random binary code that a user gets off of the internet.
SERIOUSLY, ANYONE BITCHING ABOUT ACTIVE X SHOULD JUST READ THIS GODDAMNED LINK.
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/plugins/
IT'S THE SAME FRICKING TECHNOLOGY... UNIDENTIFIED BINARY CODE RUNNING IN THE SAME ADDRESS SPACE AS THE BROWSER.
DUH.
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since Windows 7 is getting rave reviews, once it comes out, IE marketshare will go back up, I'm guessing. *shrug*
You are on crack! "most people" don't have a clue what a user agent is.
I've got a coworker that is an IE fanatic. He keeps pointing out that IE uses less memory than FF, he's right. He also tallies up whenever I complain of a crash vs when he complains of one... and he's winning (as in fewer crashes).
I love being anti-m$, but you can't just dismiss their product as second-rate because you want it to be.
If firefox supported as little as IE, it would likely use much less memory. Is it not more appropriate to measure a browser by how well it supports the web standards that browsers are built to read? MS can't even be bothered to implement all of the standard html tags. IE 8 will finally support the frickin' <q> tag from HTML 4. That's a hard one too... replace the <q> tags with quote characters. It's rocket science really. No wonder it has taken MS more than a decade to support it. Next, run IE through a CSS support test page. Maybe give Acid3 a shot with it. Things aren't looking so pretty for IE, are they? Now try opening an XHTML page with it. Oh, sorry... IE is unable to read xhtml. It just downloads it to disk. It also doesn't support SVG, or MathML, or ruby. Firefox on the other hand, does.
Of course IE isn't second rate. It's not even good enough to qualify as third rate. I'm sure that's the primary reason MS is bleeding browser share at an accelerating rate.
At the end of the day, both IE Active X controls and Mozilla plugins have the same fundamental problem. They are native code DLLs, and so, cannot be verified so easily by the browser when downloaded and so a user could always install a plug in, when running as administrator, that could call DeleteFile or any other Windows API.
The most interesting promise in plugins is Google Chrome, which allows for verifiable native code and thus sandboxing of plugins. However, as you already pointed out, this only really matters because, you can't set ACLs to functions under Windows, only to users.
The ideal mechanism for DLLs, that is internet safe, would be to be able to say that a caller could specify the permissions of the DLL when it was running. So, if I were writing a FireFox or an IE, or some sort of internet loadable thing, I could say, yeah sure, go ahead and let me load up this DLL, and I'll just tag it so that it can only call a certain set of Windows OS functions, and for that matter, only a set of Windows OS functions with a particular set of handles. Like, the DLL's functions could only call GDI functions with the DC I supplied. I would also like to say that the DLL could only access certain pages of memory. For that matter, I would like to be able to do that to my own application, so that, a buffer overrun or some other malicious code couldn't do anything... other than hose me myself, and even then, my own internal states and document would be protected.
I would bet that you could hack some of this into Windows, basically by modifying the way GetProcAddress and LoadLibrary worked. To LoadLibrary you could add a permissions mask that would, for that HINSTANCE, modify how that library's GetProcAddress worked. So, if loaded up a library, I could set it up so that when it called GetProcAddress, to say, find out where DeleteFile was, it would instead redirect itself to my sandbox chumpy saying that this was a no-no.
This would improve matters, but it would not be perfect. Ultimately, I think, the whole mechanism of a function call would need to have an associated "allowed" set of function calls be associated with it. IF there was maybe some chumpy in the kernel that would say, "just block all these syscalls", but even then, that would only address the file system type of stuff, which is good, but you also want to use that mechanism to cover everything else. It may well turn out that everything has to be a file in order to make this sort of safe and securable sandboxing actually work.
I guess my question to Linux people would be, doesn't Red Hat have something like this in its enhanced security? Like, you can at least tag applications with permissions but could it work with function calls?
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If anything, the stats are more skewed by the more-technically-inclined FF users changing their UA so that crappy websites don't break just because they fail to see the magic "IE / Windows" keywords.
Remember, Internet Explorer 8.0 is coming probably around March-April 2009. Once that comes out expect IE marketshare to increase again, mostly because there are so many corporate internal applications tied to IE that switching to Firefox, Chrome or Safari is not an option, especially with today's poor economy.
Your argument doesn't make sense. You're saying that IE marketshare will increase when IE8 is released, because corporate applications are tied to IE. IE8 marketshare can only increase from people upgrading from earlier versions of IE, or switching from alternate browsers. The first one will not increase total IE marketshare, since it's only one IE version to another. And the second one, well, if corporate applications are tied to IE, how did they stop using IE in the first place?
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!