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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."
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
God, this article must be one of the crappiest in a long, long time. The december figures are already up!
Browser trends
MSIE 68.15%
Firefox 21.34%
Safari 7.93%
Chrome 1.04%
Opera 0.71%
Operating system trends
Windows 88.68%
Macs 9.63%
Linux 0.85%
iPhone 0.44%
The two line summary:
Firefox and Safari both take lots of market share from MSIE which is now way below 70%.
Macs have a huge one-month (0.8%) and two-month (1.4%) rise while Linux is flatline.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Yes, I am surprised that even Chrome has a higher usage share, considering Opera is actually a very good and useable browser and has been around for a long time. It would actually be a great all-in-one solution for many since it is a great browser, email client and torrent downloading in one application.
The number of programmers employed to write shrink-wrap software aimed at consumers is a tiny fraction of the number of programmers writing software for use inside their own company.
Considering Opera's install base on mobile devices I would expect that number to be much higher. Considering its common configuration to mis-identify as IE to avoid website misbehavior, I predict that that number is seriously under-representative of the true marketshare. Also, never use statistics that are not explained. What does "70%" mean on this chart? 70% of visits (define visits?)? 70% of hits? 70% of unique IP addresses? 70% of traffic?
Get over yourself already.
Used to be web *was* IE and people were reduced to fool web pages with bogus client ID to get working IE web code instead of terrible buggy netscape 4.x code or just simple "get IE" -banner.
2/3rd is still a lot but it was 90% a little while ago and it could be perfectly justified to develop a new site IE only.
With these figures, in 2009 new sites designed have even stronger reason to cater for the "other" demographic.
Too bad there's no credible alternative to vista or vista 2nd release in sight for your average gaming-oriented PC. I wouldn't use linux for general desktop stuff either, too much pain if there's no ideological reason to go there. And the other notable requires joining a cult with the membership fee charged in overpriced hardware.
Seriously? That is really freakin weird. Got any (english) links? Not disputing, just curious.
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
This is not true at all. IE 1, 2 & 3 were not as good as Netscape Navigator and they suffered, but IE 4 was hands down better than other browsers. It mainstreamed a fully programmable DOM, where Netscape Navigator had what, document.write, and a bunch of junk about layers.
And, while we lament the death of Netscape, you do have to remember that while free IE may have killed Netscape on the client side, I'd be willing to bet that Apache utterly crushed Netscape on the server side. Does anyone remember Netscape web servers? Ah, that's a big negative. I remember even in the late 1990s our Sun admin was looking to replace Netscape web server with Apache... him and others like him really finished that company off.
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.
This is very true. But you have to understand that the counterpoint to Microsoft's strategy is to get people to think about rich clients again and they are actually being rather successful with VSTO and Excel integration. I see lots of contract work with Excel front ends, instead of web front ends, these days. It's a crappy technology, but businesses pay for it.
This is my sig.
Netscape tried this... see where they landed.
Hey, you forgot their accessories division (Microsoft keyboards and mice) which will keep them afloat for many years to come!
I think, if anything, the internet will be their downfall. They just don't understand it. In the mid-90s, they tried to control the internet by marrying internet explorer to their OS. Yes, it screwed up standards and forced the internet to bend to their will for a while (IE only websites). I suppose it was great to sell boxes that way by practically having an exclusive market on the entire WWW working for them, but IE made no money on its own.
Then in the late 90s, it shifted it's attention to the holy grail of an internet Portal. MSN. It's target was yahoo. To make it apparent how serious it took this and for how long, within the last year they were trying to take over Yahoo. To demostrate their lack of focus, with the market crash, despite having a ton of cash lying about, they are not willing to buy Yahoo now. Less than 6-9 months later. I guess flailing around in the dark, they found another strategy beyond the internet portal.
But the internet marches on. It will be their death one day. Linux adoption would not have been possible without the internet. But more than that, someone else mentioned about how they would explain to their grandmother why the windows card game disk doesn't work in her linux box. It won't matter. That market is dead. Games are slowly splitting into two parts: hardcore gamer games where they need max hardware, or flash games which work on any platform readily. The middle market has eroded. Grandma is more likely playing online than off a CD these days. And the high end market, MS itself has made less important, with its consoles that are guaranteed to play. There will be always a PC gamers market, but it becomes less important with every console generation.
Lastly, Microsoft is pricing itself out of the market. I can either be a pirate and take what I need or I can pay through the behind a price for boxed MS while OEMs pay but a fraction of it. That means, eventally, with WGA, that less and less people tinker with the OS. While Ubuntu and others play friendly at installs, MS just assumes it's king and has no partition tools upon install. Nor is it's install disc readily a livecd either, unlike many linux distros. It's also not handling 64 bit too well imo. My one Vista Business install, I decided that 32 bit was no longer enough. Do they give me a 64 bit for free or a small fee? No, OEM copies cannot be upgraded cheaply, they want $$$. Yet, when I bought the computer, 32/64 bit had no price difference. It's just a case of MS wanting to extract money where it can, and in this case probably will cost more than the actual ram I want to upgrade with. Other than ram, these are things that the linux community will gladly give me free.
There will never be a year of the linux desktop. As this stastic shows, it will just keep creeping up before we realize what happened. The cracks in the wall are already there. I would say a dam bursting event is when Quicken or Photoshop list on their software Windows XP, Vista or Wine 1.0 (or whatever version) compatibility. Then you know things will get ugly quick for MS.
I work for one of the top 5 insurance companies in the U.S. and SQL Server utilized as the back end for at least 50% of the apps currently running. The rest use DB2 Mainframe as the back end, and many of those are being re-written using both J2EE and .NET with SQL Server as the back-end.
SQL Server is used in many of the shops I've worked for, and as more companies do the J2EE vs .NET juggle, SQL Server is fairly common.
I gave up religion for Lent.